The Soldier - S.R. Jones Page 0,25
now, and … different.
The light in her eyes has darkened, her hair too, and her skin is sallow, not golden. Shit, she almost looks sick.
“…so, I think we can safely let her go,” Margaret finishes.
“Sorry?” I shake myself out of my stupor and give Margaret my attention.
She frowns briefly, but then taps one perfectly manicured nail on the photograph. “This one, Cassie Evans, we can let her go. She’s not been there all that long; therefore, it won’t cost anything redundancy wise, and”—she leans in—“you know I always do a little digging over and above getting the staff files.”
She does; it’s why I use her.
“Yes,” I say with a smile.
“Well, Cassie Evans was engaged to one of the senior programmers; in fact, the rumor is he helped get her the job. The firm doesn’t have any rules against dating a colleague, but they ought to. Place is a hotbed of nerdy love.” She gives a disgusted shudder. “Anyway, Cassie was engaged to Timothy Spoor.”
“Was?” I say.
“Yes, was… He allegedly had an affair with a member of the sales team, and now he and Cassie are broken up and at loggerheads. It’s causing an awful atmosphere. Trouble is, he’ll cost a fortune to get rid of as he’s been there a lot longer and is a manager. She’s a lowly IT consultant, so easy enough to cut. I know that for once, you want to turn this place around and keep it on our books, so my advice is, cut her for sure. We need to implement a no fraternization rule too. Bloody Brits, lackadaisical to a fault. You don’t get this shit so much in America. It’s a shame in one sense because the girl has skills. Came top of her class, and they had to shut down a project she was working on with two other people because they managed to hack into top level government security.” She laughs.
Cassie … my Cassie is a hacker? Or, at least, she was. Well, this is interesting. The girl gets more intriguing every time I find out something new.
“No,” I say without thinking.
“Sorry, no what?” Margaret wrinkles her nose, the way she always does when she’s confused.
“No, we’re not getting rid of Cassie. Sack him instead.”
“What? I mean… Sorry, boss, but that makes no sense.”
“You just said she has skills; maybe we can use them?”
“With all due respect, Konstantin,” Margaret uses my first name, a sure sign she’s bringing her most serious game to this discussion. “This is a girl who used her then fiancé to get a job in the firm, and then, by all accounts, couldn’t deal with his affair in a grown-up manner.”
“Would you deal with Dave in a grown-up manner, if he had an affair?”
“Yes, actually,” she says with a shark smile. “I’d take him for everything he’s got, via my lawyer.”
“Touché. But, trust me on this one. Keep the girl, sack the guy.”
“Okay. Whatever you say.” She sighs but doesn’t argue further.
We conclude our meeting an hour later, and Margaret leaves my office. She’s taken the staff sheets with her. I can hardly ask her to leave Cassie’s behind without it looking strange, but I’ll go grab it from her office when she leaves for the day.
My little ray of sunshine has come back into my life, and suddenly, I’m determined to get a whole lot deeper into hers. I tried to walk away; hell, I did walk away. I never went back to the coffee shop, or tried to find out where Cassie was, even though I thought of her often.
That girl, with her dimpled smile, and her love of literature, is someone I’ve had more real conversations with during the short time I knew her than almost anyone else.
Seeing her picture made my heart beat faster.
Seeing her picture made my cock hard.
As of next week, I’ll be her new boss. I’ll own her ass, and she’ll be mine. I’m determined to make that true in more ways than one. I let her get away once. Not again. Poor little Cassie, she’d almost escaped and got the boring life she so clearly craves. Never mind, I’ll show her a walk on the wild side she’ll never forget.
The burner phone in my desk goes, and I pick it up. “Yes?”
“It’s me, boss,” Vasily speaks in our native Russian.
“Da.”
“I’ve found something out about what happened to Yulia.”
My heart stutters, and I grip the receiver so tight I think I might break it. I’d buried this. My father was