When the result came through, I stared at it with a stone lodged in my throat. The probability the email had been written by Sam was 97.2 percent.
Still, I kept digging. Before I went to him with this, I had to be sure I hadn’t left a single stone unturned. Opening the repository archive, I clicked on a folder no one touched. It contained mail-spoofing emulators we’d built years ago for defensive training to simulate threats.
There it was. The script that had been authored by me. Sam had been the last to modify it…two days ago.
Holy hell.
He’d done it. He’d actually done it.
I sat back in my chair, the wind knocked out of me. I’d built that script to keep us safe, and he’d used it to…what? Hurt me? Hurt Bea? To what fucking end?
My fingers curled against the armrests. I stared at the screen, waiting for something inside me to catch up, but all I felt was confusion.
I didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Didn’t even breathe too loud. I thought and thought, but I could not find the answer. I couldn’t even begin to fathom why Sam would have done this.
I’d have to get the answers straight from the source.
I found him in his office, hunched over his desk as if nothing was out of the ordinary. He was flipping through a stack of notes I knew he didn’t need. Sam always liked the look of being busy more than actuallybeingbusy.
“Sam.”
He looked up, blinked, then smiled like I was asking about a bug fix.
“Hey,” he said, relaxed. “You made it back. The team was in a legit tizzy you missed the meeting.”
“We need to talk.”
His smile faltered. Just a twitch, but I caught it. His fingers tapped once on the rim of his cup before he leaned back in his chair and studied me like I was the one behaving irrationally.
“What about?”
I stared at him, not moving. “It took me less than ten minutes to trace the spoofed email sent to Bea back to your machine. Do you have anything to say about that?”
He sighed, like this was inconvenient. Like I was being unreasonable for needing an explanation.
“I knew you’d figure it out.” He opened his hands on his desk. “Look, I was pissed you were ignoring my calls all weekend to spend time with her. She’s been distracting you. Ever since she showed up, you’ve been off. You missed the investor call—”
“We’re not going public.”
“You don’t seem to get it. This is our moment, Tore. And you’re…what? Letting some blue-haired waitress pull you off course?”
I didn’t flinch, but something inside me knotted, sharp and hot.
“You forged an email firing her. You used my code. My tools.”
“I absolutely did not fire her,” he clipped. “I made a snap decision when I was angry, thinking if I put some space between you two, you’d be able to breathe and think rationally. You weren’t thinking, Tore. It appears you still aren’t.”
I stepped forward. He leaned back.
“You had to know I’d trace it back to you.”
“I figured you’d gain enough clarity once you were away from her it wouldn’t matter who really sent it.”
“You were wrong.”
“I see that now, and I apologize for acting before thinking,” he said, voice calm, placating. “You’ve always been the levelheaded one. That’s what makes you brilliant. That’s why Nox works. But this woman is…chaos. She's changing you, distracting you. You can’t afford that.”
“She’s not the problem,” I said firmly. It was becoming very clear exactly who the problem was.
