“Did you pay him to sleep with me?”
“Sleep with you? Christ, no. He befriended you, yes. But sleeping with you. No.” He looked so genuinely outraged, so close to anger, that Damon almost believed him. “Did he?”
Cain ignored this. “You wanted him to spy on me.”
“Notspy, Cain, but to keep you safe.”
“To make sure I wasn’t involved in any relationships that could damage your reputation.”
“Or yours! When your father is rich, is powerful, people come out of the woodwork to take advantage—" He glared at Damon again.
“You must have been so sorry to lose him,” Cain said bitterly. “Now that you don’t have anyone to keep tabs on me.”
Once again, the senator hesitated, and Cain recognized it immediately. “Oh, fuck. Who? Who’s spying on me now?”
“No one,” Shaw lied. “I was concerned for your safety, and Jack was in charge of security for our family. His job was to keep you safe, among other things.”
“Among other things,” Cain repeated in disgust. “Other things like killing Levi and Charlotte Seaver.”
Shaw’s face paled. He took a deep breath and steepled his hands on his desk. “Levi Seaver was my best friend.” He slid open the top middle drawer of his desk and a second later, there was an audible click as he removed a panel from one side. He extracted a package of cigarettes, an ashtray, and a lighter.
“Levi was the one who gave me this desk,” he mused. “It’s an original Warren, with a hidden compartment. He said it reminded him of me - an antique with hidden secrets. Two years older than he was, and he never let me forget it.” He smiled sadly, like he was thinking of his old friend. The lighter cracked and flared as he lit the cigarette, taking a deep drag. “We won’t mention this to your mother,” he told Cain, exhaling the words in a plume of smoke. “She thinks I quit years ago.”
“God,” Cain said in disgust. “How do you live with yourself?”
The senator sucked in a breath through his teeth. “I didn’t kill Levi Seaver.”
“What happened to not insulting our intelligence?” Damon demanded. “Jack Peabody told us all about what he did… andwhy.”
“I didn’t kill Levi Seaver,” the senator repeated. “Levi killed himself.”
“Wow. That’s sick,” Damon accused. “You — “
“Do you know, when Levi and Jon McMann and I founded Seaver Tech, Levi didn’t have a pot to piss in? Mortgaged his house, pawned his guitar, pissed off Charlotte to no end, although she stuck by him, because that’s the kind of woman she was. Jon was this newly-minted lawyer, thousands of dollars in debt and saddled with a kid and a wife who’d grown up rich and accustomed to a certain standard of living. I was dating your mother, and determined to show your grandfather that I was good husband material. It was a different time then,” he added with a short laugh. Then he sighed. “Such a different time then.”
Cain drifted forward to lean against the back of a chair across from the desk. “What does that have to do with— “
“Don’t interrupt,” the senator told him with a glare. He took another drag of the cigarette, and Damon noticed that his hand wasn’t quite steady. “Levi knew his tech would work. Christ, that man was convincing. And confident. I don’t know if you remember that, Cain, but he was so confident in everything he did. Sebastian is a bit like that,” he mused. “Must come with the genius.” He sighed again. “The banks wouldn’t lend us money, we were in debt up to our eyes, but we didn’t have enough for the demo we needed. We were desperate.”
Oh, fuck. Damon sighed as the facts clicked into place in his mind. Just where would three broke not-quite-kids get the money they needed for a start up?
Cain looked back and forth from Damon to his father. “Explain it to me, because I’m not getting it. What did you do?”
Shaw’s lip twitched in a parody of a smile. “We went to an unconventional money source. A man by the name of Ilya Stornovich was happy to lend us money… in exchange for a little help from time to time. A little programming job here, design plans there. Side-jobs we called them. Jon hated it - he was squeamish from the beginning, but that’s a lawyer for you, eh? Black and white, a firm line between right and wrong. He didn’t have a head for business, so eventually we stopped telling him. But Levi, he understood that sometimes you have to nudge the line a little if you want to get ahead.”
He flicked his cigarette over the ashtray before taking another drag. “But then, a few years in, Levi started getting cold feet too.This is the last one,” Shaw said in a sing-song voice, shaking his head. “No more after this, Emmett. We don’t know what they’re using this tech for. I want to be a man my sons can be proud of.Christ. LikeIdidn’t? Like I wouldn’t have slept easier at night if the Russians didn’t know my name, or the names of my kids? But it wasn’t about wrong and right at that point. It was about keeping my head above water.” He turned to look at Cain. “It was about keeping my family safe.”
Damon stepped forward, needing to be closer to Cain. Shaw was starting to make a fucked-up sort of sense, and all of a sudden, up was down and down was up.
“See, the problem was, the Russians liked us just a little too much. By then, old man Ilya had ceded power to his son, Adam, a bastard in every sense of the word. He wanted to be more than just a moneylender, a leg breaker, a broker for technology like his father had been. He wanted to build himself an empire, get his family a seat at the table in the criminal world.
“We’d repaid our loans a hundred, maybe a thousand, times over, of course. Levi, Jon, and I had become an overnight success story. Jon bought his first hundred-thousand-dollar sports car, which back in those days was saying something. People were writing articles about Levi.” He laughed. “He was on the Hot Hundred Most Powerful Millionaires list for this magazine one time. I gave him shit about thatdaily.Hourly, for a while.” His smile faded. “But none of it mattered, because the game with the Russians was no longer about what they could doforus, but what they could dotous. Ruin us in business, for sure, but worse… hurt our families.”
He stubbed out his cigarette with violence and promptly lit another.
“Levi had the brilliant idea that he’d start making tech that failed. He’d leave out one crucial line of code, mess up some small mechanism. Maybe then they’d be less eager to use us, right? They’d just forget we’d ever existed.” He shook his head. “Remember the time Sebastian Seaver ended up in a car accident, Cain? Rear-ended by that hit and run driver who was never found?”
Cain nodded slowly. “Broke his collarbone.”