Constant Risk. Janie Crouch

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СКАЧАТЬ it was like to hold her mother as she vomited up blood from the beatings the Organization inflicted on her?

      “Let’s just focus on Michael Jeter,” Gregory said. “Let’s leave the more painful stuff out for today and focus on when you first met him.”

      Gregory didn’t understand. It was all tied to Jeter. He’d been the face of her nightmares for nearly a dozen years. There was no separating him from the horror of what happened to her, even if most of it hadn’t actually happened by his hand.

      She attempted to focus.

      “I moved up the ranks at Communication For All pretty quickly. At the time my mother didn’t realize that the free courses were being utilized by the Organization to discover children who had natural hacking abilities. We just thought they were giving kids in poorer neighborhoods a leg up.”

      “And when did you meet Michael Jeter?”

      “I’d been inside the Organization for over a year before that happened. He didn’t get involved with the classroom programs in any regard except the highest possible levels. He met maybe one child per year.”

      “And you were that child?”

      Bree nodded, glancing away from the screen. “Yes. I’d aced every class and test they’d given me. I was already living on the Communication For All compound with my mom, and honestly was a little bored.”

      She could still almost perfectly remember the day she met Jeter. His office had been on a high floor in a Chicago skyscraper. She and her mother had grinned at each other all the way in the ride up the elevator.

      “What happened at that meeting?” Gregory asked, yanking her out of the memory—one of the last clear good ones she had of her mother.

      “I was brought into his office. It had unbelievable views from the window, and I wanted to look out them. But Jeter told me I had to do a test first before I could.”

      On the other end of the screen, Gregory jotted something down. “And what was the test?”

      “To most people it would’ve looked like a computer coding game. That’s how Michael presented it to me.”

      Thinking about it all now, with such hindsight, was difficult. If she hadn’t wanted to show off so much, impress the bigwig in the fancy suit with the grandiose office, how much different her life would’ve turned out.

      “I almost missed the true test,” she finally murmured. “I was so used to everything coming so easily to me with computers that I almost missed the Trojan horse Jeter had put inside his little game.”

      The defect had been placed deep inside the coding, and couldn’t be fixed with a simple rewrite. Almost the entire program had to be refitted, and had to be done quickly and creatively because of the countdown the system was on.

      “He was testing to see how I could adapt. He wanted to know what I would do when a system’s walls started closing in around me. If I could think outside the coding box.”

      “And how did you do?”

      “I passed.” She said it with a shrug like it was no big deal.

      It had been the hugest of deals.

      She would never forget the look in Jeter’s eye when she completed his little coding puzzle and turned the laptop back around toward him with time to spare.

      Until that moment she’d been nothing to him. Just another kid who, with the right guidance, would probably grow up to do pretty advanced programming, or maybe even start her own business.

      But once she’d turned the laptop back around to him and he’d seen what she’d done, she had become something much different to him.

      Much more interesting.

      From that day forward, until the day her mother had finally broken them out, there wasn’t a single day that Bree could remember that didn’t have Michael Jeter in it.

      “Were you aware of his illegal activities at the time?”

      She let out a sigh. “I was eleven. And for the first time being challenged to my fullest potential. To me, it was all a game. In the beginning at least.”

      “And when did things take a turn for the worse?”

      She stared at the screen, almost unable to focus on Gregory’s friendly face. She tried to force words out of her mouth—once, twice—but they wouldn’t come. Panic bubbled inside her.

      All she could see was Michael Jeter.

      All she could hear was his voice.

      All she could feel was when her leg had been broken at his command.

      The room began to close in on her, the past threatening to swallow her whole.

      “Hey, freckles.”

      Tanner. She felt his hands on her shoulders, his strong thumbs moving gently up and down the back of her neck.

      The terror faded. He was here and would help hold her demons at bay. She leaned her head back against his abdomen.

      Without taking his hands off her, Tanner crouched down so Gregory could see him in the screen.

      “Hey, Tanner.”

      “Hi, Greg. Looks like we might need to take a break for tonight.”

      Frustration floated over the lawyer’s features. “Being able to talk about this on the stand will make a difference in the case. Bree’s already written it all out, so it’s just a matter of being able to say it.”

      Tanner’s voice was calm but firm, and his fingers never stopped rubbing her neck. “You read it, so you know what sort of trauma we’re talking about. You’re going to have to be more patient. Bree will get there, but it’s going be on her timetable and nobody else’s. And besides, if she decides she doesn’t want to talk about all this, you’re going to have to find a workaround. You’ve got plenty of other stuff.”

      Bree rubbed her eyes. She should be able to do this. “I’m sorry, Gregory...”

      He held up a hand. “No, Tanner is right. You shouldn’t push yourself too hard. God knows you’ve done enough to take the Organization, and Jeter, down.”

      “Some days it’s easier to process the past than others.”

      “Well, like Tanner said, we’ve got plenty to go on even if we don’t include details from your childhood.” Gregory’s voice dropped, and he gave her a sympathetic look. “But what he did to you so very clearly proves he’s a monster. If we can use that to our advantage, I think we should.”

      Bree gave a tight smile and a nod, standing up and walking away from the table, as Tanner talked a few more moments with Gregory. She moved over to the front living room window, wrapping her arm around her midsection. She couldn’t see anything in the darkness—dark came early here in the heart of winter—but her mind could perfectly envision the beauty of Tanner’s ranch and the Rocky Mountains behind it. But right now the beloved scenery СКАЧАТЬ