Off Contract ( Athos Security Book 2 )

Leo

San Antonio, TX

Five Years Ago

"That’s him?” I asked in disbelief.

“That’s him,” Boswell replied,"Not much to him, is there?”

On the other side of the two way mirror, a boy sat with far too much confidence in the interrogation room. Sidney Barrow, the hacker prodigy, thorn in my fucking side, and the reason I’d flown cross country into the hell’s inferno of San Antonio, was just a kid. He wasn't even legal drinking age.

Boswell and Reed did their job.They dragged him out of his hacker hellhole with a brutality meant to break him. Their task had been simple: obliterate any hope or dignity left in the kid.Yet there he sat, defiant and insolent, cuffed to the bracket in the center of the table, with his head held high and his jaw set in a stubborn line.

You cocky little shit.

This was the same kid who, after a failed attempt to hack into Athos, faced off against Greenwood, my head of cyber security and investigations. Barrow hadn't even paused to consider the consequences.

Instead of retreating, the obnoxious little prick declared open war.

That was his mistake.

For a month they tangled, every strike from Greenwood met with a counter move by Barrow. He hadn’t stood a chance against a man that had come to Athos much the same way Barrow would come to be in the company’s service:desperate, talented, and exploitable. Though he'd been seldom called on to shoulder a gun, Seth Greenwood was the single most dangerous operator on the roster at Athos. Barrow faced him down without hesitation. I couldn’t decide if he was young and naïve, dumb, or simply too arrogant to acknowledge that maybe he just wasn’t as good as he thought he was.

In another life, I might have admired Barrow’s bloodthirsty joy for the fight or at the very least the colossal balls he apparently possessed.

I wasn't bothered when he attempted cracking Greenwood’s security to seek secrets to sell, hitting Athos where it hurt. Not when the little shit siphoned cash out my personal accounts. Not even when he froze the company’s funds. What had he done to tip the scales? He'd threatened to dox my operators and that I couldn't abide. My employee's identities were mine to protect and I took that responsibility seriously.

The kid may have found a worthy adversary in Greenwood, but he had no idea the kind of enemy he’d made in me.

Blood smudged beneath Sidney’s nostrils, catching on the glint of a septum ring, continuing over his lips,down his chin to his throat. Dotted the left side of his lips, beside that blood smeared scowl was an intriguing little beauty mark.The bruised gash on his cheek was already swollen. If Sidney was pissed before Boswell and Reed delivered that attitude adjustment, I couldn’t imagine the spark of fury that had burned in him now.

“Care to divulge what happened to his face?” I asked.

It seemed Sidney attempted to hold his own. An impressive feat of both courage and stupidity for a kid damned near half the size of the mountainous operators flanking me on either side. I’d sent the pair of them specifically to intimidate him into compliance. Reed and Boswell had no choice but to implement physical force to subdue him because Barrow had been willing to fight to the death.

I didn’t have to turn to know Reed was standing at my side like a brick fucking wall with his arms crossed over his barrel chest, trying not to smirk.

“He drew on me, sir,” Reed responded, “and forced me to disarm him.” He paused, “I strongly encouraged him to rethink this course of action in the future.”

“Wormy little bastard fought us like a raccoon on bath salts,” Boswell struggled not to grin. John Boswell took pride in his ability to maintain order by force when necessary. Of course, it always seemed necessary. I supposed I should be relieved that it was Reed that Barrow squared up with. Had he drawn on Boswell, the conversation about to take place would happen in a hospital once Barrow regained consciousness. Boswell added, “The kid had to be subdued, sir, ziptied and hauled out bodily. He spit out swear words I’d never even thought to string together.Think he’s just a little irate.”

Irate? That's one way to put it.

Irate was to be expected, but I needed him to be cornered and desperate. I assumed these things would come easily with his youth, but there he sat glowering at the two way mirror like this was just an inconvenience. I expected to find a kid ready to crumble under the weight of the series of events his ego had triggered. Instead, I found Barrow still ready to wage war.

Time to extinguish that flame.

I straightened my jacket and exhaled a heavy sigh. Barrow’s holier-than-thou- crusader-for-justice attitude was going to be beyond exhausting.The door to the interrogation room swung open and I stepped inside. He sat there with his chin lifted, tipped in infuriating defiance. His eyes lifted as I entered the room, hazel eyes, a brilliant blend of gold and green I wasn’t certain I’d ever seen on anyone else before. Stunning. Those eyes burned bright beneath a fan of golden lashes.

He was fucking pretty.

“Do you know who I am?” I asked, dropping the dossier onto the metal table.

Pulling out the chair across from him, I allowed the metal legs to scrape across the concrete floor even though the sound set my teeth on edge. Sidney flinched and I smirked as I took a seat.

“Some petty rich asshole that has flown cross country to have your pet troglodytes beat the hell out of me for fucking around with your Pop’s empire of moral decay?”

“To be fair, you earned the beating on your own I hear,” I gestured to his face.

“Yeah, well, those two WWE rejects come at you, we’ll see if you want to punch your fucking way out of it,” Barrow muttered. “Guess from where you are sitting it looks like they taught me a valuable lesson.” He glowered at me, “So why exactly are we having this conversation? Come to gloat? Come to say hello before some corporate fixer buries me in a barrel in the desert?”

“What makes you think you're worth the effort of digging a hole?”

My gaze lingered on his battered face, appreciating both the courage and pure idiocy it must’ve taken to go head to head with two human fucking citadels like Boswell and Reed. That little scuffle was nothing, a scrap. Now the actual game began. This was what Sidney Barrow should've been dreading all these months. He should've been worried about facing me because this confrontation had been building, unavoidable from the first time he’d tried and failed to hack through Greenwood’s defenses. I leaned forward, resting my elbows on the table.

Time to see if I could find the chink in that righteous armor.

“We're having this conversation because I wanted to offer you an olive branch,” I told him.

Barrow’s response was a dismissive snort. He grated on my nerves. I understood exactly why Reed took the brat down a peg or two.

“You should've backed off once you hit interference, Barrow," I sighed, "but you just couldn’t do it, could you?”

His stubbornness was a persistent pain in my ass for far too long. His confidence in his craft was so unshakeable that he oozed self assurance that I wouldn’t have the evidence I needed to back my actions.

This was going to be a hard lesson for Barrow to learn: he wasn’t that good.

But if he gave me the opportunity, I could make him great.

“You gave my head of cyber security everything he needed, every one of your tells so he could track down all the self righteous Robin Hood bullshit you’ve been pulling since you were what...sixteen? Fifteen?”

“Tah-dah.” He threw his cuffed hands up in mock celebration, letting them fall with a clatter against the tabletop. His slender shoulders sagged. Standing, I doubted Barrow was shoulder high to me. “Impressive catalog of work, ain’t it, you Dutch fuck?”

“Very,” I acknowledged. “Until you got so cocky, you decided that your new hobby was going to be fucking with Greenwood until you fostered a vendetta. Not the person you want to tempt into single minded vengeance, Barrow.”

“He's decent,” Barrow muttered. He shrugged as if to dismiss the countless hours spent trying to best a man that had spent Barrow’s entire lifetime in the trenches of cyber warfare. “But he’s just not that good.”

Barrow was decent.

Greenwood was invincible

“He let you fuck up continually so that he could ruin your life, Barrow,” I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. My father had written an entire protocol manual about the steps needed to neutralize Greenwood and mitigate the damage should he go rogue.Hell, he even code named the protocol Artopos after the Greek Fate that cut the thread between life and death. That was the type of operative Greenwood was, lethal and indispensable. And Barrow acted like he was just some guy who had happened to take a casual disliking to him. “Do you know how much evidence he has against you?”

“By the way you are puffing up your fucking chest, I’m guessing enough that I’m not going to see freedom until I am an octogenarian. ”

The game was over. He was out of moves. I suspected he knew this, but his pride wouldn’t allow him to accept.

“Pretty much,” I confirmed. “I'd think you'd get at least twenty five years. That is a generously low figure for all the dumbfuckery you engaged in. You’ve been quite the marauder, haven’t you? Cracking federal databases, identity theft on a massive scale, forging and altering government documents for immigrants at a price so low I doubt it covered your operating costs. You've stolen enough money to buy yourself a small island in the Maldives and yet, you kept none of it. You've funneled it all into causes you deemed worthy,” my voice dripped with mockery as I set my eyes on his, “What a saint you are, Barrow. Commendable, truly, but grandiose in stupidity. That moral high ground means shit when under all of your self righteous ideology you're still a thief.”

And that pissed him off.

“I'm the thief? You've never worked for anything in your entire gilded, sheltered existence, you silver spoon sucking asshole.” His cheeks flushed, a muscle in his jaw ticked.“That money did more good than it ever would've in the claws of you and the rest of you and the rest of those bottom feeding blue blooded vampires,” Barrow laughed. “Funny how I’m the one shackled, destined for prison, when all I did was serve a little sliver of justice. Does it hurt your feelings to know that your mercenary money helped people that you don’t give a good goddamn about from the ivory tower that is Athos?”

“As it stands, Barrow, you are the one in the stocks, are you not? The world isn’t fair,” I told him,“It’s all about connections, leverage and power. You and I both know that you have none. Let’s not kid ourselves. There's no scenario in which someone like you has an advantage over someone like me.”

His reaction was immediate, his chest heaved in pure fury as he faced the reality of his situation.

Without anonymity, Barrow was powerless.

Seemed I'd rendered the boy wonder speechless

“But sometimes, it's luck that makes all the difference and your luck hasn’t run out just yet.” I opened the gray dossier offering Barrow a lifeline and a leash. “Greenwood has developed quite an interest in your talents. Seems you’ve impressed him with your antagonism.”

“Consider this,” I tapped the contract with a finger. “Work for me under Greenwood. Your past misdeeds? Erased, forgotten, nonexistent.” I saw the struggle behind those bright hazel eyes. It wasn’t just freedom Barrow desired. He needed validation, a challenge that I was all too happy to provide. “Because once you sign this,” I said as I drew a sleek silver pen from my jacket. I uncapped it, setting it on the contract.“Sidney Barrow doesn’t exist. You'll be one of Athos’ guarded assets.”

I slid the contract across the table, a temptation for a cornered man with everything to lose. His Adam’s Apple bobbed and his eyes fixed on the contract, a desperate man on the verge of making an unthinkable choice.

“No one has even mirandized me. Don’t I need legal counsel for this?" his voice had gone small and quiet. All that bravado was gone. “To ensure I’m not conceding more than I can live with?”

“You aren’t under arrest. Yet. And a lawyer? Sidney, let’s not pretend this is anything but what it is.” A ghost of a smile curved my lips as I met his eyes to watch the light dim, “You’re relinquishing your soul to me.”

Silence enveloped the room save for the mechanical hiss of the struggling air conditioning. He gnawed at his lower lip, a nervous tick that didn’t escape my notice. He was so very close to selling himself out for the sake of freedom.

Freedom I would dictate.

“You thrive on human misery,” Sidney murmured. “Do you even feel guilty? I doubt you’ve ever stooped so low to pull the trigger yourself, but how many people have you murdered by proxy? Sanctioned murder is still murder, it’s just got a prettier price tag. How many fucking skunkworks operations have you overseen where your army of sociopaths unleash hell at your behest? Your family has been amassing a fortune on and off the government’s payroll since the first time Germany got its knickers in a twist. You’re a war profiteer, DeWindt, a fucking parasite. You are what is wrong with the world.”

Nice speech.

I didn’t feel guilty about any of it:anything my grandfather did, anything my father did, anything I had done or will do.

I didn’t feel anything.

“And you,” I shrugged, “are about to be swallowed by a system that chews up men like you and spits out the bones. Provided you can survive long enough while incarcerated, that is. Or let’s be real, long enough to show up at your trial. You're young, just turned twenty, if I remember correctly. I hate to admit it but you are awfully pretty, Barrow. Those are two things that won’t serve you well in lockup.”

He flinched at the word ‘pretty’ as soon as it left my lips. There was no subtlety in the motion. It was an involuntary reaction he had no control over. The fact was for a brief moment, a pained expression that settled on his face. I was certain he was about to vomit all over the table between us.

Interesting.

There was no joy in the truth, only the cold reality of the situation at hand. The fiery defiance in his eyes flickered out.

Broke him.

The spark just sputtered out.

“Fuck you, DeWindt,” he growled, fumbling with the cuffs.His trembling fingers struggled, flipped to the last page. Ready to betray his sense of self, Sidney signed. The pen clattered against the table, his nose snarled in self disgust.

“See, that wasn’t so hard, was it, Barrow?”

I retrieved the contract, closing the dossier and essentially this chapter in Barrow’s life. His future was now mine. I pushed the metal chair back across the concrete floor before I stood up to allow him to marinate in his misery.

“See you in Boston,” I smirked.

That signature had cost him everything but my intuition whispered it was going to cost me so much more.