Burning Ultimatum (Trevor's Harem #4) Read online

  “Like Jessica,” Daniel agrees. “She’s sweet. And Trevor is good for her. But even if I’d been bastard enough to cheat on you, it could never have happened with Jessica. You understand that, don’t you? She has an eidetic memory. Photographic. She literally remembers everything she sees once, and remembers it as if it’s in front of her now. It’s neat for parlor tricks, and it turned out to be extremely helpful when I asked her to internalize everything I’ve ever fed into Halo, so she could look for patterns. But it’s also a curse. There are things in my past, Bridget, that I hope one day to forget. Like how I treated you when we met.”

  He gives me a sad smile, then goes on.

  “But Jessica can never forget. If she does something she regrets — like betraying a friend — it haunts her forever. That’s all Caspian did in her test, you know: listed old horrors she can never let go of.”

  “So she looked through everything? Every shred of information you ever gave Halo about any of us?”

  “As much as was practical. For a while, we thought Halo might be using an encryption key that it saw around itself, making it from room dimensions, GPS coordinates, something like that. But in the end it was in the data. The real epiphany came when I showed Jessica her own particulars. And not about her time here, in the house. It was the research. Her metrics reading on an Eros reader; her use of Eros toys. She saw the data sheet and noticed certain events missing. Like if she used a vibrator and came twice right in a row, the data I gave her, from the vibrator’s embedded spyware chip, might show no orgasms at all in the same timeframe. Nobody else could possibly have noticed those things. But because Jessica remembers everything she did. We realized Halo wasn’t perfect. We couldn’t hack it, but we could fool it.”

  “I still don’t get how you did that.”

  I sort of care, but mostly I don’t. Lying here with Daniel is making me lightheaded. It’s easy to forget we’re in this twisted place, playing this wicked game. It’s easy to forget the implied threats, the billions of dollars at stake. Eros wants something from me, or from Jessica. It wants it from Daniel. And yet here we lie, my hand slowly returning to his strong leg under the sheets, touching his flaccid member, feeling it slowly twitching back to life.

  “Halo is an algorithm. It’s technical name is Heuristic Adaptive intuition aLgOrithm.’”

  “That’s a horrible name. It doesn’t even spell ‘H-A-L-O.’”

  “The L and O are both from algorithm.”

  “That’s not how algorithm is spelled.”

  “They took license.”

  “And what about the I? It should be Hail-O.” I trace a circle on Daniel’s chest with one hand while the other attempts a better acronym: CPR, for Cock Preparedness Resuscitation. “Sounds like a breakfast cereal.”

  “I didn’t name the fucking thing,” he says, a trifle short.

  I make a thumb-and-finger circle under the blanket and wrap it around his stiffening dick in apology. It’s like I’m giving his dick an A-Okay.

  “I’m sorry. You were saying.”

  “It’s an algorithm,” he repeats. “That means it’s dumb. It follows rules, like a flow chart. If this, then that. And what Jessica saw, by comparing our results to her memory, was that Halo deletes anything it thinks is just a repeat of what came before it, like her doubled orgasms that Halo recorded as zero orgasms. It decides that repeated events must be glitches, so it removes them from the equation. We started feeding surveillance footage and test results back into Halo so it’d delete whatever was on it, thinking the two repeated events were glitches. We couldn’t bolster your scores to keep you here, but we could knock everyone else’s score down so you’d still end up doing well, relative to them. But it’s all guesswork. We’re running with scissors — in the dark.”

  Daniel is completely hard in my hand. He’s not returning any favors, and my pussy, getting wetter, feels neglected. I think I’m being turned on by talk of statistics and math. Or maybe just by Daniel.

  I roll back onto my side, facing away, and shove my ass toward Daniel’s crotch. I scoot back into him, impaling myself on his shaft. Then I scoot back farther, until my cheeks are against his thighs, and start doing all the work. Men.

  “I guess we’re done talking about algorithms and statistical outliers,” Daniel says, finally taking my hips in his hands and pressing forward, filling me up.

  “Tell me about prairie voles again,” I say.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Daniel

  Welty looks me right in the eye. Right in the fucking eye. If we were dogs, I’d see it as the implied threat it is. And then because I’m the alpha no matter what the board tries to pretend — no matter the Trevor-related smokescreens they blow at the press or with the outside world — I’d leap through the video screen and rip out his throat.

  Especially since he’s threatening my mate.

  “This has gone on long enough,” Welty says.

  “Maybe you should elaborate.”

  “Don’t be stupid. I’m talking about Miller.”

  “And?”

  “Halo didn’t select her, Daniel. Just because Caspian decided to have his goons cart Kylie off doesn’t mean that Miller is better suited to … ”

  “Bridget. Her name is Bridget.” I know I’m exposing too much, but this is the endgame. Soon, none of this bullshit will matter. And besides, fuck them. Fuck them all for what they’re trying to do.

  “Regardless,” Alexa says, “what he’s saying is true. Halo didn’t select Kylie to leave, or Kat. That’s two of the top four positions, summarily dismissed.”

  “So you feel the dismissals shouldn’t have occurred,” I say. “And maybe you’d like to fly to Ukraine and ask the nice men who took Kylie away if they’d mind returning her. Though honestly, I doubt she’ll be much good to us anymore.”

  “Don’t be a wiseass,” Welty says.

  I cross my arms. “I came to you with the information about Kat, and you handed me your decision. I seem to remember you agreeing she needed to go.”

  “The difference is that you wanted her to leave for her own good, rather than because her orientation would affect her later performance.”

  “She’s just as gone,” I retort. “I don’t see why you care.”

  “It’s just more evidence that you’re compromised. More evidence that this should have been in Halo’s hands all along!”

  Welty standing up for Halo? I must really be getting to him. I can’t resist a smirk. If only he knew the loophole in Halo’s armor that I’ve been exploiting for weeks.

  “Look,” says Victor. “What’s done is done. Halo selected Bridget and Jessica the same as it selected Kylie and Kat. Whether you feel Daniel is compromised or not is of no consequence, as much as I’d like to feel it somehow is.” He glares at me the way Welty recently did, the two-way screen technology allowing us to meet pupil to pupil. “Truth is, none of us are going to challenge Caspian.”

  And she was after me and Trevor, not just the championship, I think but don’t say. And if you’d let her infect the company that far, it wouldn’t have been long before she came for the board, too.

  The fat man, whose name I still can’t recall, shakes his jowly head. “Kylie was the one. We need someone with a strategic mind.”

  “You’re guessing,” Alexa says, dismissive.

  “Maybe I should pray,” the fat man snaps back.

  “It’s moot,” Welty says, playing arbiter. “None of us knows what we’re looking for. It’s like searching through a dump for a single item, not finding it, and then realizing the problem is that you’ve never seen or touched the thing that’s lost, or know anything about it.”

  “You’re so smart,” Alexa says, sarcastic as always.

  Welty glares at her but goes on. “All we can do is to trust Halo. Halo scored Kylie consistently highest until these past weeks, where something she did began pulling her down.”

  Or something I did, with Jessica’s help.

  “But whatever
; she’s gone. Now we have two of the final four. One of them has to suit.”

  “Not Bridget, though,” says Victor.

  “Obviously. So it’s Jessica.”

  “Halo sees something in Bridget,” I say. “If you agree it should be trusted, how can you — ”

  “Oh, we’re sure,” Welty interrupts.

  “You didn’t let me finish.”

  “Fine.” He crosses his arms and raises his eyebrows for me to continue.

  “I was going to say, ‘If you agree that Halo must be trusted, how can you have your heads so far up each other’s asses that you need oxygen tanks to breathe?’”

  Alexa smirks. “Cute, Daniel. And you just keep acting like a big man right up until the moment Halo goes wide. Then we’ll see what happens to your position.”

  I imagine Alexa’s head exploding. It doesn’t make me feel any better.

  “I don’t know what you’re trying to pull over there,” she continues, “but don’t think you’re under the radar, or that all of what we’re seeing and believing here today won’t factor into our final decision for … ” She stops, as if realizing her sentence has gone on a word too long. She should have stopped at our final decision. Nobody reacts, but it makes me wonder: Final decision for whom?

  Alexa storms through the hesitation, turning from hesitancy to aggression. “Somehow, the results are being manipulated, Daniel,” she says, her voice sharp. “It’s the only possible explanation for why Miller’s still around.”

  “Maybe she earned it,” I say.

  “Or maybe you’ve found a way to hack Halo,” Welty says.

  “It can’t be hacked. You know that unless you’re an idiot. Check the code. Go ahead, Welty. I’ll wait while you verify that all the safeguards preventing code changes are still in place.”

  Heads reluctantly nod. None of these people like me, but I’ve spoken the few words that they’re forced to agree with.

  “She has no special talents,” the fat man says. “You said it was restraint then immediately made it clear that you were making it up. Why would you manufacture a key indicator if the girl had anything real?”

  I’ve spent some time thinking about this. The day will come when I no longer need to outthink the board, but for now I can’t raise new suspicion. I tied my noose by venturing a bullshit superpower then pulling it away, but since our last meeting I’ve figured out how to explain it. And damn if it doesn’t strike me as convincing enough to be real.

  “I’ve done further study,” I say. “And I now believe it is restraint that makes Bridget special, which explains why I jumped to that earlier conclusion. But it’s not restraint in the way we originally imagined.”

  “Really,” says Welty.

  “She’s not truly refraining,” I explain. “She’s conflicted because she’s forming attachments. You know the arguments. We’ve seen it in numerous animal studies: Ovulating females prefer so-called alphas for their superior genetic value, but only as short-term partners. For long-term partners, the profile shifts. The hormones shift.”

  “These women aren’t lab rats, Daniel,” Alexa says.

  “That’s right. They’re humans. That means they have a cortex, not just chemistry. You can’t think of this in terms of hormones and neurons. You have to consider free will.”

  “‘Free will’?” Welty says, practically crowing.

  I keep my composure. “Yes. Humans can outthink their biological impulses. It’s why men with a propensity to stray can stay faithful. It’s why women don’t fuck everything that moves just because he’s peacocking with a confident smile, proving social value, and all that shit the geeks will tell you. I think that’s what’s happening with Bridget. She resisted me, yes. But restraint isn’t her special ability. It’s that she seems to see me as both: as a short-term and a long-term partner. She’s conflicted. She wants to respond but feels she shouldn’t. She is, in short, outthinking her impulses. And that, I feel, is why Halo has kept her.”

  “Because she can think,” Welty says.

  He’s mocking me, but Alexa seems thoughtful. Any human can think, but it’s true we’ve never selected for high willpower, high discretionary power. We just never thought of it. And although I’m mostly speaking out of my ass, I can see it being true. The others have their special abilities. But Bridget, more than any of the women, seems strangely centered when it comes to all that’s surrounded her here — me included. Me especially.

  “Ridiculous,” Welty says.

  Here’s where I lie. Here’s where I stick my neck out this one last time. But if I can pull this single untruth off, the rest might hold together.

  “We’ve stayed apart,” I say. “But if you look at her new profile, from the footage, I think you’ll see that she hasn’t considered anyone else. You saw her with Caspian, then with Trevor. If that doesn’t prove she actually has an uncanny ability to outthink her impulses — without the sexual outlet I provided her earlier, against board approval — then I don’t know what does.”

  Or in other words, Bridget’s remained moderate and centered even after we’ve stopped fucking.

  Which will be a convincing argument as long as the board never figures out that we haven’t stopped fucking.

  In the blind spots.

  In the hidden room.

  Like rabbits.

  Alexa seems to think then slowly shakes her head.

  “I almost want to agree with you, Daniel,” she says. “And if you were right, she really might fit the profile. What we need more than any single other talent is critical thinking. Almost nobody is self-aware enough to resist the things she has, and that suggests an incredible amount of front-brain ability. But there’s just one problem: She’s fucked up. We all know she’s fucked up. She didn’t have a mother growing up. She has a dysfunctional attachment style. She’s … what’s the nerd way to say this?” Alexa turns toward Welty.

  “She lacks the proper receptors in her nucleus accumbens.”

  “Less nerdy,” Alexa clarifies, rolling her eyes.

  But I’ve studied my neurology. And I can’t believe Welty is giving me this opening.

  There are two factors that affect the way genes express themselves.

  There’s the genetic code itself.

  And then there’s our world and the situations surrounding us, which can be a powerful pen and eraser for the hand that nature’s dealt us.

  “You’re ignoring epigenetics,” I say.

  “What? You’re saying that somehow, something in Bridget’s environment is changing her genes?”

  Keeping my face carefully straight, I nod.

  “What?” Welty says, his voice practically dripping condescension. “What force could possibly be strong enough to rewrite DNA expression in a girl who was born to a dissociated mother with her own history of neglect? What super-amazing, all-consuming force of nature could do that, Daniel?”

  I look Welty right in the eyes.

  “Love,” I say.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Bridget

  Now that I know about Halo, so many things around the mansion make a lot more sense. Like the way lights turn on and off as we walk through rooms. Like the way the thermostat adjusts — not only to a standard temperature, but to preferences we ourselves have expressed in the past combined with the rooms somehow scanning our bodies. According to Daniel, Halo uses the home’s sensors to surveil us for the competition, doing double duty to run many of the facility’s systems at the same time. Halo knows I like an even 70 degrees — a bit cooler at night, slightly warmer in the mornings. But what’s creepy is that if my mom went into one of these rooms alone in the middle of a hot flash, Halo would cool the room, knowing exactly how uncomfortable she’d be otherwise.

  It explains why, after turning my bedside lamp on every night to read, it was suddenly on all the time when I returned to my room in the evenings. And it explains why, after Kylie left, there stopped being peanut butter on the breakfast buffet. Kylie ate the peanut butt
er (on the sly; bitch only ate salads in public, I swear), but ever since I mentioned my peanut allergy to Kylie that one random time, it vanished.

  It even explains the single-serving helpers. The house probably has a massive staff, but they stay invisible like the Oompa Loompas before Willy Wonka gave them too much freedom. Halo presents most of what we need, before we know we need it — like having a mind-reading assistant doing your bidding all the time, whether you want it or not.

  We’re sitting around a small four-top table in the dining room, near the big picture window, looking out over the snow-capped mountains. A sense of abiding peace is on my shoulders. The view is majestic, but for me, this is a place to vacation, not stay. For the first time since I’ve been here, I can appreciate it as such. There may be a final challenge to separate me from Jessica, but it’ll be moot. We’re not in competition. Jessica wants the house, the view, the fortune, and Trevor.

  I only want Daniel.

  Under the tablecloth, Daniel’s hand slides up my leg. I feel a tingle but take his hand instead of letting it go farther. Right now, I just want to love him. I want to feel his love for me. There will be plenty of time for more once this is finally over, after I’ve gone home with my second-place prize. We can’t discuss details at this table because the risk of deleting too much from Halo and attracting attention is too great so close to the finish. But I can squeeze his hand under the table and smile. We don’t need words.

  Later, I tell him. There’s time later for that, when Halo isn’t watching.

  And Daniel’s eyes say to me, Let’s visit the secret room after breakfast.

  A tiny, dirty little smile forms on his lips, and I hear him mentally say a thousand other things that flutter my heart, and turn my panties wet.

  A man brings us coffee. Another single-serving helper I’ve never seen. My coffee arrives light and sweetened because Halo has fine-tuned food deliveries to all the preferences I’ve ever expressed in this strange place.

  “Which one of us do you think will win?” I ask Trevor.