✅ My Cousin's Keeper [NaNoWriMo 2021]

139. My Bargaining Chip

This bonus chapter is dedicated to Lonewulf. Thank you again for all your support!

I glanced around me nervously as I left the building. I knew there was no point being paranoid; there were technological solutions to track the location of my employee badge anyway, so there would be a computer somewhere that always knew exactly how long I actually spent in my office, and when I was elsewhere in the building. My job gave me an incredible amount of latitude, and the company was happy to let me work remotely or do personal stuff on the office computers whenever I wanted, so long as all my work was completed. But I still felt guilty when I left the office for something that wasn't technically work-related. Even if I was meeting with someone I knew through work, who was technically employed by one of my clients.

This was the third time I'd left the office to meet Tyler Walthamstone in the last two weeks. He seemed to have something of a talent for being called away, or not being where he had expected to be. I could only hope that this time I would actually be able to see the guy, and get this DVD off him.

Somehow, telling myself that I was allowed to leave the office whenever I wanted didn't settle my nerves. But looking around me and seeing that there was nobody there except one of the interns on the front desk was reassuring. They were people I didn't need to work with directly unless I was giving them a bunch of papers to copy before a meeting or something, so they wouldn't even question what I was doing. But Bracewell would. Just as I was walking towards the door, it slid open and my boss's boss's boss walked in. Or something like that; I didn't know if she was actually in the chain of command, but she was in charge of the whole Upper Ashfields project; our person on the town council, as well as the head of the personnel department for all SYL staff on site. If there was anybody who could cause me trouble for shirking my duties, it was her.

I didn't want to talk to Bracewell. I didn't want her to know where I was going. I certainly didn't want to explain to her that a popular movie star thought I was blackmailing him. And whatever I thought about her policy of allowing staff to treat this place like a social club so long as their work was done, there were still a lot of things that I didn't want her to know about me.

Just from seeing her, my heart was racing. Everybody was scared of Bracewell, and running into her at the exact moment I was doing something I shouldn't was cause for pure terror. I could only hope that she wasn't here to talk to me, because if she was I knew that she'd see right through me. She was the kind of person who knew exactly what you were thinking, and always had to know everything that was going on around her. The kind of manager who would make sure everything was done right because she needed everything to be under her control, but also had the skills to make sure it was done right.

She walked over to the reception desk and raised a hand to greet somebody. Not me, thankfully. She wasn't talking to me. I tried to get my pulse to calm down, but it was a lot tougher than I had imagined it could be. Just having the big boss here was the stuff of nightmares, and I couldn't shake the irrational fear that she would want to talk to me about something, or that she would have discovered the kind of stories that I'd been reading. I turned to see who she was actually talking to; hoping for any confirmation that it wasn't somebody in my office, or that there was no way I would be drawn into whatever crisis had drawn the elder dragon out from her lair.

I'll admit that I was surprised when I saw who was coming through the door. Carter might spend a lot of time chatting with her friends online, but she also did all the work that was assigned to her without question. I couldn't imagine her doing anything that would hurt the company enough to get Bracewell involved. Or could Carter have a problem with someone? Maybe she needed help because she was being bullied in the office, but I'd not seen any sign of that. And going straight to Bracewell wasn't exactly the normal procedure. Couldn't she have come to me first? I was functionally the office manager now, unless Jessop was on site. The Claughton contract had steamrollered most of our regular work, and my team had expanded to include everyone in sight. Could it be that Carter still didn't trust me, or didn't think I could deal with problems in my own office? I'd been about to leave, but now I knew I had to hang around a minute longer, and see if I could overhear anything that would set my mind at rest. If it involved someone on my team, I had to be interested.