BRANDON’S POV
Reaching out to my phone to check for messages, there was only one from Natalie just before she went to bed: “Thinking of you, can’t wait for you to come home. Stay safe.”.
I smiled at two of those words and felt myself grow warm in my chest. That’s just what I needed that morning. I replied fast telling her that I was thinking of her too, that I was about to call her in a minute.
I had taken my quick shower and headed running into the kitchen, where Anthony always had a mug of his supercharged coffee waiting for me. He warmed up a pot long before I hit the office, going over some last-minute details with the team. Walking in, Anthony looked up and then gave me the nod.
“Morning.” He handed over a fresh cup of coffee. “Ready for round two?”
“You bet,” I said awkwardly, reaching for the offered coffee. “Chomping at the bit, ready and raring to go. Let’s get ‘er done.”
The first few hours consisted of a walk through each department, meeting staff, overviewing the strategy, and listening to what they had to say. Morale was obviously down, but there seemed to be possibly a little twinkle by the time we finished. They were wounded in the fight, and that is exactly what we needed.
Then Anthony and I would go back to the office, his office, and pore over what the problem was with them. It was a hairy situation, but we began tugging a way forward.
“If we can re-negotiate these big clients,” I pointed to a couple of names on that list, “we may pull this out. And we have to do it fast.”.
“Alright. Then I’m calling today. We might have to bend a little, but..”
“It’s fine. If that is what keeps the company running, it’s okay,” concluded Anthony.
“And we probably should be working up a contingency plan too, just in case. This isn’t something we can afford to be blind-sided by a second time.” I added, moving way out in front.
Anthony yawned first. “Oh wow, that’s so much,” he said, stretching so that his neck preemptively cracked at the action.
“Yeah, well,” I said, smiling and suddenly flung back to the early days when we were all young, naive, and starting afresh, and things were hard.
“Yeah, we have, and we will get through this too,” he murmured back.
And we were all too glad to keep our date, so we bunked down at the hotel, took note, or didn’t take note, of the detail, and were eager the next morning for some hard-bitten haggling. But deep inside, it was that funny feeling in me jabbing me continually with the thought, something like: This ain’t business; it was something deeper, something that my fingers, too, could never explain.
Hours crawled by, my mind going back to that call from Arlys. There had been an obvious, open threat that she had made but something in the way she offered it-the mocking, sneering tone in her voice-just didn’t jibe. I’d been around her enough to know how to read it when she was bluffing, and this time she was just a little too cocky.
Anthony, being observant, knew by the faraway glaze that was in my eyes that something was going on. He half-reclined in his desk to catch me with one eye. “What’s up, Brandon? You’ve been off all day.”
Most of the day I had held things back, from what I wanted to say to him. He was my best friend. With all the people in this whole wide world, if there was someone who could have helped me make sense of this, it was him.
Running a hand through my hair, I said in defeat, “It’s Arlys who’s been pulling this stuff with Natalie, making the threats, and it’s really starting to get to me.”
He grimaced. “Been up to no good still, huh? Kind of thought you had that one penned up a while back.”
“I thought that was so, too,” I snarled back. “Only this time, she’s not letting me go. She even had someone following me the other day. Of course, we even caught the guy. But when we caught him, he said it wasn’t her. I just don’t know what to believe anymore.”
Anthony creased his brow and leaned in. “Do you believe him? This person sending guys after you, I mean? The guy that was following you?”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying,” I shook my head at him. “I don’t know; you’d think it would have been some woman. The detective figured he was on the level and if it wasn’t Arlys then who the hell was it?”
Anthony, for his part, didn’t answer at first, his own mind obviously hung up on the very same words. “Could it be somebody else? Maybe somebody from the business world? We’ve pissed off a lot of people over the years.”
And make a pithy profit, maybe, but didn’t market it. “But whoever this woman may be she’s getting more and more aggressive. And with Arlys playing both sides, I can’t take any chances.”
That’s when he was full of it. “We really need to be very, very careful. But don’t let her inside your mind, Brandon. That’s what she wants.”
“I know,” the depth of the honesty in my voice no thicker than the tread. “I just… I can’t lose Natalie. Not now, not ever.”
“You won’t,” Anthony said firmly. “We’ll get through this. You’ll take it one day at a time, and then we’ll deal with Arlys once and for all.” There was something in the total assurance of his voice, literally something reassuring in and of itself, and yet in the depths of me, a feeling persisted that it was moving very slowly this night. I could feel it, sensate it: something was coming. And I had to be ready.
The next morning was arriving for me no sooner, but we both worked clients back to back, trying to best the other’s trust and effort to get new contracts. By the time it was all over-nearly dead-beat-we had done a lot, and some big breakthroughs had already been reached. The match of key clients had already really agreed to a renegotiation and lastly, there is a feeling that the office is having a welcome wind of change.
All those hollow victories and yet something deep in the back of my mind wouldn’t shake my preoccupation about Natalie and whatever danger she might be in. I knew she was a strong girl by now and could hold her own, but somehow, the thought of Arlys or whoever it was sent a shiver of cold right down my spine.
That night in what passed for a hotel bed, I lay on my back and made a decision. The minute this disaster here in London was mopped up, I was going to make sure of Arlys. I just couldn’t go on living like this-flinching over my shoulder every five minutes, wondering when the next attack would hit. For Natalie’s sake, we deserved better than this. All of us did.
From there he fuzzed into meetings past counting and renegotiations without end but, at the end of that week, Anthony and I had indeed saved the company from certain destruction, not a complete win but enough to at least bandage us over with the investors and set us upon the road to some breathing room.