“I’m glad you’re both safe.”
“Oh, hello,” Elsa said. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced.”
“Yes, you have,” Tyson said. “This is Paris. Well, Paris’s android carapace.”
Elsa’s eyes went wide as she looked Paris up and down. “That’s an android? Did you write a really nice letter to Santa, Tyson?”
“She bought it for herself.”
“Well, that’s not entirely true.” Paris ran a hand down Tyson’s chest. “I was intending to share it.”
Elsa put her hands up. “Okay, look. I don’t know what’s going on here, and frankly I don’t fucking care. You two are obviously busy, so since I’m not getting any answers, I’m going.”
“Elsa, wait—” Tyson said, but she silenced him with an upheld finger and a furious countenance. “I assume the elevator isn’t going to shoot me if I leave by myself? Because that would be unlawful detainment.”
“No, of course not.” Tyson moved to his desk and punched in a code. “I’ve disabled the security protocols. You may leave without worry.”
“Good.” She stormed into the lift car. “Thanks for a lovely evening, Tyson,” she spat before the doors closed and the car sank into the floor.
Livid almost beyond reason, Tyson spun around to face Paris and absolutely lay into her. But before he could get so much as a syllable out, she had closed the distance and planted her lips on his. Reflexively, he tried to back away, but she wrapped an arm around the back of his head and held him fast in the kiss. She was strong, inhumanly so. Something in the most primitive parts of his brain shifted. All the anger and frustration he felt bubbled up and mixed with the loneliness of years spent at the top of his profession. He was enraged, and rapidly engorging under the relentless kiss of the most perfect woman he’d ever held. Well, she wanted it? He was going to give it to her.
Paris sensed his intentions change as his hands went to her waist and rewarded him with her hot, probing tongue on his lips. Her free hand dropped down and ripped at his belt buckle while he fumbled for the zipper on her back. It had been a while since he’d last helped a woman out of her dress, and it showed.
She beat him to the prize as his belt was pulled free of its loops. A quick flick of his silk slacks’ fastener and zipper and they fell down around his ankles. Paris leaned back out of the kiss, holding his belt by the buckle in one hand, grinning mischievously. Then, all in one fast, fluid motion Tyson had no chance of countering, she whipped it out and around his neck, grabbed the other end with her free hand, twisted around herself to face away from him, and effortlessly leaned over to flip him over her back and send him crashing to the floor with a thud.
He tried to cough as the wind was knocked out of his lungs from the brutal impact, but her turn had put a twist in the belt that constricted it around his neck like a tourniquet. He couldn’t cough, couldn’t breathe, and couldn’t believe he’d been played so easily.
The entire story came into focus even as his vision blurred. It had always been Paris. She was the mole in his organization. She was the only one in a position to leak the truth about the Teegarden outbreak to the press, and he’d assigned her to find the real culprit. She knew about Cassidy, maybe even had her killed. And she was the only one who Tyson had told about the message from Sokolov.
She’d even gotten him to pay for the body she was now using to kill him, the clever bitch. She could say anything, that their BDSM lovemaking session had gone too far, that he’d hung himself with his own belt after the embarrassment he’d suffered at the auditorium. Whatever would fit the narrative she wanted to create. And no one would question an AI’s honesty.
It was a perfectly wrapped gift for whomever had corrupted her.
As the oxygen starvation began to take hold, Tyson almost found himself appreciating the mind that had crafted such a setup. In the next few seconds, his family’s centuries-long control of Ageless Corporation would come to an abrupt end, and no one would ever know the truth.
His head slacked to one side as the color drained out of the world and his field of vision shrank into a tunnel. It had almost closed entirely when the lift car once more emerged from the floor.
“Forgot my purse,” Elsa said as Tyson’s eyes failed completely. “Wow, that’s some kinky shit you’re into.”
Tyson couldn’t speak, but he tried to turn his head in the direction of the sound of Elsa’s voice and mouthed the word “HELP.”
“Holy shit,” Elsa swore. The pressure around Tyson’s neck eased a fraction, then dropped away entirely as his frantically pumping heart shoved fresh blood into his starving brain.
“Put it down and you will not be harmed,” Paris’s normally comforting voice said in a completely flat, emotionless tone.
“Back off, bitch!” Elsa shouted. Color and light returned as Tyson’s eyes started to make sense of his surroundings again. He focused on Elsa’s outline. She was holding something out directly at Paris even as the android advanced on her. “One more step and I cook you like a soy burger.”
A Taser, Elsa was holding a civilian-model Taser. “Shoot her!” Tyson shouted with a gasping, raspy voice that sounded nothing like his own. “Shoot her!”
Elsa choked up on the grip of her Taser and pushed the firing stud even as Paris’s carapace lunged forward with impossible speed. But the compressed gas behind the electrode darts was faster still. Two perfect coils of wire snaked out from the unit as the
