“The sooner you find your match, the sooner we can protect her.”
Wow. Just wow. So many assumptions in that statement, and all of them pushed my buttons in a bad way. For a moment - a brief moment - I imagined telling my Dad exactly where he could shove his old-fashioned idea of happily-ever-after. But I was on a call and even if I wasn’t that was not an appropriate response to my father’s pushing. “I’m going to have to call you back,” I told Cassie. She snickered on the line, and I realized she had heard my father’s comment. I felt my face heat. She gave me a soft wish of good luck and hung up without any further questions.
At least she was discrete.
“Don’t you ever knock?” I asked Dad. That could have been a client.
Dad waved away my words. “You could have kept going. It’s not like I don’t know our business.”
I felt the headache building and started digging for the asprin. If I got a migraine two days in a row my stomach might just up and leave, right with my brain, for someplace a little less spikey. “What if someone heard you being so unprofessional in the office and took offense?” I asked, and I finally located the bottle and popped two dry. “Don’t you remember the scandal when we first decided to co-own the position? How we had to prove we could keep a professional relationship despite being immediate family?” How I wouldn’t bow to a stupid decision just because it came from my father?
“I am your father,” Dad said, like that was the point. “That’s why I want you to find your soulmate!”
I wanted to just lay my head down on my desk and groan, but that would be just as unprofessional as my father discussing my lovelife at work. I resisted. Just barely. “We still have this mess to clean up, and the new hope IT project to kick off,” I said, steering him back to business. “It’s really not a good time.”
“New hope?”
Did he keep his ears filled with cotton? Or did he just never talk to any of the employees? “It’s what the teams started calling our improvement efforts to prevent this from ever happening again. I’m sure we’ll have a better name before launch - with less cheese.” At least they hadn’t called it ‘helping hearts’ or anything else so romantically sappy.
“What did the teams find?”
Good news first. “We weren’t directly involved. They did meet at one of our Balls, but it was for a different intended match.” Pause. Let him digest the exact wording of that. “But we could have saved them.”
He sighed. I couldn’t help but agree. It wasn’t the worst news - but that didn’t make it good. And, of course, I had saved the worst for last.
“Two of the others reached out to us to work the separation.”
That had felt like a hit below the belt. I felt slimy just admitting it. Those should have been caught.
“They weren’t flagged as former clients?” Dad asked, speaking up again like he actually had an interest in our business.
“No. We didn’t even question it. Those two teams are completely separate, so no one recognized the names when they came through a second time.” I had found the guy who worked the projects - John Kilburn - and talked to him for an hour about it. Somehow he had gotten both of them. He’d been sweaty and nervous, but most employees at his level are when I talk to them. He hadn’t even remembered them; nothing about them had stood out.
“So we develop new flags or whatever it is IT does, so employees question it in the future. No big deal.”
Shit. Said like that it sounded easy. Months of development and testing and making sure things didn’t break reduced to ‘no big deal’ flags. “It’s a lot of work.” I tried to sound sincere and not frustrated.
“I’m sure you can handle it,” Dad said. Just like that. “In the meantime we’ll find your soulmate and figure out what kind of protection she actually needs.”
Oh gods. By all that is holy, it was almost a safer topic. Traction was slow enough on researching the leak and developing the New Hope ideas that I felt like we were just treading water, but this? This felt like a step forward. “So you admit they would need protection?” Finally.
“They?” Dad latched onto the word like a golden retriever hearing his treat bag open. One single misspoken word and he looked like an excited puppy. How did people live with parents? It was maddening. “As in more than one?” he pressed.
“They as in a person of unknown age, gender, or existence. As in multiple possibilities because when a person doesn’t have any soulwords they have no idea who might make a good partner.” I was going to hell for that lie. The devil would sear off my words and put me with the betrayers and the killers.
Dad wasn’t going to back off, though. I knew he wouldn’t. I should just tell him the truth. It wasn’t like he wouldn’t find out. “If your match is a ‘they’,” he said, thinking out loud, “then you are admitting she exists.” His forehead crinkled. “And that she could be a - he.”
I hadn’t intended to widen Dad’s pool of victims, but it looks like that was exactly what had happened. A male match wouldn’t be a scandal, but it was obvious he’d made assumptions based on my teenage porn collection. “I have no match,” I tried again. “I’ve told you this. Or, if I do have a match, they never get the chance to speak to me. It’s a rather grim thought. I’m surprised you’re pushing it so much.”
“They could still be plural,” Dad hummed, completely ignoring me. “Unusual, and intriguing. How does that even work?”
By having great big orgies in my bed. Which was definitely pooling heat where it had no business pooling when my father was in the room. “That was very rude.” And hot, but there was no way I was saying that.
As usual he brushed off my concerns like they were nothing. “It’s not like we’re in public,” he said as if that had actually made a difference before. “Besides, any employee leaking private conversations is well on their way to getting sued. If you had more than one match I would have seen at least part of a mark by now,” Dad decided. “The thought that your match may never speak to you is new, and brings up some very concerning ideas. You’re right that it is rather morbid. I am not finding you a soulmate just so she can die at our feet.”
“So we’re ignoring the fact that our employees could report you for harassment and continuing with the morbid.” My jaw was so tight the words came out through my teeth. I had to work to unclench my jaw. “Why can’t we just agree not to search?” And did they make painkillers for family-induced migraines?
“Because it’s important. I am going to look into the Digger situation, though. You just leave all of that to me right now and instead you can take over planning your Ball.”
Wait, what? I thought we were talking about soulmates. “What Ball?”
“You don’t want a soulmate search, fine. I’ll accept that. That doesn’t mean I’m going to give up on finding your match. We just finished the Jamison deal and we turned a good profit. It’s a great opportunity for the company to celebrate, just like we always do. It’s going to be bigger this time though. All the employees, their families, and all the employees for the other departments in this building - outreach, operations, IT, security, even the cafeteria crews. Their families too, of course. We’ll get you meeting a bunch of new people without ever announcing it’s an unofficial Ball.”
Deep breaths, Tyr, deep breath in. One, two, three, four, five and release. I still wanted to smack him. Dad wanted me to have the same fairytale-like experience he’d had with mom. Sometimes I envied what him and mom had. Other times I hated his perfect love and how he expected the same of me. “I’m not searching,” I said, trying to keep my tone even.
Dad jerked his head around at my words, and I knew I hadn’t kept all the annoyance out.
“It’s just a party,” Dad said, backtracking. “Maybe we could rent out that club down the street. Wouldn’t even need to consider transportation or parking - we could walk from here.”
For a moment I just let myself breathe and think. What harm could a party really do? Was it really so awful that he wanted me to have a partner? I’d already met almost all of the employees in the building, and their families weren’t complete unknowns. Even if I did happen to meet my match, there wouldn’t be anything odd about them coming to and from the building to visit their relative. It might take some explaining as to why we needed to be discreet, but that could easily be explained with fraternization rules rather than anonymous threats.
Fuck. I hadn’t even met my match and I was already planning how to explain things slowly. My stomach clenched as I realized I’d already decided to indulge Dad. And a silly part of me was hoping that, despite everything, my match would find me. And maybe my words were just a plea to speak up in the loud pulsing beat of the club, or asking for my coat, or showing me to a table, or something equally innocent.
But that wasn’t likely. I’d been to the club multiple times, and I knew most of my employees. If I planned it then Dad couldn’t turn it into a town-wide party, and I could keep it to mostly known factors. We still had the clean up from Lyssa, the news yapping about soulsickness, and the threats pouring in now that people thought we were encouraging false matches.
The office was quiet, and cold. The vent for the air conditioning was right over my head, which was great for the nerves when I was meeting clients, but caused a slight chill to creep up my spine at the moment.
“Tyr, are you okay?” I blinked, and turned towards Dad. “You drifted for a moment there.”
“Headache,” I explained, and it was true even if it wasn’t entirely the cause. Dad’s shoulder’s slumped and his face relaxed. “Don’t worry about it,” I said before he could start trying to baby me more. “I’ll take something before I start making calls for the next opportunities. One of the girls downstairs has a stubborn client who’s not thrilled with our services, and doesn’t want a traditional meeting. They’ve read too much of the news. Still, we have at least three or four projects we can reasonably take on waiting for us. I was thinking maybe the new operations team could handle one of the small jobs without direct oversight. It would let us tackle the PR issue at the same time.”
“Not everything is about work, you know,” Dad pouted.
“Not everything is about soulmates, either,” I countered.
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