Page 67 of Her Unflinching Warrior (Omega Sky)
“He starts out all nice and complimentary, tells me how impressed he is with my coding and hardware skills on his proprietary property.”
He looked down at Jada who was hanging on his every word. “I have no idea what the word proprietary means, but I can tell the hammer is about to drop so I thank him, all polite-like.”
“Then he asks me if I ever got written permission to work on Streetgamezzz prototypes. Again, with a word that I didn’t understand, and I’m beginning to sweat. I didn’t understand prototypes, but I sure as hell understood written permission, and I didn’t have that.”
“At this point, I’m all ‘yes sir, no sir,’ and saying anything I think will get me out of trouble, and he’s still grinning at me, which just scares me even more.”
“Shit, who was this guy?” Jada asked. “He sounds like a complete prick coming down on a fourteen-year-old.”
“His name was Kendall Douglas.” Gideon sat up on the bed and rearranged the pillows, then he pulled Jada into a sitting position against the headboard.
“You just can’t help but be a Neanderthal, can you?” she said with a cheeky grin. “Here I am, mad at you, and you’re just moving me about like some kind of doll.”
“I told you the story was long, and I wanted to make you comfortable.” He smiled in return.
She shook her head in exasperation. “Okay, I’m comfortable now, please proceed.” Gideon took it as a good sign that her eyes were twinkling.
He thought back to that meeting that changed the trajectory of his life. To this day he still hated Kendall Douglas with a passion. It didn’t matter that the bastard had been stuck serving a seventeen-year sentence in prison; as far as he was concerned, it hadn’t been nearly long enough. Occasionally, there were times he thought of the man and he could almost put it behind him, knowing that he had to be old and pitiful now. But only sometimes.
“I didn’t get it at the time, Jada, but I was miles further along than anyone in his development team, I mean by years.”
Jada laughed. “Go figure,” she teased.
“What can I say, I liked to play video games.” Gideon shrugged. “Anyway, after forty-five minutes this guy picks up his phone and he has two guys in uniform come into his office. Looking back on it, I know it’s just his security flunkies, but at the time I’m damn near wetting my pants, but trying to act all tough.”
“Jesus.” Jada sat up even more until she was almost face-to-face with Gideon. “That was a total dick move. Then what happened?”
“He looks at me and says he has no choice but to press charges. I might have done some innovative things with his product, but it was entirely unauthorized, and if he let me get away with it, what’s to stop someone else from doing the same thing?”
“But he comes up with some kind of solution, doesn’t he?” Jada guesses grimly.
“You got that right. I’m begging by this point. I would have sold my soul not to go to jail. My mom was working as a secretary at the church, and she was the volunteer choir director for God’s sake—she’d die if her son went to jail. Plus, I gotta take care of things at home. It was really bad back then.”
Jada nodded.
“So, there I am, a skinny, sniveling mess, begging for my life, and this asshole has me just where he wants me.”
Jada let out a low growl and Gideon couldn’t help but grin.
“Then he tilts his head at me and says ‘but maybe.’ That’s what he says. ‘But maybe.’ He throws me that lifeline like he’d just thought of it. I grabbed a hold of that like you wouldn’t believe. I begged him to tell me what I needed to do, that I’d do anything. The asshole knew he had me.”
“He had to have been licking his chops.”
“For real,” Gideon agreed. He got up from the bed. Even thinking about that conversation over twenty years later still got him edgy. He began to pace.
“So, Kendall Douglas tells me that if I come to work for him and sign an NDA and a non-compete, he can arrange for me not to go to jail. Again, the only thing I understand is that I have to sign papers that will make it so I won’t go to prison. I’m all in. What’s more, I get to actually work on stuff that I want to do. But I tell him I have to work around school and ask my parents.”
Gideon rubbed the top of his head. “The bastard laughed. He said that wouldn’t be necessary. He would help me get out of schoolwork, and he would arrange it so that I wouldn’t be living with my parents. I would have to move to San Francisco and devote all of my time to Streetgamezzz.”
Jada looked confused.
Gideon nodded. “I see how you’re looking. That’s how I was looking, too. My parents weren’t going to let me give up school and go to work for some company in San Francisco. I was only fourteen. But he laid it out for me. The bastard already knew that my dad had been badly injured at the body shop, and we were barely holding onto our house. He knew that the Crips were trying to recruit my little brother Mikey. He knew we were going to end up homeless. He knew everything.”
“How?”
“Again, in hindsight, I can see it perfectly. He’d spent a lot of time investigating me before he’d made any move to confront me.” Gideon sat back down on the side of the bed, and Jada pushed over next to him. She wrapped her arm around his shoulder.
“Tell me what happened next.” She whispered the question into the side of his neck.
