Page 22 of Ugly Truths (The Veiled Truths Trilogy #2)

Davey

I lean against Leslie’s desk, watching Silas through the glass wall of his office. He’s in the middle of a meeting with Jeremy, and it’s not going well.

No surprise there .

Silas’s assistant barely glances at me. She knows how these things go better than almost anyone. Amy, our Chief Human Resources Officer, walks by with a cup of coffee, raising it to me in a silent greeting as she trudges back toward her office.

“How long have they been in there?” I ask once Amy is out of earshot.

Leslie sighs and checks the time on her phone. “At least an hour.”

Silas doesn’t drag things out unless there’s a problem. Judging by the way he leans back in his chair with his fingers steepled and eyebrows drawn, there is. Jeremy, on the other hand, has no subtlety whatsoever, throwing his hands around like a cartoon villain.

This all started the second he and William's advisor, Brenden, showed up at the satellite office, claiming William sent them to “help.” Help with what? No idea. Jeremy isn’t trained in any technical field. Brenden is just as useless. They’ve done nothing except get in the way.

Ben, Corey, Luis, and I have been working around the clock on the servers, but we have to drop everything we’re doing when they stop by unannounced.

Although I am confident they can’t discern that what we're working on is far more extensive than a standard audit, it’s putting the guys on edge.

Between the hovering and endless questions, I had to ask Silas to step in and handle him.

By the looks of it, Silas seems closer to throwing his little brother out the window than coming to an understanding.

I cross my arms, shifting my weight to the edge of Leslie’s desk so I’m not in her way any more than I need to be.

Despite Jeremy and Brenden’s constant disruptions, we’ve made progress.

Ben and Corey's skills are miles ahead of anyone I have in-house. If they’re this good under these circumstances, what could they do long-term?

I haven’t asked about their livelihoods outside of this, but I’ll admit I’m tempted.

They could work remotely to keep dissecting our vulnerabilities.

I make a mental note to think about it later.

Luis, though—not a chance. Even if I wanted to make the offer, Silas would kill me in my sleep if I even suggested it.

“How the hell am I supposed to prove myself if you don’t even give me a chance?” Jeremy bellows at Silas.

I wince.

Silas hasn’t budged on his decision not to nominate Jeremy for COO, and honestly?

That impresses me. I’ve always had to walk a fine line with William—he’s my boss, my father-in-law, and a ruthless son of a bitch.

Silas has always been quick to follow his lead, but he’s really started pushing back in the last year or two.

Perhaps it’s the security of having the board’s written approval of the executive transition. Or he's finally sick of his father dictating his every decision. Whatever it is, it makes me happy to see him starting to carve his own path.

Still, I don’t get William’s sudden obsession with the position. For years, there was an unspoken agreement that there was no rush to replace Shaw.

Just the thought of that asshole makes my jaw clench, the pressure so sharp it pulses behind my eyes. Shaw should be rotting in a goddamn cell. Or a landfill. If it were up to me, he would be.

I take a breath and then another, tucking the rage into the neat little box I have to file it into within the corner of my mind to keep it under control.

William had decided to take his time to fill any vacant executive positions after Shaw left. He framed it as an opportunity to see our internal team step up to the challenge and allow current directors to grow into the roles before an eventual nomination.

So, why the sudden change of heart for a position that Jeremy fail in, especially when we already have a Director of Operations who is the logical next choice?

“Looks like things are wrapping up,” Leslie notes, which means Jeremy is about to storm out of Silas’s office like a child who just got told no.

On cue, Jeremy yanks the glass door open and stomps down the hallway, muttering under his breath as he ignores both of us. Leslie doesn’t even blink. She just shakes her head slightly before refocusing on her screen.

Silas remains seated at his desk, pinching the bridge of his nose beneath his glasses, chest rising and falling deeply while he tries to put his remaining patience back into place.

I give him a moment to collect himself before pushing myself off the desk and stepping inside. Silas doesn’t even look up as I shut the door.

“Update?” he barks.

My fingers are unbuttoning the front of my suit jacket as I lower myself into Jeremy’s still-warm, abandoned seat. “On Peter or the servers?”

His eyes narrow at the question. “Start with Peter.”

Testier than usual.

“Nothing good.” I lean back into the chair. “From what we understand, he started a legitimate business in the early 2000s as a PI. The details in the middle aren’t clear, but it’s slowly transformed into whatever it is now. Cillian is having a hard time getting anyone to talk.”

Silas’s jaw tightens. “Why?”

“Why do you think?” I ask, scoffing. “No one wants to be associated with what he does. He’s hired for very specific and illegal purposes.

Most of the information we’re hearing is second-hand through personal assistants or in-home help.

He’s been hired for almost everything you can imagine, and his network is vast.”

“A fixer,” Silas concludes, though his frustration doesn’t wane.

I shrug. “To put it simply, sure.”

“I’m assuming his clientele…”

“Our peers and people similar,” I finish his thought. He nods.

“Do we know where he is?”

“We’re working on that,” I answer, and Silas releases a long, irritated breath.

“Okay. The servers,” he says with a wave of his hand.

“The sandbox environment is holding,” I start. “We’ve been running tests all week, mirroring the encryption structures we’re seeing on the servers.”

Silas waits for the part that actually matters.

“We haven’t triggered any security alerts that would notify William yet. The obfuscation layers are holding, and as long as we keep operations isolated in the sandbox, we don’t anticipate any immediate red flags. Ben and Corey think we’ll be able to deploy soon and start working on decryption.”

Silas nods again. “Do you have any idea how long it’ll take once you deploy?”

“Depends on how deep it goes,” I admit, biting the inside of my cheek. “If the encryption is static, a week or two. If there are adaptive layers—and I’m assuming there are—it could be a while.”

Another deep, exhausted sigh escapes the man sitting across from me. He leans back in his desk chair, pressing into the side of his temple with several fingers. “Fantastic,” he mutters.

He looks like shit. Not in a disheveled, I’ve-had-a-long-meeting way. More of a something-is-eating-me-alive way. His skin is paler than usual, exhaustion etched into his face. His usual perfectly trimmed beard is overgrown, and his suit is slightly wrinkled.

Silas Wells doesn’t do unkempt.

I tip my head slightly. “You want to talk about it?”

“No.”

I raise an eyebrow. “It’s not normal for him to get under your skin like this.”

He says nothing, shows nothing.

I shrug. “You two bicker all the time, and the COO demands aren’t anything new.” I watch him closely. “What’s different this time?”

Silas levels me with a glare. “Fuck off, Davey.”

“Sure,” I say with a smirk. Silence settles over us before I can’t stop myself from adding, “Natalie mentioned you stopped by the house the other day.”

His jaw clenches. “Drop it.”

I hum, dragging out the pause. “She said you spent a lot of time in the guest room.”

The hand lying on the armrest flexes once. “I’m telling you.” His voice is low, controlled. A warning. “Don’t push it.”

Of course, I already know why he showed up at my house.

As if I needed Natalie to tell me after getting the security notification for movement at our front door.

I followed him on our cameras as he went up the stairs, down the hallway, and through the door to the guest room without knocking.

He stayed much longer than was necessary for a friendly conversation before leaving, wide-eyed, and not so much as a goodbye to my wife.

There’s no chance in hell he’d tell me what happened, so I’ve been biding my time, but he’s already unbearable. The shame and anger have been radiating off him in waves for two days straight, and there’s no sign of it letting up.

“You could just let it go,” I suggest. Silas’s gaze snaps up, but his incredulous look doesn’t deter me. “See how things unfold. Let nature take its course. Whatever the saying is. ”

My best friend blinks at me. “You can’t be serious,” he mutters.

I shrug.

It pains me to admit it, but Silas was happier in the spring. Subtly so. Carrying himself a little lighter, not spending every waking second in this damn building. Whether I wanted to acknowledge it then or not, it started when he began dating Elena.

As for Elena, knowing her story makes her choices easier to process and, if I’m being honest, I like her better for it.

She was trying to survive. It doesn’t make anything she did right, but it’s preferable to some of the alternatives I was assuming when Scarlett’s background check came back too clean.

Silas, though, is still wading through it. I barely tolerated Elena when she was Scarlett, so there was no love lost for me, but I’d have to be blind not to see how it crushed him.

My gut says he’d be better off if he let himself have this, even if only for now. Cillian and I agree: without Peter, Elena’s main risk is her technical skills, and right now, she’s being monitored like a prisoner on work release.

My instincts rarely steer me wrong, so I push.

“Holding onto all of that anger isn’t doing you any favors,” I respond, stretching my arm to check the time. “It just keeps you miserable by your own design.”

A spark flares behind his eyes before he barks out a laugh.

“You’ve actually lost your mind,” he says, disbelief dripping from every word. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were conspiring with her.”

His accusation is filled with such disgust that I should probably take offense, but it’s hard to when you’ve known someone for so long.

Silas is many things: a great leader, a good brother, and a loyal friend.

He’ll absorb someone else’s emotions and turn them into action, walk you through hell with logic and understanding.

When it comes to himself, he’s never been able to do the same .

“You think I stayed in that basement for two days interrogating her for my own health?” I ask. “Sure, it was for Wells, but it was also for you. I needed to know everything I could because if you were going to keep destroying yourself over this woman, I had to at least see if she was worth it.”

Silas doesn’t say anything, but I can see the tension roll through him.

“I understand her now,” I go on. “Maybe too much, to be honest. She told me things I didn’t even ask for that make a hell of a lot more sense now that I’ve had time to think about them. That’s why I let Natalie move her in.”

The muscle in his jaw flutters at the mention of the sore subject.

“I didn’t like it at first either, but Nat was probably onto something. Elena’s done everything right; answered every question without hesitation or attitude, kept her head down, shown remorse, and hasn’t stepped a toe out of line yet.”

I push off the desk, standing slowly. “I’m not saying I trust her, but I’m leaning toward believing her.”

Silas looks at me like I’ve just punched a hole through his chest.

I could leave with just that. Maybe I should. But he always does better when I give him one last shove off the proverbial cliff and force him to figure out how the hell he’s going to land.

My movements to button my suit jacket are intentionally slow. “There’s no reason you can’t let yourself be happy. For whatever reason, she makes you happy, so why torture yourself when you just have it? She’d let you.”

I’m already turning toward the door. “It’s okay to change your mind,” I say over my shoulder and let him sit with it. Silas never lets something go once it gets under his skin.

And I just gave him plenty to think about.