Of Kings and Aces

39| Dead Weight

I woke up at three in the morning shivering from the cold blast of the air conditioner. It was set at eighteen degrees and was directed at me. Chino was also balled on the couch, hugging himself to stay warm. I adjusted the temperature and fan speed, but I still could not get back to sleep after twenty minutes. 

Frustrated, I took a warm shower and stepped out fully awake with a clearer and much active mind. Chino was sleeping soundlessly, so even though he was barely six feet away from me, I just shot him a message that I was going to the IT floor to work on the case.

The lights on the floor were mostly off, except for a few sconce lights in the hallway lit up few and far between. The rubber soles of my shoes softly squeaked on the tiles cutting through the silence. The IT floor had an Industrial office design with many open workspaces and a few private areas, two of which were Bart's and Jacob's offices.

As I closed in on Jacob's office, the light on his computer shone through the frosted glass, and someone was in front of it basing on the shadow that was moving. I stopped a few feet away in the shadows so as not to be seen. The screen changed color and light intensity a few times, signifying that whoever was in front of the computer was working on it. 

Suddenly, the light turned blue and shut off, sending me in a scurry to hide under the working table closest to me, whose boards went all the way down to the floor.

The door swung open, and I held my breath. Something fell on the floor, but the person quickly picked it up, and the footsteps moved further away. However, something crawled on my arm, making me gasp and hit my hand on the underside of the table as I swatted whatever was on my arm. That made a loud thud, and the squeaking of the person's soles abruptly stopped.

"Hello? Is anybody there?" His baritone voice echoed on the empty floor. Not satisfied, he walked back and called again, accent thick and unmistakable. "Who's there?"

He was cautious; I felt the tension and hesitation in the air. As he moved closer, I once again held my breath, cursing the insect and myself internally. His footfalls stopped just between the door and the desk where I was. I almost jumped out of my skin when he spoke again.

"Ace?" The way he said my name was soft and painful. Did he hear my heart thudding? Because the sound was deafening! I searched the floor around to see if anything had given me away.

"Hey, what are you doing here? Who are you?" another man with a firm voice called as the urgent sound of his heels clattered on the floor. A beam of light shone against the wall with the shadow of a person.

"Hi Tim, it's me. Jacob," he said indifferently, his voice suddenly void of emotions.

"Mr. Kingston, you're doing overtime again? You've been here every day. Is what you're doing really so important?" Tim questioned. You could tell he was surprised and also in awe of Jacob's diligence. They started walking away.

"Yeah, my job depends on it," he chuckled. "Hey, Tim, is anyone else here?"

"Mr. Acebedo is on the upper floor with a guest." The squeaking footsteps stopped.

"He has a guest at this hour?"

"No, the man has been here since half-past nine."

"Anyone new?"

"Nah, that friend of his comes here often."

Their voices finally disappeared. I waited a little longer to be sure he was out of the floor before crawling out. My eyes had already adjusted in the darkness, so it was easy for me to walk straight to the office without hitting anything.

After the start-up screen, it went straight to the desktop, skipping the sign-in and password step. Except for that, nothing seems to have been changed. As I worked through the breach, I found the detours and other roadblocks that he had set up, as well as the data cache that I suppose should have been hidden.

Did he really forget to erase the cache, or was it deliberately left there? My heart raced, and I felt cold sweat trickle down my freshly showered back. I frantically checked the history, double-checked, triple-checked. I wasn't hallucinating or imagining things. What I saw was real.

He had been through the entire system, and he had been feeding our firm's data to Beau's company.

Fucking son.of.a.bitch. Better words escaped me. In fact, words escaped me altogether.

My heart sank to the bottom of my feet, all the way down to the core of the earth. I did not know what to feel. I felt horribly sick, and shock was an understatement.

'Disappointed' did not do justice to the indescribable crushing pain of betrayal. He already stabbed me in the heart with a kris dagger before Christmas, and now he was twisting it, watching me as I pretended not to feel the pain.

I think I was going insane because all logic escaped me. There was this little voice in my head, that tiny nagging voice or my gut that was telling me not to jump into conclusions and to hear him out. And despite everything, I was willing to listen.

Perhaps I wanted all of this to be untrue so bad that I was willing to grab on to any sliver of hope just to prove myself wrong. I was sure that if it were some other employee, I would be livid, and I would not hesitate to call them up at this hour to fire them.

But I could not do it to Jacob. I could not do it to myself.

I slowly exited the program with trembling hands, shut down the computer, and stared at it for another half hour until Chino called to tell me he was leaving.

The sky outside was beginning to lighten, heralding the break of dawn. Soon, the cleaning services would arrive to clean the place up. They did this the morning of the first Saturday each month. Sighing heavily, I didn't notice how heavy my chest was until I tried standing up and could not.

There was once again a war between my logic and my gut, and thank god my heart was dead. Otherwise, I would be more devastated than I already was. I knew then the stupid thing in my chest died because I was carrying its dead weight. However, it seemed that the weight on my chest was a hundred times heavier than a ton of bricks.

Does a dead heart weigh that much?

Because dammit, Jacob Kingston, what the fuck are you doing?

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A/N

This chapter is really short, especially since my chapters are quite lengthy.

It's because split up some chapters' contents and combined them with others to make the flow smoother. And so I ended up with this surprisingly short chapter. However, the details here are still necessary to build Ace's distrust, hence, I didn't want to delete it completely.