Rogue Descendant (Nikki Glass) by Jenna Black Read Free Book Online

distracted, like only a fraction of his attention is actually focused on whoever he’s talkingto. I suspect when he heard the knock on his door, he assumed it was Anderson, and finding me there threw him for a bit of a loop. His shoulders hunched as if he were expecting a blow, and his gaze dropped to the floor.
    He was nervous with everyone, but more so with me, the newcomer to the house. I wondered if I should have explained what was going on via email instead of coming to his suite, but it was too late now.
    “Hi, Leo. I’m sorry to bother you so early in the morning. I hope I didn’t wake you.” I knew I hadn’t, but it seemed like the polite thing to say, and I found Leo’s nerves and awkwardness contagious.
    “I was awake,” he told my left shoulder. “The European markets start opening at four.”
    Geez, and I’d thought I was an early riser. I’d never known anyone else in the house was up at this hour, which I guessed meant Leo didn’t venture out of his rooms in the morning. Actually, Leo didn’t venture out of his rooms much at all. Sometimes he had to be reminded to step away from his computers and eat. It didn’t seem like much of a life to me, but what do I know?
    With anyone else, I probably would have tried a little small talk before launching into my request, but I figured Leo wouldn’t blame me—hell, he probably wouldn’t even notice—if I skipped the social niceties.
    “I forwarded you an email,” I told him. “It’s supposedly from Konstantin. I wonder if you’d be able to trace it or something.” I honestly didn’t think Konstantin was stupid enough to send me a trail of breadcrumbs that would lead right to him, but I figured it would be foolish not to at least check it out. Not to mention that Konstantin was centuries old and might not be as computer literate as a modern man.
    “I’ll see what I can do.”
    Leo didn’t beckon me to follow as he retreated into his room, but he didn’t close the door, either. I assumed that was an invitation to come in, so I stepped inside.
    All of the suites Anderson’s Liberi inhabited consisted of two rooms. For most of us, one of those rooms was the bedroom, and one was some version of a sitting room. I supposed with his fanatical attachment to the stock market and his lack of socialization, a sitting room would have been useless for Leo. Instead, the first room of his two-room suite was what I imagined the inside of a NASA control room might look like, only less tidy.
    A huge L-shaped desk took up about half the room, and practically every inch of that desk was covered with computer equipment, bristling with tangled cords and surge protectors. I saw laptops and desktops, Macs and PCs, shiny new machines and old clunkers that looked like they were held together by duct tape. There were monitors sprinkled here and there on the desk, but there was also a bank of them mounted on the wall. Disassembled units spewing spare parts were tucked under the desk and pushed up against the other walls, and a freestanding air conditioner blasted cold air into the room even though it was January.
    Leo must have noticed me staring at the air conditioner.
    “The computers generate a lot of heat,” he explained. “If I didn’t keep the air conditioner going, my equipment would overheat.”
    He plopped down into a rolling chair and used the edge of the desk to pull himself over in front of one of the computers. His fingers moved lightning fast over the keyboard. Whatever he was using as an email reader wasn’t anything I’d seen before, and I wondered if it was something Leo had created himself. There were no pretty icons or neatly labeled buttons, and instead of tooling around with a mouse or track pad, Leo was typing into a command window. He paused practically midkeystroke and glanced over at one of the other monitors. He frowned and wheeled himself over, hit a couple of keys, then returned to the email.
    “You’re really into multitasking,