After about an hour, Jordan walked in, giving his usually brief knuckle-rap on my door. I put down the paper I was glancing at and sat back, focusing my full attention on him. He looked—shell-shocked and a little terrified. I frowned. Jordan had been my closest friend during my brief stint in college and when I’d needed a business guy for my fledgling gaming company, I’d known he’d be perfect. He’d actually finished his degree at Caltech, whereas I’d dropped out to move to San Diego in order to work for Sony.

“Hey,” I said. “There you are. I was wondering if you were going to come in and announce your resignation or something.”

He frowned, looking halfway between being pissed off and scared shitless. What the hell? Was he that upset that I was back?

“Good to have you back. I’m really shitty at your job,” he said. He creased the paper he held—folding it in half, then into quarters, then eighths. He actually looked—nervous. I’d been joking before, but maybe he really was going to announce his resignation. Shit.

He exhaled loudly and sank into the chair opposite me, his face set in grim lines. “I would have come over earlier, but I’ve been screwing up the courage to have to be the one to drop this on you.”

Uh-oh. I straightened my shoulders and braced myself, putting my hands together on the desk in front of me. “What do you need to tell me?”

Jordan blinked and pinched the bridge of his nose. I waited, studying him. He was the Don Juan of the office—half the employees were in love with him while he failed to acknowledge them. He dated models and aspiring actresses, mostly. Whenever I had a thing at my house or we had a social function to attend, he always had a different woman on his arm. He changed women like a Hollywood starlet changed designer gowns.

But today he was drawn, pale, his hair disheveled like he’d run his hands through it a few times. Basically he looked like shit.

“Fuck, Adam. It’s your first day back. I don’t know how to tell you this.”

I took a deep breath and waited.

“There’s a report on the news. Last night a twenty-year-old kid in New Jersey committed a murder-suicide. Drove over to his girlfriend’s house and blew her away, then shot himself. Early this morning, East Coast time, the family released a statement to the press. The parents are blaming his actions on his ‘debilitating addiction to Dragon Epoch.’ There’re rumors buzzing of a lawsuit.”

I shifted in my chair and rubbed my jaw, looking out the window for a long moment, my mind racing. “We’ll need to call the lawyer—”

“I just asked Maggie to contact Joseph’s office. We can make it a conference call if you want. We also have to get our liability insurance guys involved pretty quickly too. I’ve also pulled this kid’s log-in records and just about everything we know about access to his account. Someone—I’m guessing it was the girlfriend—used his account information to log in last weekend and destroy or sell off all of his items. Some of it was rare shit that he’d been working on for months. He petitioned customer service for a restoration, but we gave him our standard answer.”

Fuck. The room spun for only a moment before I shot out of my chair and started pacing. There was a standard procedure in these cases, because we’d had so much trouble with people exploiting the system by cloning items and equipment and selling them off for real money on online auction sites. We didn’t allow restoration of equipment that had been deleted using legitimate credentials to log in. Hacking was another issue entirely.

“So when CS investigated his petition, they found no evidence of hacking? Contact the rep who spoke with him. He’ll need to make a statement.”

Jordan leaned forward, grabbed an empty notepad off of my desk and pulled a pen from his pocket, scribbling fiercely. He was left-handed, so he always wrote with his hand cranked around at an odd angle.

I rubbed my forehead, thinking. Now I was prowling the edge of the office that looked out onto an interior atrium garden. My windows were completely tinted on the outside, allowing total privacy while I could stare out over the greenery and attempt to get some sense of inner calm. That wasn’t going to happen this morning.

“We need to meet with PR. Close down the external lines. Put up an automated answering system. No one talks to anyone until they are trained on how to deal with this.”

“Should I try to contact an outside provider who specializes in events like this?”

I blinked. “Do some research. Come up with a list. We can discuss it. And do it quickly.”