“I miss you,” she breathed. And then she was gone.

I miss you. What the fuck was that? Why on earth had she left me with that to chew on? She missed me. What a load of crap. She missed me while she was flying out to Baltimore to plan her new life without me? Yeah, I’m sure she cried for hours because of that.

She was lucky that that was the last thing she said to me instead of the first or that whole conversation in my office would have gone a lot differently than it had.

What the hell was I supposed to do with that? She would have been more merciful just jabbing needles in my eyeballs or slapping me upside the head with a cartoon-like anvil to bring my headache back. Because, thank God, it had faded shortly after she had left, leaving me with only an empty, vague phantom ache.

***

Over the next week, as I continued to put in long hours, I rarely saw her again in person, but her presence seemed to be all over the place online. Some of the bigger blogs were making comments about the lawsuit and feeding the rumors of a congressional hearing on the addictive properties of online video games. They were getting some blowback from Girl Geek in the comments. And despite her admission that she cared more about chainmail bikinis than lawsuits, she was rebutting their arguments on her blog.

When she’d first started her temp job at Draco, we’d unofficially agreed that she would not blog about the game, as it went against the nondisclosure policy that all employees were required to adhere to. But how could I call her on this? She was sticking herself out there, getting no small amount of heat for it, and doing it to defend me.

And I’d bet she did it without ever realizing that I’d notice. But I did. I noticed everything. She’d even cut out her fun and snarky commentary on Dragon Epoch. Instead her blog posts emphasized how almost every standard fantasy roleplaying game was misogynistic. She was getting crap for it and I took note to keep my eye on that because I knew that women tended to be susceptible to cyberbullying in the online gaming world.

It was kind of her to stick her neck out for me and it forced me to reconsider my stance on the quest. Maybe she was right. Maybe I should give up a few of my secrets. But even the thought of it was painful. Those secrets were like my armor, were what separated me from the bumps and miseries of the world. How could I surrender them so easily? In The Art of War, the Master never discussed terms for surrender. And I lived by his code now.

The latter half of November approached and finally, it was the weekend before we were scheduled to ship out for DracoCon. As the ultimate team-building exercise—and as a little treat for my employees, given their hard work on convention preparation—we took the day off to fight our epic rematch war against the Blizzard employees. That horde had barely beaten us last year and they had payback coming. They’d been training, too, so it wasn’t going to be an easy fight.

But Heath, Jordan and several of my other squad leaders were pros and knew their shit. We’d been working out strategy for months, and they’d be leading the regular employees in their maneuvers. And we knew the twenty-acre partially wooded course we’d be fighting on.

The teams would be participating in three different scenarios. Two shorter ones and then a long one that had been intricately designed. We had approximately three hours for each setup with short breaks and meals in between.

It was an extremely hot, dry day. So in the parking lot, before we got started, we passed around the bottles of water, sunscreen and geared up.

Emilia showed up with Heath, pulling on one of his spare facemasks—which was far too big for her. And she hefted a gun that fit her much better—presumably one that she had purchased for herself. She wore sensible clothing—jeans and long sleeves covered by a denim jacket to protect her from the hard paintballs. Heath had likely informed her how much paintballs could hurt. Even though she was in an old T-shirt and frayed jeans, I couldn’t take my eyes off her—the way the shirt stretched across her breasts, how her jeans hugged her waist, her round ass. That weird white hair was pulled back into a ponytail and capped with a denim hat. Even with the stupid hair, she was hot.

She didn’t look up as I watched her fiddling to adjust the mask so it would fit her. With a shake of my head and a reminder that I had to get my mind back in the game, I turned my eyes away, checking my equipment and trying to focus on the tasks at hand.

The rest of our team used rented equipment or spare weapons loaned out from our more serious paintballers. And as a gaming company, we were in no shortage of paintball geeks.

I was talking to my majors—Heath among them—while we were lotioning up. Fortunately, we were mostly covered—some heavily so, fearing the painful paintballs. As usual, the regulars just wore camo.