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“On everything I should have never done it on.” Dom waved one hand around and pushed the other into his dark hair as he walked back to the small ship’s cockpit to drop himself into the pilot’s seat. “Everything in our defense division.”
Garin tried to absorb that thought and its implications, but he kept getting stuck on the absurd magnitude of the statement. “You deleted it?”
“Yes.” Dom leaned back in the chair, hand still in his hair.
“All of it?”
“Yes.” Dom tugged one last lock of his hair, then let his arm fall limply over the armrest.
“That doesn’t—You can’t just—” Garin shook his head. “There are backups of backups?—”
“Not anymore, there aren’t.” Dom tapped his fingers against the chair. “That weapons data forms the financial core of our entire corporation.” His head fell to the side and his lips twisted as he looked at the floor. “Formed. It formed the financial core of our entire corporation. For security’s sake, it was only stored in a few places.” He met Garin’s eyes again. “And now it’s stored in none of them.”
Garin stared at him.
He assumed those few places had been the Turner Estate and home ships and the labs Dom had traveled between so fast he must have shot up whole gallons of high-speed chemicals to survive the pressure of the g’s.
But what Dom was saying was massive beyond comprehension.
“Dominic.” Garin sat in the copilot’s chair and spun it to face Dom. “You’re saying that all the research you and your teams have done on weapons and other defense systems for the Turner Corporation in the past several years, including blueprints and schematics, the primary product of your family’s business, is gone? You destroyed it?”
Dom turned his chair to face Garin head on, their knees bumping. He looked into Garin’s eyes, his own blue ones wide but clear. “Yes.”
Garin’s heart stopped in his chest. “Holy shit, Dominic.”
Holy shit. Why did the Turner boys always fall off the deep end on his watch?
He blew out a breath, feeling light-headed as his heart resumed beating. “Why?”
“Because the world is better off without it.” Dominic shrugged his shoulders up high. He picked up an old-style paper notebook from the console and set it in his lap, folding and unfolding the worn corner of his current page. “Because I never should have done it in the first place, and it was my responsibility to undo it.”
“Okay…” Garin didn’t feel like that particularly answered his question.
“You’re wondering why I suddenly give a shit now.” Dom folded the corner of the page in on itself until it wouldn’t fold any farther.
“I mean…yeah, I am.” Garin didn’t disagree with Dom’s reasoning about the world being better off without his work. His time in the military hadn’t made him fond of the implements of war. Quite the opposite. But he hadn’t realized Dom had been on the precipice of such a moral reckoning. “I know you’ve regretted the fear gas you sold the Klah’Eel, but I didn’t know you’d been planning such drastic recourse.”
Dom sighed and dropped his chin, halting his paper folding. “I hadn’t been.”
“This was a spur-of-the-moment thing, then?” Garin kept his tone light while internally panicking. Dom had just blown up his entire life. If this had been purely impulsive?—
“No, of course not.” Dom scowled and waved his hand in a typical Turner move. “I carefully considered my actions before I took them. But the catalyst was unexpected.”
Garin remembered what Patrick had told him when he’d returned from the Dead Zone. “The security breach? Was that real or was that a lie?”
“That was real.” Dom nodded and started unfolding his paper again. “I found evidence of Wate Group espionage in our databases. Directories that shouldn’t have been accessed in orders that didn’t make any sense. My first thought, of course, was that I couldn’t let anyone steal that data from us.” Dom tore the page out of his notebook and folded it into smaller and smaller triangles. “But then I realized that I didn’t want them to not have that data because I wanted to protect the Turner edge…” Dom blushed as though admitting to something he should be ashamed of. “I didn’t want them to have that data because I didn’t want anyone to have it.”
Pride swelled Garin’s chest, and he squeezed Dom’s knee. “You didn’t want it to hurt anyone anymore.”
Dom curled in on himself, his voice coming out small. “I don’t want to be the bad guy anymore.”
“Oh Dom, you were never the bad guy.” Garin grabbed Dom’s shoulder and pulled him into his chest.
“Yes, I was,” Dom argued, but didn’t fight Garin’s hug. “I was the bad guy. I am the bad guy. I’m not saying I get a clean slate because I’m doing the bare minimum of cleaning up my own mess but, I just—” Dom’s voice cracked and Garin squeezed him tighter. “I want to do the good thing. Oliver—fucking Oliver—did and now he’s…”
Loved. Garin rubbed Dom’s back and propped his chin on the top of Dom’s head. Oliver was loved. Not only by an amazing man, but by friends, acquaintances, and even some strangers now. Not that Oliver didn’t have enemies, he did. And plenty of people would never forgive him for the things he had done. But plenty of people had, and plenty of people loved and liked him for the other things he’d done.
Oliver was loved in a way Dom wasn’t and never had been. He’d gotten out. The irony of which didn’t escape Garin since Oliver had always been the more ruthless of the pair.
