William Truman: April 24th, 20XX

The glass doors of my office gently tapped against the wall, and Nikolas confidently strode into my office. He stepped over the piles of reference books I kept by the bookcase and smoothly maneuvered around the many obstacles that often took me down on my way to my desk.

He stiffly put a bright tablet onto my desk and followed it up with a paper version of the same information. Nikolas hated hearing excuses for not receiving information over the company network, so he always prepared a hard copy of whatever information he felt was apt for one to know.

He was also very paranoid about technology and loved making paper backups of everything. I figured there must have been a cyber attack at his old company, but he never confirmed nor denied it.

“This is all the information I could find on the kid Mr. Hall was with.”

He looked too calm and collected for someone that had worked overnight alongside myself and Aleka. Well, he always looked collected, but I didn’t like how I looked when I compared our images in the reflections of the glass walls that surrounded us.

I took a long swig of my coffee and staunchly refused to take my attention off the three screens of information that I already had in front of me.

“I don’t really have the time to read over your beautifully put together presentation. Just read out the most important parts.”

He stared at me with an overall blank expression, but I could see a vein tighten on his neck as he debated responding to my request. Technically, asking him to put together a folder of information was asking a lot of someone with a similarly high title as mine, but telling him to summarize it and read it aloud was downright asking him to act like my assistant.

Well, I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t trust that he still felt too grateful about me recommending him for the job to punch me in the face. There was also the fact that even if I’d read over the whole thing, he would still have given me a verbal summary.

Overall, telling him to do that was just my way of annoying him for the day.

“His full name is Jake Kiorn Addams. Eighteen years old as of this year and is a budding star in the track and taekwondo world. He lives on the school campus but has a family within the city; those being his stepmother who is currently 27 and his two step siblings. His father passed the year his second step sibling was born on a military mission in the south, I didn’t have much luck in finding details. The stipend given to the families of deceased family members is about to run out so Addams has expressed a high interest in doing jobs that make a lot of money, rather than things that might further his career in his fields.”

The age of his stepmother caught my attention.

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“27… that’s only about nine years apart from him.”

Nikolas nodded but didn’t contribute any comments.

“Addams divides his money between helping his stepmother and an account he created for his university funds. He doesn’t seem to have a very active social life for his age, but his clean reputation has landed him a fair amount of advertising deals within high-school and university demographic centered brands. He keeps a decent grade average in school, just enough to be able to continue with his activities and overall seems clean.”

I took a better look at the picture Nikolas had found of him and cased it over from the company’s perspective. After all, that was the main agenda of Nikolas and I’s secret meeting.

When I had seen him for the first time, he had just gone through an armed robbery and had been hurt by his friend; he naturally hadn’t looked great. But seeing him all made up in the picture Nikolas had found made me see why Nikolas wanted to rope him into the company.

He was dressed in bright, youthful clothes and had a stunning smile as he hopped on a skateboard. It was a generic picture by all means, and the brands that had paid him to take the images shone brightly as well under the artificial sun, but he looked good.

“The only thing to really worry about is his military background. Although he moved here when he was ten, he was enrolled in a full military program, just like his father had been. He is still considered a citizen of the south.”

“Well, that’s not really an issue. In fact, wouldn’t that be better for promoting him if we ever branch out to the south?”

Nikolas nodded, but his mouth stayed in a flat line.

“It could also put us in a tough position if anything were to happen with our government and theirs.”

“True. Why don’t you run it by Aleka and see what she thinks. She’s better at these things than I am.”

Nikolas agreed a little too quickly for my pride to accept, but it was the truth, so I couldn’t rightfully lash out. I’d just get back at him for this later.

“I wanted you to help me put together a deal to push him as our newest face before the company’s big image reform period ends.

Sir Hall seems to be interested in all sorts of entertainment fields, so I put together a proposal to buy out a small team from another company; all we lacked was a proper name to attach to them.”

“And you wanted one of those names to be Jake’s.”

“Yes. This way we could naturally incorporate him closer to sir Hall.”

“You also want to give him something to lose if he doesn’t keep his mouth shut.”

Even though the kid’s resume was great, and he seemed to be a decent person, this was the true reason he had come up in conversation.

No matter how close he currently thought he was to Finley or how loyal he fancied himself, it only took one slip of the tongue, the right conversation partner, or a high enough offer for the secret to blow out.

That absolutely, most surely couldn’t happen.

Although Finley had entrusted it all to me, transferring company stocks from those old criminals to new prospective buyers was still delicate. We had been doing great so far, and Finley’s almost aggressive hiring of new, competent people gave the outsiders hope, but any negative news could tank us right into a lot of trouble.

“Yeah. It sounds great. Let’s put it all together into a proposal and put it forward to Finley.”

Nik turned a bit uncomfortable at putting forward our project to Finley. After all, the kid was adamant about keeping his company life and outside life separate. It would likely be a hard sell to convince him that this was for the best, but it was something that we had to do.

I also had to talk him into privately finding a doctor if he didn’t already have one. Even though I didn’t want news of this getting out, I also couldn’t responsibly let Finley out on the world as a danger to himself and others.

Even as much as we would encourage Jake to stick around him, there was only so much a high schooler could do.

“Don’t worry about it Nik. I’ll take lead in convincing him. Just get all the details sealed tight.”