Sakura Keeping her Favorite Employee Busy...

[The following scene occurs prior to book 1.]

Sakura arrived at the office an hour early, though she didn't actually enter the place. The smoothie shop across the street was her usual haunt, and she checked her emails from there while waiting for a certain someone to arrive.

He arrived early too, though not quite as early as her. Sakura held up her phone, zooming in all the way as he exited.

Click.

She snapped a quick picture, then examined it closer. Jeans and a T-Shirt. Not her favorite outfit on him. Perhaps she could start enforcing company dress code a little more stringently. He looked very nice the one time she'd managed to get him into a suit.

Sakura took the picture and saved it to cloud storage from her phone. It, like thousands of others, went into a very large folder called 'Photos of Carter.'

Sakura had never thought of herself as the stalker type. Or the shy type for that matter.

It had started in college. Carter had been attending the state school next to her private university, and she'd bumped into him while he'd been working at her favorite smoothie shop.

If that had been it, Sakura would have paid him no further mind. But a week or so later a bad run-in with someone who knew how wealthy and connected her father really was went south. Things could have ended badly for her if Carter hadn't been in the right place at the right time.

A huge thug covered in tattoos from his fingers to his face jumped out at her while she was exiting the shop with a smoothie in hand. He leered at her, waving a gun in one hand and grabbing for her with the other.

"Ah... the Miyamoto brat. The boss wants a word with you!" the thug said, reaching arm moments away from trapping her in his grasp. But his hand never reached her. The door next to them swung open, and Carter accidentally bumped into him with a bag of trash from the shop.

The encounter had happened between the smoothie shop and the dumpster, which would normally be the perfect place to kidnap someone, except those few times a worker was dumping trash.

"Watch it, kid!" the thug turned his gun on Carter, but before he could fire Carter swatted him in the side with the bag of trash he was carrying. Chunks of melted ice cream and yogurt sprayed all over the thug and threw his aim wide. His gun went off harmlessly into the air.

Meanwhile, Carter jumped back and reached under his sweatshirt.

"Ahh, apocalypse raider! It's started already! The end of the world!" Carter shouted as he brought out his own firearm.

He pointed, aimed, and fired six shots from his own gun at the thug in quick succession. The aspiring kidnapper was full of holes before he could even wipe the smoothie juice out of his eyes.

"Whew. Glad I got that concealed carry permit." Carter stuffed a handgun back into his pants.

He looked around, not seeing anyone, including Sakura who was standing right behind him.

"Gotta get to my safe house before things go bad!" Carter said.

"T-thank you for saving me! That man is yakuza and is a hitman for the... wait, why are you running?" Sakura yelled, but it was too late. Carter sprinting away at top speed.

A lot more happened that day, including having to explain the dead body to the police. Thankfully, it was a fairly cut and dry self defense case when the dead guy had a history of gang violence and she had her father's multi-million dollar lawyers. They were able to sweep the whole incident under the rug, not just for her, but for Carter too, even though he wasn't aware of it.

In fact, he didn't seem to remember the incident at all. Once he realized his panicked apocalypse worries were unfounded, he must have buried all thoughts of the evidence so deeply that not even he remembered what happened. It was probably a secret he thought he was going to take to his grave.

But Sakura did, and the more she thought about what happened, the more she realized Carter had just saved her life. That yakuza gangster would have kidnapped her, and she would have been very lucky if that was all that happened. Her father wasn't well liked in many circles, and using her to get to him would have been an obvious ploy.

"It was meant to be..." Sakura said, running her fingers across Carter's image, displayed on her phone. If only she'd just asked him on a date years ago. She wasn't sure if he even remembered that class they'd shared together.

She'd learned a lot about him since then, though. The young man she'd taken an interest in was fastidious about having a variety of weapons near him. He also purchased an inordinate amount of survival supplies. It was like he was prepared for the world to end at any moment.

Sakura wasn't quite sure what his deal was there, but it had saved her life once already, so who was she to question it?

Mind returning to the present, she finished her smoothie and entered the office. She'd given Carter a key early on, so he often opened the doors and turned the lights on for everyone.

"Hey Sakura," Carter nodded to her, already sitting at his computer cubical, which was strategically positioned opposite the window to Sakura's office.

"Carter." Sakura nodded at him with what she hoped was a very boss-like smile. A bit disinterested, but not so much as to be cold.

"Once in her office, she sat down to figure out what she was going to do for the day. She'd already completed most of the days work while drinking her morning smoothie, so the rest of the day was hers to do with as she pleased.

With that in mind... she rummaged around in her drawers for a pair of scissors, then reached down and snipped one cable trailing up to her computer. The machine sputtered and rapidly died.

Once she was certain it was broken, she slapped her mouse against the desk, let out a low growl of frustration, and pretended to be upset.

Carter turned to look at her, and she met his gaze.

"Carter, my computer isn't working. Could you help me?" Sakura asked.

As he had many times before, Carter walked over to her office and started working on her computer. Sakura backed up to get out of his way and pretended to be scrolling through notifications on her phone, but in actuality the only thing open was her camera app.

"Huh. The computer isn't powering on at all. Weird," Carter said as he pushed buttons. "Let me check to see if everything's plugged in correctly. Maybe something wiggled loose."

He circled behind the computer, but found nothing. Eventually, he scooted down and started messing with the plugs underneath. He bent over, crawling under her desk to find the problem.

Click. Click.

More photos for the collection. Sakura quickly uploaded them to her cloud storage.

"Ha! Here's the problem. You must have run over this cable with your chair or something. It's cut clean through."

"Oh no..." Sakura said, hand to her lips. "Can you fix it?"

"I'll just take an extra power cable from one of the computers nobody's using. I'll be right back."

Carter left. While he was gone, Sakura realized this problem was going to be solved a little too quickly, so she brought the scissors out again and snipped a few more cables. She also loosened just about every connector, and made sure the unplugged power strip was hidden behind her bookshelf. That ought to keep him busy for a few hours.

Carter seemed a bit flustered when he came back with a new cable and that didn't fix the problem. Sakura just voiced her belief in him and moved herself to a better viewing angle.

Click. Click. Click.

There were so many photos going into her collection now that her phone was having trouble uploading them.

But eventually, all good things had to come to an end. Carter moved the bookshelf, found the power strip, replaced all her broken cables, and this time zip-tied them to the leg of her table so it would be impossible to accidentally roll over them.

"There we go! It's up and running. Let me just verify everything's working smoothly. Mind typing in your password?" Carter asked.

"Oh, it's 25Wallabee," Sakura said.

"Huh, crazy coincidence. I used to live in the 25'th unit of a building by the same name in college," Carter said.

"Yeah... coincidence..." Sakura shared a laugh with him as he typed in the password and booted up her computer.

"Everything looks good. Oh, wait, what's this? Looks like you're running out of cloud storage space. It's probably some junk files taking up room. I can help you--"

"No!" Sakura jumped from her seat, pushing him aside in a sudden frantic instant. "There's... er... company secrets in there. Sorry."

"Okay, okay. I won't peek. Just let me know if you need any help. Have a nice day, boss. If we're all done here, I'll get back to my regular duties." Carter tipped his head to her in a nod and vanished out the door.

Meanwhile, Sakura breathed a sigh of relief. That had been a close one.

<Note>

This one was pretty fun and came out pretty easily. The last one was a bit more of a struggle, but this one flowed quickly in just two writing sessions.

I had to flesh out why Sakura liked Carter so much, though I had something like this backstory in my notes already. It also helps explain why Carter was so okay with killing people back in book 1 (though in truth the meta reason for that is I know readers don't care much for reading page after page of guilt and angst after the protagonist has to kill for the first time, since we've all read it before.)