Winds of Destiny: Falling ~ {Hawks x OC}

Chapter Twenty-Two: Reality Check

The Hero Public Safety Commission's head of investigation stepped out of a shadow in the corner of the President's office about an hour after he'd left to follow up on Misaki's report and announced, "I found the phone. It's dead."

The President glanced up sharply from her computer screen and asked, "Is it hers?"

He pulled his own phone out of his pocket and held it up, showing her the trace he had running on the GPS tracking chip imbedded in Misaki's phone. It was showing the chip to be located in the middle of the headquarters of the Hero Public Safety Commission, right where they happened to be standing.

The President sighed heavily, "She was there..."

"She's lucky whoever she was tailing tossed it instead of trying to trace it back to her," he said, his tone chiding.

"What was she thinking?" She whispered to herself under her breath.

He narrowed his eyes at the woman as he asked, "What exactly did you tell her when you gave her this assignment?"

"I asked her to look into Stain's background for any possible connections to the League of Villains. Not to tail him or one of them to a possible hide out. I thought she'd have more sense than that." The President curtly shook her head and raised a hand to cover her eyes.

"You gonna pull her off the assignment?" The man asked dryly.

She considered for a moment before saying, "No."

"Why not?" He asked in a apparently disagreeable tone.

The President leaned back in her chair with a stern and focused look on her face. "If she'd told me she'd encountered one of the League members herself I would have pulled her off of the assignment right then and there. She had the sense to lie to me, which means she knew that what she'd done was out of line." She looked up suddenly and held out her hand to the man. "Give me the phone."

Stepping up to the front of the desk, he reached into his pocket and pulled out Misaki's scratched up smartphone. As he reached out to place it in the President's outstretched hand, he asked, "You gonna confront her about it?"

She stared down at the phone gravely as she replied, "If she lies to me again, she's done."

"And if she tells the truth?" He carefully asked.

The President clutched the phone in her hand and glanced up at him with a grim glare. "That depends on what she has to say."

~*~

Misaki stared down at the top of her desk with wide, slightly unfocussed eyes as she counted down under her breath from one hundred in an effort to calm her racing nerves. She hadn't gotten a wink of sleep last night. Her mind just kept running through all of the different ways everything had gone wrong yesterday and dreaming up scenarios of how she could have handled things differently. By the time the light of the sun had begun to peak through the cracks in her curtains, she'd come to the decision that she needed to come clean.

She was going to tell the President everything that she'd done and accept the consequences of her actions; and if that meant she would soon be looking for other employment, well... She just hoped that wouldn't be the case. She really, really cared about her job. So much so that she would apparently do some pretty unscrupulous things in order to carry it out. But that was no excuse for her actions, and definitely not the lie she'd told to cover them up. Hopefully the President would appreciate that she was willing to confess to all of her transgressions and treat her with leniency. And if not, it would be no less than what she deserved.