The System (Fire Universe Book 4), page 1
The System
NICOLE PYLAND
PYLAND PUBLISHING LLC
Copyright © 2024 Nicole Pyland
All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 979-8-88696-048-8 eBook
By the Author
Chicago Series:
• Introduction – Fresh Start
• Book #1 – The Best Lines
• Book #2 – Just Tell Her
• Book #3 – Love Walked into The Lantern
• Series Finale – What Happened After
San Francisco Series:
• Book #1 – Checking the Right Box
• Book #2 – Macon’s Heart
• Book #3 – This Above All
• Series Finale – What Happened After
Tahoe Series:
• Book #1 – Keep Tahoe Blue
• Book #2 – Time of Day
• Book #3 – The Perfect View
• Book #4 – Begin Again
• Series Finale – What Happened After
Boston Series:
• Book #1 – Let Go
• Book #2 – The Right Fit
• Book #3 – All Good Plans
• Book #4 – Around the World
• Series Finale – What Happened After
Sports Series:
• Book #1 – Always More
• Book #2 – A Shot at Gold
• Book #3 – The Unexpected Dream
• Book #4 – Finding a Keeper
• Book #5 – Making It Count
• Book #6 – Side by Side
• Book #7 – Crashing into Love
• Book #8 – Spin Serve
Celebrities Series:
• Book #1 – No After You
• Book #2 – All the Love Songs
• Book #3 – Midnight Tradition
• Book #4 – Path Forward
• Series Finale – What Happened After
Holiday Series:
• Book #1 – The Writing on the Wall
• Book #2 – The Block Party
• Book #3 – The Fireworks
• Book #4 – The Sweet Escape
• Book #5 – The Misperception
• Book #6 – The Wait is Over
• Series Finale – What Happened After
Fire Universe:
• Book #1 – The Fire
• Book #2 – The Disappeared
• Book #3 – The Kidnapped
• Book #4 – The System
Stand-alone books:
• Reality Check
• The Show Must Go On
• Future Wife
Young Adult / New Adult:
• The Moments
• Love Forged
• Pride Festival
Anthology:
• The Meet Cute Café
(a collection of 8 interconnected love stories featuring couples of different ages and backgrounds)
Erotica:
• Once a Month
• Voyeur
Royalty Series:
• Book #1 – Ascending
• Book #2 – Appointing
• Book #3 – Arriving
• Book #4 – Awaiting
TruLove Universe:
• SoulMatch
• TruLove
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
By the Author
The System
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
EPILOGUE
Coming Next
By the Author
Afterword
About The Author
The System
Fire Universe Book #4
Kieran Hart has just gone through a divorce and is starting over with a new job at a DNA discovery site. After finding out she’s adopted years earlier, she sends in her sample, hoping to find her birth parents, and instead, finds herself in a police station, being accused of a crime she didn’t commit because her DNA was a match to a homicide. Only, it’s not Kieran’s DNA. It’s her identical twin sister’s DNA. The sister she never knew she had.
Carina Whitlock is the top ADA in her office and is on her way to becoming the next district attorney when she is handed the case of Marin May, Kieran’s twin sister. It seems like a fairly open-and-shut case until she spends time with Kieran and finds herself not only believing that Marin might not have committed the crime, but also that Kieran might be more than someone she’s supposed to know through a case.
All the evidence points to Marin being the killer and maybe much more than just that, but Kieran can’t stop trying to help her sister and becoming friends and maybe more with the ADA assigned to prosecute the case.
To contact the author or for any additional information,
visit: https://nicolepyland.com
CHAPTER 1
DNAdiscovery.com wasn’t where she’d thought she’d end up, but they’d been hiring, and she’d needed a new job. At thirty-five, she’d been around the software engineering world for a long time now, and it had always seemed to be a young person’s game. As Kieran aged, it was getting more and more difficult for her to find a job as an engineer because employers expected her to want to be a manager by now, but she didn’t want to be in management. She loved coding, and that would never change. After leaving her husband, she’d kept her job at a local company for a while, but after their divorce was finalized, she’d started looking for something else.
Kieran had needed a fresh start, and that had included ending a marriage, finding a new place to live, and looking for a new job. The job had taken a while to find, but once she’d managed to get one, she’d been excited for the first time in a while. She was a senior staff engineer now and made forty thousand dollars more than she had at her last job. Her divorce settlement was modest because she hadn’t wanted to take Diego for everything he was worth. Their separation had been amicable, so while they weren’t exactly friends, they didn’t mean any ill will. With that settlement and her new salary, Kieran had been able to get herself a nice two-bedroom place in a small town and use the second bedroom as her office instead of going into the company’s office. Grateful she and Diego had never had children, she had no need for the second bedroom to be anything else.
Her first day on the job had been simple enough. She started her new-hire orientation and training and got her systems set up. She had three monitors and the screen on the laptop the company provided. Kieran preferred to have at least two monitors, one vertical and one horizontal, and she’d spent an entire day connecting everything together and making her office exactly what she’d always wanted. In their house, which had been a three-bedroom, Diego had had an at-home office, and they’d used the other bedroom as a guest room. Kieran had worked at the office most of the time because when she wanted to work from home before, she’d been forced to use the kitchen. Finally, after years of wanting more for herself, she’d gone out and had taken what she’d wanted. Being on her own for the first time in her adult life felt good, too. It was lonely, yes, but it was the kind of lonely she thought she needed to feel like herself again.
Diego hadn’t been a bad husband. When they’d first started dating in college, he’d been an attentive and loving boyfriend. When he’d gone to law school a state away and she’d gone to graduate school, they’d kept in touch but hadn’t been exclusive. Of course, he’d met other women and had had short relationships, while Kieran hadn’t found anyone else who was interested in a nerdy coder girl who liked video games and not much else if it didn’t involve a screen. Three years after parting for their respective schools, they’d met back up one day for coffee, and they’d been together ever since. He’d been her first and was still her only, but after their first few years of wedded bliss, things had started to change between them. Diego had moved up at his law firm and seemed to want the kind of wife the other lawyers had, which wasn’t Kieran. He’d also spent more and more time at the office and less and less with her, to the point where she’d assumed he’d been having an affair. He hadn’t been – or, at least, he’d sworn that he hadn’t. He just had to work because the more billable hours he got for the firm
That had been all he cared about until, one day, he’d asked her about children. That had been around Kieran’s thirtieth birthday, and she’d been surprised to hear him bring that up because they’d both said they didn’t want kids. There had been a talk, then a fight, which had been followed by another talk and several more fights. He’d expected her to not only have their children but to be their primary caregiver since he had to work so much. When Kieran had asked where this had all come from, he could only mention other associates at work who were starting to have families.
“So, you just want to be able to say you have children, but you don’t want to actually have children?” she’d asked one day. “You want me to be here to take care of them all by myself while you just put their pictures on your desk so that you can look good to the partners?”
“That’s not it, Kieran,” he’d argued.
“We said we didn’t want kids,” she’d reminded.
“Things change. We’re getting older,” he’d tried.
The argument had repeated over and over until finally, Kieran had told him that she wouldn’t have his kids, and if that was a problem for him, they’d have to figure something else out. He’d said it was fine, and they hadn’t talked for the next several days. That had been the beginning of the end, and after she turned thirty-three, she had told him that she wanted a divorce. When they legally separated, he’d moved out of the house and into an apartment closer to his office, and Kieran had started looking for another job. Then, when they’d finalized everything, she’d let him have the house. She hadn’t wanted it anyway. It had too many memories of a relationship she wanted to leave in the past.
It hadn’t been that easy for Diego, though. He hadn’t wanted the divorce. Kieran had known that, but she’d fallen out of love with him and couldn’t see a way back. Before the separation, there had been marriage counseling and a book that she’d read on her own, but nothing had worked; the feelings just weren’t there anymore. After all those years together, she had made the decision to leave, and she stood by it despite how much she knew it hurt him. Now, Diego could move on, too, and he’d recently made partner at his firm, which meant that they were both on their way to their separate fresh start.
“Hey,” she said when he called around nine after her first day at her new job.
“Hey. How was it?” he asked.
“Just the usual training. I also had to take the sexual harassment course, which was an hour long, and then I got my email account set up. That kind of stuff.”
“Do you like it so far?”
“It’s hard to tell. It’s mainly been me doing training. Everything okay?” she asked him.
“Yeah, everything’s fine. I just got home and thought I’d call.”
“Diego, we–”
“Before you remind me that we’re divorced yet again, I only called to tell you that I found some of your stuff in the basement. I was just making small talk before I told you. That’s all. I needed some old case files that were down there, and I came across a few boxes that belong to you. It looks like your dad’s stuff that your mom gave you when he died.”
“His old baseball stuff?” Kieran asked, trying to remember if she’d brought that box with her in the move.
“I only opened one box, but yeah, I’m pretty sure I saw one of those baseball card book things in there.”
“I thought I brought all that with me.”
“Well, it’s still here. I can bring it over this weekend, if you want. It’s fine here, if you want to leave it, but I can bring it over.”
“I can pick it up.”
“You won’t be able to fit everything in that tiny car you drive. His old bat bag is here, and there are at least four boxes.”
Kieran’s father had been a college baseball coach and had played in the minor leagues for a few years, on his way to the majors, before a shoulder injury had sidelined him, and he’d moved into coaching. A lifelong fan of the sport, he’d collected baseball cards since he’d been a kid, and when he’d passed away from cancer six years ago, her mother had given Kieran all of his old baseball stuff.
“I have the SUV. Just let me bring it over for you,” Diego added. “It’s not that long of a drive anyway, and we could catch up.”
“About what, Diego? We just talked last week.”
“Your new job. I can tell you about the partnership. I’ll bring lunch or something. Tacos. You love those pork tacos.”
“I’ll let you know. I have training this whole week, and it’s exhausting. I have to get through that first before they actually let me do my job. Let me text you later this week, okay? I’m still getting this place set up and will probably be running errands anyway.”
“So, you’ll be too exhausted to have lunch with me but not too exhausted to run errands?”
“Diego, I need to go now. I haven’t had dinner yet, so I need to eat something before I call it a night,” Kieran lied.
“All right. Fine. Just let me know about the weekend. I need to know before I make plans myself, obviously.”
“I will. Thanks for letting me know and for the offer.”
“Good night, Kieran.”
“Night, Diego,” she replied and hung up.
Calls like this one still came at least once a week, but when she’d first left, there had been daily texts, too. Sometimes, Diego would remind her about something she’d remember on her own. Other times, he’d ask if she wanted to talk over coffee or a meal. She figured she should at least be happy that instead of every day, it was only once a week now because that probably meant that soon, they’d be once a month, which, she felt, would be more appropriate for exes trying to find their way toward friendship.
Kieran went into her kitchen and decided she’d make herself some popcorn as a snack since she’d eaten dinner around six but was still hungry. She added the extra melted butter that she preferred, along with probably way too much salt, and sat down in front of the TV in the living room. She wouldn’t mess up her controllers with butter hands, so she just turned the TV on, deciding to find a movie to watch while she was finishing her snack. Then, she’d either play something or work on the app she’d been building on the side for the past few months.
The idea had been her friend’s, who wasn’t technical, so Kieran had offered to, at minimum, create her a viable product that would get her friend started, and Ruthie, in turn, had agreed to give her a percentage of the business should it take off. Building an app from scratch wasn’t hard for Kieran, but Ruthie kept evolving her idea. One day, it had two features. The next, she wanted a third added. Then, there also needed to be a way for people to pay through app stores, despite Ruthie initially telling her that she hadn’t planned on launching with in-app purchases. Every day, it seemed, there was a new text from the woman with a different request. While Kieran enjoyed building things and didn’t mind adding new features, she also wished she had the full scope of the project from the start so that she wouldn’t have to scrap parts of the code or make copious changes to it. It gave her something to do in her evenings that wasn’t work-related, though, and since she now lived over an hour away from her friends and family, she could use fun things to do from afar that still kept her connected to all of them.
She found herself in bed later that night, working on the app, when an email came into her personal account. It was from DNAdiscovery.com, too, which was weird that it landed in her personal inbox and not her work one. Then, she remembered that this was part of her benefits package. DNAdiscovery was a company that, by swabbing people’s cheeks, collected their DNA so that it could get analyzed before a database of now hundreds of thousands of samples could spit back out their relatives and ancestry. While the company already offered more than some of its competitors at the moment, part of what Kieran had been hired for was to expand their feature offerings by building the things the new product managers said they’d need, and for being an employee, she could have a test kit sent to her home and get the results back, all completely free of charge.
