Hack X Love

Episode-4

Lotus Oden's POV

It was mid-afternoon, and I should have been sleeping. I had a long night of coding ahead of me. Instead, I was sitting at my system, staring at all the information I'd gathered on the name she'd slipped under my door.

Nati Grant. Coloko.

She was a decent coder, and I knew a script kiddie when I saw one. And so did she. She could destroy us.

Now I felt like an i***t. I hadn't really known Lila that well past frat parties and mutual friends, so who was I to judge that she did not have a identical twin sister? It wasn't out of the realm of possibility. But given what she'd done to me, more likely still was that Lila was a two-faced piece of s**t. Could I really be blamed for questioning it? Who would have expected what scheme a deranged mind would come up with?

So the little one I'd almost assaulted was Nati Grant, and I should have known that, but I couldn't help but also think that Lila had probably egged her on to whatever it was they were trying to execute. So far, though, she was clean.

I'd hacked into everything I could find on Nati. I read her emails, her f*******: messages, looked at her photos. She'd known that I would, or she'd never given me the info. She wouldn't have given up her hacker handle.

She was a computer programmer at Denicorp. She'd clearly gone to Cambridge University as well, but she must have gone under the radar in comparison to her sister, because she wasn't someone that I knew. Her entire collection of social media photos were of the girl who'd visited my door this morning. And when it came to the two sisters being so identical, I was f*****g seeing double.

The odd thing was that Lila had no online presence. I’d checked up on her a couple of times in the past few years and hadn’t been able to find anything beyond where she lived and some financial information. It was the same today. No social media accounts, no online footprint.

I could have had all the revenge I ever wanted within my reach. A couple of clicks, and her name, her bank accounts, her credit report—everything she was—belonged to me.

But I didn't.

I'd hit bottom pretty hard more times than I cared to recall, but there was still some vestige of human decency that had stopped me from ruining her life the way she'd ruined mine. I'd rather think I hadn't yet sunk quite that far. But if she kept playing with fire, I might get there in a hurry.

Even if it was all true what Nati had said to me this morning and Lila really was in danger, why the devil should I care? She was going to have to do a hell of a lot better than that to get my skills triggered. A whole f*****g lot better than that.

And again, here I was, digging into everything I could find out.

Lila hadn’t been the best-looking girl I’d ever seen. It was the way she carried herself, the sultry-siren act down to an absolute science. The fit of her clothes that accentuated every luscious curve. The voracious heat in her eyes, the promise of her full lips. And damn if she hadn’t turned out to be that siren, luring me to my doom, while I’d gone willingly, grinning like a gullible son of a b***h.

One dumb drunken bet at a party, and I'd taken her F in computer science to a B with minimal effort, just enough to keep her scholarship but not exactly an A because it was more than required. She sucked at everything else, so an A in computer science might raise eyebrows, and a quick scan of her records had shown she'd gotten only one A in college.

Which was in—surprisingly enough—abnormal psych. I’d even changed a few other random students’ grades to take the heat off her in the event the intrusion was found. More fool me. It had never occurred to me in a million years that she would be the one to put the heat on me.

There was a knock on my door at the very same time that a text on my phone disturbed me from my reverie. Me, it said, signed Caleb Thompson. He always signed his name, for some strange reason.

Come on in, I responded back without getting up from my chair. All the members of the team knew one another's entry codes. One minute later, the beeping of the keys being typed was heard, and the door swung open after me. I glanced over my shoulder to see my hardware tech coming toward me, wise all-knowing blue eyes zeroed in on the twenty-three-inch monitor in front of me…where a photo of the woman who had introduced herself as Nati Grant was clearly displayed, smiling face between a man and woman who, by virtue of resemblance, must have been her parents.

"Sweet girl," he said, stroking his shaved head. "I said the same when I saw her all messed up outside your door this morning. And you hadn't even mentioned a word about a woman in your life."

I grunted and shook my head, wiping the screen. "That is one woman I want out of my life, stat."

"I can reprogram her microwave to kill her," Caleb said with a chuckle.

Motherfucker wasn't kidding, I'm sure.