Chapter 7
923 Words
God he was a hard man. The kind I had avoided all my life. The only encounters with males like him had been in school, which I escaped as soon as possible by finishing early.
He was a bad boy. Going nowhere. The kind who pulled my pigtails in elementary school and called me “brainiac” in high school, as if intelligence were an insult. I’d stopped raising my hand in class by the end of sophomore year and signed up for dual enrollment online that summer, working tirelessly to complete my G.E.D. requirements.
Graduating early meant I had extra time, which would have been wasted in class with kids like this here ogre in my bed. Instead, I researched cyber security certification programs, and convinced my dad to let me sign up for early acceptance with Global Knowledge if they’d have me.
Of course they did. Apple didn’t fall far from the tree, and the last name Tate went with ethical hacking like white on rice, best in the business. In a profession where distrust was the premise of the relationship, my papa opened doors for me that would have otherwise slammed in my face. As an inexperienced connoisseur of network infrastructure, I had access to some of the most prestigious penetration tester platforms. Breaking into an organization’s security firewall was addictive. And eventually helped me save my father’s life when I was able to warn him that Bunker Inc. was penetrating those security vulnerabilities right along with me, only their reasons for doing so weren’t ethical.
“Hey, can you please get me my laptop? I need to check out a couple of things.”
Liam blinked rapidly and then stared at me. “Ha! Good one.”
“Listen, I tried to tell you earlier; you’re working for the wrong side. You don’t strike me as a bad guy, other than your Neanderthal methods of dealing with women. Confused maybe. After all this is the 21st century and last time I checked there weren’t any caves you could carry me off to.”
I watched his admirable backside as he yanked open his duffle bag and took out a shaving kit. I know he had just spanked me and observed my naked hiney, and I was doing my damndest to pretend it never happened, or that it turned me on. But the act of him brushing his teeth in the next room struck me as overly intimate. Not once in my entire life had I chatted with a guy while he brushed his teeth.
Other than my papa.
“Anyway,” I continued, “these are very bad dudes you are working for; trust me, I know. They framed my father and they’re not above putting a bullet through your head if it suits their fancy. Well, I’m sure they’ll have someone else do it for them. Can’t get their corporate hands dirty.”
He was gargling now, not paying the slightest bit of attention and I squinted my eyes at his back while he put toothpaste and brush away and zipped it up into a tidy leather kit. I grit my teeth and said, “Look. You have to understand one thing about what I did.” He walked through the door and his body crowded its frame. “A desperate human becomes an animal. Capable of anything. My paw was caught in a trap, and I gnawed it off to get my father the help he needed. The people who framed my father didn’t care one iota about playing fair. Why should I?”
I bit my lip and felt my mouth go dry as I started pacing the wood floor. “In my shoes you would have don’t the same thing. Crashing their server was the only choice I had so they couldn’t steal from any more accounts. To distract them from finding my father until he was able to flee the country.”
“Stop talking.” He was pacing the wood floor and coyotes began to yip somewhere in the distance.
I pulled the covers around me so the coyotes wouldn’t mistake me for a snack through the window. “Excuse me?”
“You heard right, not one more word about how innocent you and your pops are. You can work all of that out with my employer when I turn you over. Not. My. Problem.”
“What do you think is going to happen? You think they’re going to slap us on the wrist and let us go? Be real—my father will eventually figure out what it takes to bring them down. People have disappeared from the planet for less!”
His body went suddenly still and a black curtain of contempt fell over his eyes. I decided to leave it alone, sensing that the beast was at his limit. I still had time to think and plan before we arrived in Maryland, which is where this lout was taking me. Corporate headquarters. There they could put the screws on me and try to get to my papa.
Fat chance.
Not even I, computer system spy, knew where he was. But that didn’t mean I was giving up. Every good cyber security specialist knew that to effectively penetrate an enemy’s system, you had to pivot and approach the problem from multiple sides.
I received the highest score in history from the Advanced Penetration Testing Program.
If I knew one thing it was this: dude was going down.
down
- Writer
