Hacking His Code (Beguiling a Billionaire Book 7), page 20
“She would have been insufferable,” I agree, pressing my face against his chest.
“Thank you,” he says, scooping me up in his arms. “Now, let’s get you to bed.”
Hunter
I wake with a joy I’m unfamiliar with. It’s one part content, another part excited. I finally have something to look forward to, and a person to share my joys with.
After almost a month apart, I know with absolute certainty that I’m head over heels in love with Ari.
She stretches her body against mine, her eyes snapping open when she realizes she’s not alone.
“It wasn’t a dream!” she gasped.
“Thankfully, no,” I reply, toying with the long strands of her hair.
“How long have you been awake?”
“About twenty minutes. It’s calming watching you sleep.”
“I need a shower.”
“That makes two of us.”
I order up breakfast, have some clothes brought up for Ari, then escort her into the shower and proceed to lather every inch of her lush body.
“You do know I can wield a bar of soap myself, don’t you?”
“With me, you’ll never have to.”
She pulls me to a wall, wrapping a leg around my body.
I grow hard from her desire for me. Following her lead, I plunge myself up and into her warmth as she moans out in satisfaction.
What a way to start a morning.
When we’re done, I towel her dry, and we hurry to eat breakfast.
Ari giggles hysterically. “Now I can check fucking in a jungle off my sex bucket list.”
“First, you have a sex bucket list? I would like a copy of that. Second, if you really want to fuck in a jungle, I can make that happen by evening.”
Ari finishes a piece of bacon and says, “I’ll have to take a raincheck. Today I need to get my life in order.”
“Life in order? It seems to me like all I have to do is call some movers to bring your stuff here. Heck, if you want to leave it all behind, I’m fine with that.”
“You really want me to just move right in? My mom is supposed to be moving in with me, ya know.”
“We’ll look at apartments for her close by. You won’t have to worry about her.”
“Hunter, I have a life and a job. I can’t just disappear.”
“You won’t disappear. If you’d like, you can go to college and finish your degree. Or, nepotism could provide you with a job here. Or you could just care for our child.”
She shrugs. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to finish up what I’m doing with the Icors. I feel bad about up and leaving with no notice.”
“That’s understandable. You can discuss it with them on Monday, but today, you are mine.”
“Actually, I’d really like to get my things situated at the apartments. I have mine and my mother’s to contend with.”
“Nonsense. I’ll send over a team to do that for you.”
“Hunter, one was my home for most of my life. This is my way of saying goodbye.”
“Okay,” I relent. “I’ll have my people escort you.”
“You don’t get it, do you?”
I arc a brow.
“I don’t want some muscley dude standing there as I’m sobbing over the shit I’m going to throw away.”
“Understood, but I still want—”
“I’m not bringing a security detail,” she insists. “Let me get the two apartments situated and packed. Tomorrow, you can have your people come and load whatever I’m taking here.”
I have to respect her wishes, as much as I’d rather not.
“Fine, but I will see you tomorrow, won’t I?”
“Tomorrow is when my mother is being woken from her coma.”
“Am I invited to join?”
“I’d love to have you.”
Arinessa
After giving Hunter one last kiss, I leave his suite and make my way toward the exit. On the way to the elevator, I see Ernestine.
My mind goes to her movies. To all her secrets I’ve puzzled together.
She slinks on over to me, a suspicious look on her face. “Funny seeing you here.”
“Yeah…about that—”
“So, you told him how you felt?”
“Yeah, and as it turns out, we both kind of suck at this sort of thing.”
Ernestine smiles. “It gets easier. Once the love is established, it grows, multiples, and eventually, there’s three.”
I smile, excited to tell her about her first grandchild.
“I have some matters to attend to, but I look forward to seeing you again,” I say.
“Same.”
My mind goes to the emails Hunter has been receiving, but this isn’t just a threat to his family now, not when I’m carrying his child.
I have to see what I can do to help Hunter, whether he wants me to or not. And this woman is my best chance at getting to the bottom of this.
“You remember what I was researching?” I ask.
She exhales a sharp breath. “Yes.”
“I made a break in the case. A biiiig break.”
Her brow shoots up in surprise. “Oh?”
“The kind of break that blows the whole thing wide open.”
She blinks back at me, mulling over my words.
“Fortunately, we’ll have plenty of time to discuss my findings,” I say. “Just the two of us.” I give her a wink.
The unmistakable look of fear lights her eyes. “I look forward to it.”
My heart races as I walk past her toward the elevator.
In no way did I want to come across as abrasive, but if anyone can help me figure out who’s been sending the emails, it’s her. And now that I have a good idea of what might have happened to Lucy, I might be able to help Hunter.
I catch a bus to my apartment, arriving home just before noon. Luckily, I still have the boxes from my move, and all I have to do is pack the important things I intend to bring with me.”
I wonder what my mom is going to think, waking up from her coma to not only me having a boyfriend but a baby on the way.
Of course, she’ll want me to finish college. I don’t know if I want to, though.
Remnants of Neon scattered around the room needle me with guilt. After I’ve settled in with Hunter, I’m going to have to fix what I truly believe was our budding friendship. It’s not that I didn’t have the right to be mad, but I should have seen things from her perspective.
I go into the bedroom to start in on my wardrobe and flicker on the light. I know Hunter would very well buy me anything my little heart desires, but I hate being wasteful, so I start separating the piles into the takes and the take-nots.
A rustling sound alerts me to a presence.
“Did Hunter send you?” I sigh, turning to see a black figure rushing toward me.
“Hey—”
A cloth bag is shoved over my face. I struggle to free myself, but all I succeed in doing is falling to the floor. Something presses against my mouth. I scream, claw, kick upward into a solid mass, but my efforts prove futile, and I fall into blackness.
Hunter
With Arinessa away, it’s impossible for me to get anything done, so I head to the family gym to sweat away my stress.
After five miles on a treadmill, I head over to the punching bags to work on my arms.
As I’m pulling on my gloves, my phone chimes with an alarm I’ve set for whenever I receive an email from my supposed aunt.
Not this again…
I exhale, annoyed. After weeks, things finally begin to go my way, and of course, there’s a storm cloud waiting to rain down on my life.
It can’t be that bad, I reason. If they really had something on my family, they’d have gone to my father, not me. They’re only approaching me because they think I’ll be easily scared.
I click into the message, and an image fills my screen. It’s a video. I push play and see a woman slumped in the back of a car, groggy.
It’s Ari.
My heart damn near stops in my chest and I struggle to take my next breath.
She looks disoriented, like she’s just woken up. A gag is being shoved into her mouth.
All I can do is watch for thirty-five agonizing seconds, then the screen fades to black. It’s then that I notice a line of text below.
* * *
“Are you going to start listening?”
* * *
With no better recourse, I call Gabriel Icor.
Hunter
“We have to go to the FBI,” Gabriel insists.
We’ve been working in my suite for the last four hours, but the combined intelligence of myself, Gabriel, and his wife Remi has gotten us nowhere.
And as each minute passes, I feel like we’re running out of time.
I shake my head, refusing to give in. “Once they’re on the case, we’ll have to follow rules, and it closes doors for us, taking away our options.”
“I get it,” Gabriel assures me. “But maybe—”
“I don’t think you do,” I say with an edge. “The FBI isn’t going to care if she’s returned alive.”
“I understand how much she means to you,” Remi says, “But Ari was the hacker and infiltrator. I know my way around programs, but not like she did. There’s precious little the three of us can do.”
“Can you get that friend of yours…Dallanger?”
“He’s away,” Gabriel says. “If we gave him remote access to your system—”
“That would alert my father.”
“We probably need to do that anyway. He has access to some of the brightest minds in the tech world. We need to get him on the case.”
I draw in a frustrated breath, angry that I let this happen.
“You’re not in this alone,” Remi says. “I adore Ari. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more comfortable around someone.”
“She’s pregnant,” I confess.
“Oh…” Gabriel replies.
“I didn’t know until last night. We made up and were talking about a future together. ”
“We have to get her back,” Remi insists. “But first, you need to tell your father.”
As much as I loathe the idea of going to my father for help, I see no other way around it.
“Fine. Let’s get this over with.”
Hunter
“How could you let it get this far?” my father shouts, reading through the emails from my supposed aunt. “You should have come to me immediately! What in the world did you hope to achieve?”
Sitting on the opposite side of my father’s desk with Remi and Gabriel, I’m too angry to feel apologetic. If anything, my father owns a share of the blame. It may be my fault that Ari is involved in this mess, but it would have never gotten this far without his secrecy.
“That poor girl,” Father mutters, shaking his head in anger. “Fuck!”
“Whatever secrets you have are coming out now!” I warn.
“Who are you to tell me—”
“Who am I? You know everything about me, but I know very little about you. What is ScryptX, and those other programs I’ve seen remnants of? Why weren’t they on the books? What were they for? Why is it that almost every piece of information on them has been redacted or deleted?”
“We are not talking about this with Gabriel Fucking Icor here!” Father shouts.
“You will tell me, and you will tell me right this fucking second! The woman I love—who is carrying my child—has been kidnapped by someone claiming to be my aunt. And you better believe I will do anything to get Ari back.”
My father leans back in his chair, stunned. “Holy shit. She’s pregnant?”
Gabriel leans forward to address my father. “Mr. Davies, we don’t need your company secrets. Right now, we’re in two completely different areas of technology, and I see no reason to make enemies. Ari’s kidnapping isn’t just a concern of yours. She’s been working for me for the last several weeks, and I’m afraid of what she might say under duress. This might be hard to believe, but I am on your side.”
Father slams his fist down onto his desk. “Fuck—my own fucking son, right under my nose!”
My father has always been a mild-mannered man, a level-headed guy to a fault. I’ve never seen him this furious.
But I’m angry too.
“What the hell is that program you were working on?” I demand. “And why does Ari’s captor care so much about it?”
“I can’t tell you,” Father insists through gritted teeth.
“You have to!”
“It’s top-secret, classified at a level so high, that if the information fell into anyone’s hands…well, let’s just say I’d fear for their lives.”
I blink back at my father, confused. “But all our government contracts are—”
“Not all on the books, as you saw,” he says grimly. “Son, back in the day, there was a whole department we called: Black Tech.”
“Was?”
“It was stuff we couldn’t do in the light of day. Stuff people didn’t want others knowing about. After what happened with your aunt, we finished up what we had on our plate and pulled out of that line of work.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“We can discuss it later,” he says. “When we’re alone.”
“No—we’re going to discuss it now. Even with Gabriel Icor in the room.”
“I always knew this would come back to haunt me. I can’t tell you how many nights I laid in bed, awake, worried that everything was going to fall apart. I had just started to let down my guard. I thought, after all this time, surely we’d be in the clear. Some things just don’t stay buried.”
“Do you know who took Ari?” I ask.
“No.”
“Do you know how to find her?”
“No, but I have some ideas, and someone who could help.”
“Then you need to get them here, right now.”
Father pulls out his phone, dials a number, and says into the receiver, “Black Tech has been compromised. I’m going into the tank. Await instructions.”
Hunter
Gabriel, Remi, and I follow my father to an elevator I didn’t even know existed. He triggers it with a handprint and a retinal scan, and after a green light flickers, the doors open.
After we are inside, Father says, “I really am sorry about this.”
“I don’t care much for apologies,” I reply. “I want this to be made right.”
“Understood.”
“What if Lucy has already—”
“Your aunt isn’t the one keeping her.”
“How can you be so sure?”
Father’s eyes grow dark. “You’ll find that soon, though I’m not sure if you’re going to like what you learn. Right now, we need to focus on getting Ari back.”
The door slides open, revealing a long hallway. My father leads us down a maze of tunnels, eventually opening into a room filled with workstations and computer monitors.
“These terminals contain all of our covert ops, the programs you only found remnants of. Not even the government knows we still have copies in their base form.”
It’s an impressive setup, and by the looks of it, it hasn’t been touched in years.
“So this is what Ari was taken for…what Aunt Lucy may have gone missing over…”
“We were contracted to work on military systems and platforms, but also some standardization of necessary industries. Banking, for example. They didn’t want the name of who worked on the banking platform to get out, lest they know who to torture for information.”
“Is it what Aunt Lucy was working on.”
“Yes.”
“And ScryptX?”
“Is the base program banks use today. Earlier this year, it was announced that they will be going through a complete system overhaul, swapping out every component of ScryptX for some new design.”
“Which means that whatever access could be granted with system knowledge of ScryptX will no longer work,” Gabriel cuts in.
“Exactly. Whoever took Ari knew we had it all along, but I suppose they may have forgotten about it until the announcement was made. This is their Hail Mary pass, if you will.”
I run my fingers through my hair, trying to make sense of everything. “If they gain access to ScryptX, it could get messy.”
“They could be King Makers,” Father says. “They could bring about the financial collapse of sixty-percent of global banking, though I doubt that’s their end game. They’re probably looking to take as much as possible and screw over a few competitors without triggering a meltdown.”
“And you’re sure it’s not Aunt Lucy?”
Father exhales, a reticent look on his face. “She’s dead, but I’d rather not get into that now.”
It takes me a moment to fully process what my father just told me, and when it finally clicks, I decide it’s not worth discussing. Yet.
“We have to save Ari,” I insist.
“I know, but we can’t just give them what they want. Or at least not the way that they want it.”
“Father, I don’t think you understand what this woman means to me. We have to do something.”
“I have some tricks up my sleeves, but it’s just gonna take some time.”
My phone buzzes, and I reach into my pocket and pull it out. It’s an email from the person that’s been posing as my aunt. There’s an attachment.
Please let Ari be okay.
I open it, and my heart damn near explodes in my chest.
Fuck!
Arinessa
The light hurts my eyes as I try to force them open. I’m pretty sure I’m not hungover, but my memories of last night are hazy.
I twist, quickly realizing I’m not in my own bed.
“There’s water on the nightstand,” a man says.
Slowly, I turn towards the voice, blinking my eyes a dozen times, trying to bring the room into focus.
“Where am I?” I croak out, my throat raw and painful.
“You are safe. For now.”
