Chapter 32
thirty-two
ASHER
I stare at the large screen in the monitor room at my office, watching the same blurry video for the third time. There’s complete silence in the room, despite seven of us being here.
Brad stands with his arms crossed beside me, his jaw locked tight. Sanjay, our analyst, sits at the console, his fingers poised over the keyboard like he’s bracing for impact.
The footage plays in slow motion. It’s grainy and colorless, captured by one of the cameras that had been corrupted during the breach.
It was deleted, but a trace remained, and once Brad and his team knew what they were looking for, they managed to recover enough for us to see exactly who was involved in the break in.
The date stamp is from a week before the office was ransacked.
The rooms are quiet, save for the on duty guard making his regular patrol.
He stands from his position at the monitor – the same monitor we’re all huddled around – and moves toward the hallway.
The image switches, as Shaun moves with confidence, swiping his badge to access the high security server alone.
He shows no hesitation at all. Like he’s a man on a mission.
“There,” Sanjay murmurs, tapping a key to freeze the frame. He zooms in on the monitor beside him, his fingers flying across the keyboard. A script window opens, lines of code flashing for a brief moment before the camera blacks out completely.
“That’s the trojan,” Brad says, like he still can’t believe it himself. “Shaun installed the backdoor himself.”
My stomach twists. Of all the people I expected to be involved in this, the man lying in a hospital bed with a head injury – on my dime – is the last person I thought would be the mole.
I try to push the feeling of betrayal down, as Sanjay brings up another clip.
It’s of the outside of the building. The date stamp shows the night of the break in.
“Where did you get this?” I ask. When we went through all the security videos the night of, they’d been deleted.
“We hacked into our own servers,” Kelly murmurs. “The trojan was supposed to stop us, but we managed to recover this from an old backup. Once we realized what the trojan was, it made it simpler.”
The screen shows the hallway outside the office suite.
The door opens and Shaun walks out, then stops.
Two men approach him, their faces obscured with balaclavas.
For a moment the three of them talk. Then he lets them into the office, into the security room.
Shaun points at something, the server room maybe?
And then one of the men punches Shaun. Hard.
Another takes what looks like a piece of piping out and slams it against Shaun’s head.
Shaun doesn’t fight back. He doesn’t even flinch. He submits. Like taking the beating is part of the plan.
Probably because it was.
Nausea rises inside me as blood drips from his temple and he slides to the ground, one of the attackers crouching beside him like he’s checking for a pulse.
Then the screen goes dark.
“We think that’s when they started breaking things in the room,” Brad says. “After that we can’t recover anything else.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose, the image of Shaun’s bleeding head in my memory. For a moment, all I can think of is my dad’s beating that day I was locked in the closet.
The way he screamed. The way he bled.
“He staged it,” I finally say, my voice hoarse. “The break-in. The injuries. All of it.”
Brad nods. “It was a cover. So he wouldn’t be suspected. It was only a matter of time before we discovered the breach. This way, they could stop us from finding the trojan, or at least from blaming him.”
“The beating he took was pretty brutal,” I murmur, my stomach churning at the sight.
“Yeah, I suspect he wasn’t expecting them to cause that level of damage,” Brad agrees. “It’s kind of poetic justice at least.”
“Has anybody called the hospital?” I ask him.
“He was discharged two days ago,” Brad says, his eyes meeting mine. “But the good news is, he’s at home. I sent a guard over as soon as we found the footage. He’s not going anywhere.”
“And you’re sure the guard is uncompromised?”
“Absolutely.” Brad nods. “What do you want to do?”
“Bring him in.” My voice is low.
Brad straightens. “You want to talk to him yourself?”
“I want him in my office before the end of the day.” I meet his gaze. “And I want to know who he’s working with.”
We know of at least two accomplices. I need their identities. And if anybody else is involved.
Brad hesitates. Just enough to make the hairs on the back of my neck lift.
“There’s something else,” he tells me, reaching for the remote and clicking to a new folder on the screen. “It wasn’t only the Manhattan office that was compromised.”
He can’t quite meet my eye.
I frown. “What are you talking about?”
He brings up some more code. “Your phone and laptop. Shaun accessed them a week before the break-in. Just a couple of log entries at first. Then a full system sync.”
My stomach turns to stone.
“You’re telling me he had access to my personal communications?” I rasp. It takes a moment to remember to breathe.
Brad nods. “Yeah. I’m sorry, man.”
My mind flashes to all the things that are on my laptop. The security cameras for the lighthouse. My messages with Francie.
The video of her touching herself for me. I fucked her against the lighthouse door. All on camera. Available for Shaun to see. And whoever he’s working with.
Fuck.
“How much could he see?” I ask, barely able to get the words out.
“We don’t know yet,” Brad says carefully. “We’re pulling logs and backups. But if he mirrored the drives and the SD card…”
He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t need to.
Because I already know exactly what’s at stake.
And if those videos are out there. Christ, I can’t think about that. Think about him seeing her at her most vulnerable. Think about who else has.
I promised her she was safe. That it was only me watching. That I had the cameras locked down.
She trusted me.
And I failed her.
A cold sweat breaks out along my spine. It dampens my shirt, making it stick to my skin, a contrast to the storm building inside of me.
Brad’s still talking. Something about data packets and encrypted fragments, but it’s a dull buzz against the roar in my head.
I see her face. Her smile. The way she looked at me like I was worth something. Like I made her feel safe. Free.
And I might have brought her world tumbling down.
“Drag him in here if you have to,” I say, my voice thick. “We need to know what he knows. Are the systems safe now?”
“Yep.” Brad nods. “As well as your laptop and phone. We’ve recoded them. Nobody can get in.”
“Bring him to my office when he gets here,” I say, needing to be alone. Which is fucking ironic, because I’ve never felt so lonely right now.
I can’t tell her. Not when she trusted me to keep her safe. Not when I’m the one who failed.
I just need to make this go away.
FRANCIE
Charlie can’t hide his grin as his car turns onto the sweeping driveway that leads to our family estate.
“Home sweet ridiculously oversized home,” he says, eyeing the mansion ahead like it personally offends his minimalist aesthetic. “So.” He taps his fingers against the wheel. “You ready for your big confession?”
It’s the third time he’s asked since we hit the Virginia state line. And at least the twelfth since we left Manhattan.
I narrow my eyes at him. “If I say no, will you turn the car around?”
He leans dramatically toward the windshield. “Too late. We’ve crossed the point of no return. Cue the ominous music and emotionally stunted brother stares.”
He’s been like this for the entire seven-hour drive. Peppering me with not-so-subtle questions about why I had him pick me up outside Asher’s apartment building. Not that he knows it’s Asher’s. But Charlie has instincts like a bloodhound with a gossip addiction.
Unfortunately for him, but very fortunately for me, I’ve learned how to handle Charlie-level nosiness: weaponized distraction.
So I spent most of the drive getting him to talk about his new TikTok channel, where he gives financial advice to broke Gen-Zers.
He’s gone viral twice, much to his glee.
Once for explaining compound interest using Starbucks cups, and again for a video titled Buy Your Avocado Toast AND Retire at 60.
He has the golden touch, not that I’ll ever tell him that. And he’s also completely obsessed with his new channel, luckily for me.
But now we’re here. And he’s vibrating with glee at the prospect of me dropping a literary bombshell on my six older brothers.
“Don’t look so excited,” I mutter.
“Oh please.” He adjusts his sunglasses with the flair of someone born for drama. “You’re about to tell the most macho men in Virginia that you’ve spent the last five years secretly writing hot, sexy, wildly successful romance novels. This is the Super Bowl of family confessions.”
“Do not say the word ‘hot’ in front of your dad or uncles,” I warn him.
“I would never,” he promises me solemnly. “Unless it comes up naturally.”
The car hums along the gravel road that leads to the family home, winding beneath a canopy of towering trees that arch overhead.
Shafts of sunlight flicker over the windshield as we drive deeper into the heart of Misty Lakes, and then, as if summoned, the trees part and the view explodes into technicolor.
It’s breathtaking.
Rolling green hills, manicured lawns, and our family home, perched like a crown on top of it all.
It’s an elegant, sprawling stone and glass mansion that wouldn’t look out of place in Architectural Digest. And beyond the hills, to the left, peeking out is a glint of blue.
The first of the lakes the estate is named after.
Though we can’t see them from here, the lake is surrounded by six cabins.
Each belonging to one of my brothers. When they reached the age of eighteen, it was a rite of passage that they built their own home along the lake.