Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
Hacking is like chess. You’re always thinking three moves ahead and anticipating your opponent’s every play.
It’s a game of strategy and skill. But unlike chess, the stakes are higher, sometimes as high as they can go.
I was right about Alfie Earnheart. His public CEO of Monroe Securities face is very different from his real one.
That good guy, mild-mannered, I care about you like a second father, routine is pure facade.
Simply put, Alfie Earnheart is a monster.
A soulless, remorseless psychopath. The Joker with the manufactured social image of a nun.
It’s taken me a week to feel fully confident he didn’t know I was in his system, but in that week, I lost time.
Georgia’s mother shipped us Tyson Monroe’s laptop, and I’ve been sorting through that.
And in doing so, that led me back to Alfie’s tonight, all of this spinning into a giant, convoluted web, and I need more time.
A year wouldn’t be long enough to sort through all this and be able to put the missing pieces together .
And there are missing pieces. Several, in fact.
Georgia and I are set to leave for Boston today for the Thanksgiving holiday.
I have to talk to Zax and Grey about Georgia, and while I could have done it on the phone—on any one of the five or so calls we’ve had where I felt like a guilty, lying piece of shit—they deserve to hear it from me in person.
I need them to look into my eyes so they know this time everything is different.
After that, Georgia will be flying to LA for her board meeting, and I’ll be joining her.
Georgia is not safe anywhere near Alfie. Or Ezra.
If all goes to plan, I can make this happen fast and remove them. If not, that poses the challenge.
I’ve spent the last six hours combing through piles of data, text messages, and emails. I’ve been cross-matching that with dates and timelines from Tyson Monroe’s information. I have things I have to tell Georgia. Things that will hurt her greatly, but things she has to know about all the same.
Now. I have to tell her now. I don’t think this can wait any longer.
I finish reading through the last email and blow out a strained breath. My eyes are bleary, and my muscles are stiff. I swear, in all my years of hacking, I’ve never encountered something so dark and convoluted. Taking off my glasses, I scrub my hands up and down my face.
Fuck.
Just fuck.
Checking my watch, I see it’s sometime around six, and while Georgia might kill me for waking her this early, it can’t wait any longer if I’m going to try and catch a few hours of sleep before we leave.
Exiting my office, I twist my spine, cracking my back as I go into the kitchen to brew some fresh coffee.
Light snow is falling, piling on top of the two feet we got over the weekend that hasn’t melted much.
Once the coffee is going, I jog up the steps, slowing my pace as I enter our bedroom.
Georgia is fast asleep, curled up on her side, and a pang hits me.
A pang of guilt for waking her, but also the same sweet ache I get every time I see her.
Being with her like this still feels like something out of a dream.
I stare down at my left hand, at the thick metal band that’s partially obstructing my rose tattoo and wish I could do this with her all over again, only differently.
Maybe when all these threats are behind her, and our relationship is out in the open, I will.
Pulling back the undisturbed blankets on my side, I crawl in bed and wrap myself around her.
She stirs and groans, but there is a smile on her lips, and my heart quakes in my chest. Life is so much harder when you’re afraid to lose something, and I have already lost enough.
Her included. I lost her because I gave her up, but that’s not something I can ever afford to do again.
Still, knowing what my world is like without having her in it makes me a determined, protective beast with this.
“It’s early,” she half-heartedly complains. “I don’t even have to open my eyes to know that. I can feel that it’s still dark out.”
“It is early, but I’ve found some things I need to tell you, and then I need a few hours of sleep before I can drive.”
“I can drive.”
I smirk against her neck as I trail kisses along her skin. “Not my Shelby, you can’t.”
“Oh, we get to take the Shelby. Fine. You can drive your hot-guy Shelby. But I have a feeling I’m not going to like anything you’re about to tell me.”
“You’re not.” At my serious tone, she rolls over in my arms and slowly blinks her eyes open. Her hand comes up, her fingers running along what are likely bruises beneath my eyes.
“You need more than a few hours of sleep. Whatever you’ve been doing all night is all over your face.”
I sigh and press my forehead to hers, needing to hold her closer, needing to make sure she’s real and here in my arms. Needing to make sure she’s safe when all she’s been is in danger for the last several months.
“Do you want to see what I’m talking about, or do you just want me to tell you?”
She thinks about this for a beat. “I want you to show me. ”
“Then come with me. The coffee is already brewing.”
“You go down and make me a cup. I have to pee and brush my teeth first.”
I smile against her lips. “I love you.”
“I love you too. Now let’s do this because I’m anxious to get to Boston and see my people.”
I climb out of bed and go back downstairs to make her a cup of coffee while she does her stuff upstairs.
By the time I have it ready and am walking back toward my office, she’s flying down the stairs, wearing my Rebels hoodie that goes down past her knees and those freaking knee-high socks that always seem to have her sliding around.
She looks fucking adorable and I hate that her playful smile is about to fall from her face.
I hand her the coffee and take her other hand, bringing her to my office. “The password changes every thirty seconds and connects to a VPN that requires a facial ID from me on my phone plus a retinal scan on the door itself. That said, I will give you your own facial ID and access.”
She shakes her head. “That’s a hard pass. I get you’re trying to be inclusive and all that, but the last thing I want is access to the Batcave.”
I roll my eyes, but then let us into my supposed Batcave.
Georgia takes it all in, from the couches on opposite walls to the small fridge to the four racks of servers in an air-conditioned vault with their own biometrics to the long, wooden desk with two keyboards in front of two homemade computers and one laptop to the six large screens stacked in columns of two across the wall.
“This is… holy fuck, Lenox, what the fuck do you do? I mean, I think I’ve been laboring under a massive misconception here. I didn’t think hacking really meant… I thought you were kidding about how to enter this room, and then you just did that, and now there’s this room that’s... this is insane.”
There is no way to respond to that, so I take her hand and walk her over to my chair, sit down, and position her on my lap. She sits sideways, her legs dangling over my thighs, her coffee landing on the desk as she tries to figure out what the code and windows mean on the screens.
“Georgia, I’m not really the guy who gives it to you gently, so I’m just going to tell you what I know. That doesn’t mean I don’t care, and that doesn’t mean I’m insensitive to your thoughts and feelings on this.”
“I know,” she says in a breathy whisper. “It’s just how your brain works. I get it, and I won’t get upset or mad at you. Just tell me.”
Fuck, how am I this lucky that she knows me this well and still loves me?
I plant a kiss into her hair and shift her weight to my left thigh so I can access one of my keyboards.
“I accessed Alfie’s system, but I held back digging in until I was positive he didn’t know I was in it.
I didn’t want him shutting anything down or erasing stuff, and he would have if he had known.
In the meantime, your mom had sent your father’s laptop.
In going through things on here, I found a ton of evidence of mass financial indiscretion by Alfie.
It was a ton of things, from acting as a threat actor and intercepting a third-party payment, to briefly shorting stock, to presenting false and manufactured financial reports to the board that would impact the stock price.
He embezzled money while also committing a ton of SEC violations, but he did a brilliant job at covering his crimes and also showing them as legitimate financial gains and losses and even created data to back it all up. ”
“But if you discovered this on my father’s laptop, he clearly knew about it.”
“Correct. Your father is who had discovered that Alfie was the third-party event actor and went from there.”
Her brows scrunch. “I’m not sure what that means.”
“Alfie hacked the email system of a third-party vendor company that Monroe used and sent out an invoice to Monroe acting as the company but using a bogus payment system. Basically, he intercepted what would have been a legitimate transaction and rerouted the payment to a numbered offshore account. Monroe paid it, not realizing it wasn’t legitimate, and weeks later, the intercept was discovered.
I’m not sure what tipped your father off that it was Alfie, but that led to your father secretly investigating Alfie for about a year as he built a case against his, at that time, CFO and best friend.
Essentially, Alfie embezzled money from Monroe, acting as another company. ”