Epilogue #3
I frown at her just because it feels like the right thing to do when she makes a valid point that I have no intention of confirming. “How about I cook dinner for my beautiful wife and show you another hobby of mine that is of the culinary variety.”
“Mmm, yes, please.” She rolls away and walks into the closet, coming out in my Vanderbilt sweatshirt and joggers, her feet in thick socks that may also be mine, as they look way too big for her.
I smile in appreciation of her level of cozy and get myself dressed so I can feed her and ensure she puts her feet up tonight. She hasn’t complained about swollen ankles yet, but I’m told it’s likely to become an issue and I want to take the proper precautions.
She hurriedly starts down the stairs, but the slick wood is no match for her thick socks and her foot goes out from under her. Her startled cry pierces my heart and gets my adrenaline surging, and I manage to grab her around the waist before she tumbles down twenty-plus stairs to the first floor.
“Fuck, Paige, don’t scare me like that!” My words come out with the rasp of sandpaper against metal, harsh and rough enough to cut. My heart is hammering in my chest giving downtown construction jackhammers a run for their money, so I yank her back and wrap her against me.
Her arms are trembling as she holds me just as tightly.
“I didn’t expect that,” she breathes, her words spoken into my chest where her face is pressed.
“No more big socks without something that grips between you and the stairs from now on, hear me?” I demand into her hair.
The idea of her slipping and falling to her ass on one stair is bad, but to have her roll down the entire staircase while pregnant?
I shudder at the thought. There are too many dangers in this world that could harm my wife and our unborn child, and now I have to add the fucking stairs in this gorgeous mansion to the list.
I’m selling it. Single-level homes or nothing from here on out as far as I’m concerned. I’ll call the realtor in the morning and buy the biggest sprawling one-story in Buckhead by the end of the week. Fucking stairs.
“You are planning the demise of every sock and stair combination in the world right now, aren’t you?
Ready to exact revenge on the laws of Physics and the coefficient of friction between smooth surfaces.
I bet you’re planning on selling the house off and putting me in a place where no stairs exist.”
I look down into Paige’s face, seeing the obvious humor that is quickly replacing the fear that only moments ago had us on our knees as the weight of the possibility of what could have happened played out in our minds.
Before I can refute her very true assumptions, my phone rings. Saved by the bell? I fish it out of my pocket and see Payton’s name on the screen. Paige nods when I look at her.
“What?” I ask when I answer the call.
“Looks like our old enemies are back at it. Our network is under attack. We’ve had fifty attempts to breach our servers in the last half hour and our team is scrambling to keep our firewalls and protections in place.”
“Don’t we have the best tech systems money can buy? You built it. Why is this even a possibility?”
“Of course we do, which is why I was alerted at the first breach attempt and we know it’s happening at all instead of being something covert or insidious that we find out about later after we’re fucked.
But it seems someone, or maybe multiple entities, would very much like to access our data, likely with a financial motivation.
They could hijack the servers and demand a king’s ransom to release them, funnel money into different accounts, or just wreak havoc on the system and leave us stranded for who knows how long. ”
“Is there a way to keep them out, or is this an inevitability?” I don’t know the first thing about the tech side of our company, but Payton has his hand in everything at Olympus and runs the tech side of things like the savant he is.
“I’ve worked with the best white hat hackers to find weaknesses and shore up our systems for just this type of attack, so it’s holding right now.
Our tech department is working on finding breach points, but we’ve never encountered something on this magnitude.
It’s hard to tell if it will continue until they find some weak spot we are unaware of, or if they will change their tactics to target something else.
Right now, it’s just a full-frontal attack on every access point and if it continues, there is bound to be some sort of faltering. ”
“What should we do?” I’m fucking out of my element here. I can’t hunt down the problem and fix it with brute force or play mind games to get my way, so I don’t see the solution. If I had a name or knew even a little about who was doing this, it would be a different story.
“Prepare for something bad and hope for the best. Even if we get through this, I think it’s just the beginning.
We have too many enemies to think this will be it, and the group that attacked the mines has more than enough motivation to put on something like this, but we can’t be sure it’s them. It’s time to go to war, brother.”