My Stepbrother's Dirty Little Secret novel Chapter 14

Gianna

━⊰ ❦ ⊱━

I stood in front of the full-length mirror, my hands shaking so much I had to tuck them under my arms. I was dressed in a white button-down shirt and black slacks.

I spent ten minutes pulling my hair back, brushing it until every stray strand was flattened into a sleek, tight bun at the nape of my neck. I wanted to look sharp. I wanted to look like the kind of girl who never made a mistake, someone who saw the world in perfect, straight lines.

But my world wasn't straight lines. It was a jumble.

I looked down at the thick leather folder on my bed. Inside were my documents, my official transcripts and my resume. Every time I looked at the letters on the page, they started to dance. "Data" looked like "Date." "Linear" looked like "Learner."

I thought about my mom. I thought about the way she bragged at breakfast, her eyes shining with pride. Top of her class. A genius. A 4.0 student. Every word she had said felt like a heavy stone being added to my pockets. I had lied to her for years. I wasn't a genius. I was just someone who worked ten times harder than everyone else because my brain didn't work the right way. I spent my nights staring at screens until my eyes bled, using every trick and software and hack I could find to hide my dyslexia and dysgraphia.

I wasn't brilliant, I was just a really good actress.

And now, I was going to perform for the scariest audience in the world.

Raphael.

The thought made my stomach do a violent, sick flip. I grabbed the folder, my fingers digging into the leather. I could almost hear his voice already, mocking me, calling me out in front of everyone.

I took a deep breath, trying to push the sick feeling down. I checked my reflection one last time.

"Fake it until you make it," I whispered to the empty room.

I picked up my backpack, and walked toward the door, my heart hammering against my ribs. I was walking into a war, and the only weapon I had was a pile of lies and a bun so tight it was giving me a headache.

───── 𓆙 ─────

The elevator ride up to the top floor felt like being in a rising coffin. My stomach stayed on the ground floor while the rest of me climbed higher and higher. When the doors finally slid open with a soft ding, I was met with a wall of glass and steel.

The lobby of Orion Vector Technologies was huge. It didn't look like a normal office. It was all white marble and black metal, looking more like a high-tech spaceship. Right in the center was a massive digital screen glowing with the day's schedule and scrolling lines of data.

I stopped in front of it, clutching my folder to my chest. I looked up, trying to find my name among the lists of government meetings and security checks.

And then it happened.

The bright white light of the screen hit my eyes, and the black letters started to break apart. My name didn't stay still. The ‘G’ slid over the ‘i’, and the ‘n’s started to flip upside down until they looked like ‘u’s. It looked like a jumble of sticks and circles. I blinked hard, my heart starting to race. Come on, focus, I told myself. You know your own name.

But the more I stared, the worse it got. I couldn't tell if they had spelled it right. To anyone else, it was just a list. To me, it was a moving puzzle I couldn't solve.

"Can I help you, miss?"

I jumped, turning to see a receptionist behind a long desk. She looked perfect, not a hair out of place.

"I... I'm here for the eight o'clock," I said, my voice sounding tight.

She checked her computer, "Ms. Toricelli? Mr. Capone is waiting for you in the main room. Through those doors and to the left."

I nodded and walked toward the heavy glass doors. My heels clicked loudly on the floor. I pushed the doors open and stepped into a room that was almost entirely windows.

The whole city of Chicago was spread out below, but I didn't care about the view. All I saw was the long black table in the middle of the room.

And Raphael.

He sat at the head of the table, a laptop was open in front of him, casting a faint glow over the sharp angles of his face. His suit was perfectly tailored, the kind that looked like it had been made for his body alone.

A pair of thin reading glasses rested low on his nose, softening nothing. His dark hair fell slightly over his forehead, just enough to look careless, even though everything about him was precise.

His jaw was rough with a shadow of stubble, and the faint crease between his brows showed how deeply he was concentrating on whatever was on the screen. One hand rested near the keyboard, the veins along the back of it visible under the warm light covered in ink.

He didn't look up when I walked in.

"You're two minutes early," he said, his voice cold. He finally looked up, his dark eyes boring into mine. He didn't smile, "I like people who don't waste my time."

He turned a second monitor around so it was facing the empty chair across from him. The screen was filled with lines of code, thousands of small, flickering characters.

"Sit," he ordered, "Before we look at your paperwork, I want to see if you can actually do the work. There’s a bug in this script. It’s breaking the surveillance flow. You have ten minutes to find it and fix it."

I sat down, my legs feeling like they were made of wood. I looked at the screen, and my breath hitched.

The code was dense. It was a wall of text with no spaces, no breaks, just endless lines of symbols and letters. To my dyslexic brain, it looked like a bowl of alphabet soup. The characters started to swim and crawl over each other. The ‘s’ turned into ‘8’, and the brackets looked like teeth.

I felt a cold sweat break out on the back of my neck. I couldn't even read the first line, let alone find a mistake in a complex AI algorithm.

Raphael leaned back, crossing his arms over his chest. He tapped his finger against his arm, watching me.

The numbers in the corner of the screen started counting down.

09:58

09:57

The ticking wasn’t loud, but it might as well have been a hammer inside my skull. I leaned forward slightly, staring at the screen. The code was still a solid wall. Lines and lines of letters, symbols, brackets, numbers. My eyes tried to follow the first line, but the characters slipped over each other like wet paint.

An s turned into an 8.

A bracket bent the wrong way.

The word stream looked like starem and then steam and then something else entirely.

My fingers curled slowly in my lap.

Okay.

Breathe.

I blinked hard and looked away from the code for a second. The huge windows behind Raphael showed the whole city spread out below us, but the sunlight bouncing off the glass towers only made my head feel worse.

When I looked back at the monitor, the letters were still moving.

09:21

My throat tightened.

I couldn’t read it like this.

I knew that feeling well. It was the same feeling from school when teachers would hand out a worksheet and everyone else started writing immediately while I sat there staring at the page like it was written in another language.

But code wasn’t like normal words. Code had rhythm, patterns, shapes. And shapes… I could understand.

Slowly, I reached forward and touched the mouse. Raphael didn’t move. I could feel his eyes on me, but I didn’t look at him. Looking at him would make my brain shut down completely.

Instead, I highlighted the entire block of code.

Blue filled the screen, then I scrolled fast. The lines blurred together into moving bands. Dark and light shapes repeating again and again.

There.

Something in the pattern snagged my attention.

Most of the script had the same spacing. The same structure. A line would start, indent, close, indent again like steps on a staircase but halfway down the screen the rhythm broke, just slightly.

I squinted. The letters still swam when I tried to read them normally, but the shapes didn’t lie.

That section looked... crooked like someone had kicked one stair out of place. My heart beat a little faster. I leaned closer.

07:43

Okay.

Okay.

I dragged the window wider so the lines stretched across the screen. When the code got longer, it was easier for my brain to see the structure instead of the letters.

I didn’t try to read the words, I watched the shape, bracket, indent, command, close, bracket.

Again and again.

Then—

There.

My finger hovered over the trackpad.

One bracket pointed the wrong direction. It was small, almost invisible. To most people it would probably look normal but the pattern was broken.

My brain liked patterns. It held onto them the way other people held onto sentences. I clicked the line and moved the cursor slowly across it.

The letters still blurred, but I knew the structure.

Open.

Close.

Open.

Close.

Except here, my stomach dropped.

The bracket was backwards, not just backwards. It was sitting in the wrong place, pushing the rest of the line forward like a domino.

The room felt hotter by the second.

Without thinking about it, I reached up and loosened the top buttons of my shirt. The collar had been pressing against my throat, and suddenly it felt like I couldn’t breathe properly.

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