My Stepbrother's Dirty Little Secret novel Chapter 16

Raphael

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The Minister of Defense had been speaking for twelve minutes and thirty-two seconds.

A blue map of the city flickered on the wall, covered in red dots that moved and changed as our behavioral AI predicted the next hour of traffic and crime.

I sat at the head of the long glass table, my hands folded. To everyone else, I was listening. I was the CEO of Orion Vector Technologies, the man who sold them the future. But inside, my mind was running a different program.

An image of Gianna flashed across my brain.

It was like a static screenshot.

I saw the way the light hit her hair. It was a light brown color, pulled back into a bun so tight it looked painful. I remembered the small, stray strands that had escaped near her ears. Then there were her eyes, bright green, wide, and full of a panic she couldn't hide.

My mind moved down to her face. Her skin was pale, her lips looked full. They had been trembling slightly when I stepped behind her chair.

I looked at the Minister, nodding as he spoke about data encryption, but I was actually seeing the white fabric of Gianna’s shirt. I remembered the moment it opened. I saw the curve of her breasts, the soft rise of her skin against the harsh office lights.

The memory remained fixed, like a three-dimensional model rotating slowly in the dark space behind my eyes. It was not a pleasant memory, just a precise one.

The tactic itself had been obvious.

She had been cornered by the problem on her screen. The code maybe had trapped her in a loop she couldn't escape for a few minutes. The pressure of the deadline had tightened around her. So she reached for the simplest tool available.

Distraction.

A button opened.

Then another.

The human brain was easy to manipulate if you understood where to apply pressure. Most men would have looked away from the logic on the monitor. Most men would have looked exactly where she wanted them to. It was a crude move. Low level. The sort of thing women used when they realized they were losing.

"Mr. Capone? Your thoughts on the facial recognition lag?" the Minister asked.

I blinked, the image of her nervous face fading back into the dark corners of my mind. I didn't care about her fear. I didn't care about the way she looked. She was just a new piece of hardware I had brought into the building. A piece of hardware with a glitchy history and a very pretty, very desperate face.

“The lag is irrelevant. The delay you’re seeing is a visual buffer on the interface. The actual processing time happens on the backend servers. That system has already been optimized.”

The Minister frowned slightly, “How optimized?”

“Enough that you’ll never notice the difference,” I replied. I let two seconds pass before finishing, “It will be ready by Monday.”

I went back to the meeting, but the screenshot stayed in the background. The green eyes, the lips, the open shirt. It wasn't a memory I enjoyed. It was just data.

I leaned back in my leather chair, my eyes tracking the data lines on the wall, but my fingers were restless. I tapped my index finger against the arm of the chair.

Every part of my brain wanted to open a new tab. I wanted to dig. I wanted to see the truth behind those green eyes. My company was built on knowing things before they happened. I had the tools to pull up every text she had ever sent, every photo she had ever taken, and every grade she had actually earned in middle school.

My skin felt tight with the urge to just type her name into our deep-search engine and watch her whole life spill out in black and white. My fingers actually itched, a sharp, annoying prickle under the skin.

But I stopped. I curled my hand into a fist until the itching went away.

I looked across the table at the empty seat where my brother sometimes sat. We were Capones. My brother was the head of the family. He had given his word that this girl was to be treated as one of us. Our father had brought Hazel into our home, and Vincenzo had placed Gianna under our protection.

In our world, words were the only thing that kept the floor from falling out from under us. If a Capone gave his word, it was law. If my brother said she was off-limits for a deep-dive, then she was off-limits. We didn't spy on our own. We didn't go behind each other’s backs. To betray his trust was to break the family, and a broken family was a dead one.

I forced my hand to go flat on the table. I wouldn't run the check. I wouldn't use the satellites or the bank records. I would respect the line my brother had drawn in the sand.

"The meeting is over," I said, standing up.

I stood up and left the meeting room without saying a word to the men behind me. I walked down the long hallway until I reached a door that looked like a solid slab of silver. There were no buttons and no keyholes.

I pressed my thumb against a small glass square on the wall. A thin line of green light scanned my skin, reading the tiny loops and lines of my fingerprint. With a soft hiss, the doors slid open. This was my private elevator. It didn't go to the lobby. It didn't go to the parking garage.

I stepped inside and the doors closed. I didn't press a floor number.

The floor dropped. We zoomed past the lobby, past the basement, and deep into the dark earth beneath the city of Chicago. When the doors opened again, the air was different.

I walked into the hub.

This was the heart of the Chicago Outfit. Above us, people thought Orion Vector was just a tech company. Down here, we ran the city. The room was huge, filled with rows of black servers that blinked with thousands of tiny, blue lights.

Men in dark hoodies sat at long tables, their faces lit up by the glow of multiple monitors.

On one screen, I saw millions of dollars moving in small, silent jumps from a bank in London to a hidden account in the islands.

Another screen showed a live feed of a police station’s evidence room, a cursor moved across the screen, deleting a digital file as if it had never existed.

To my left, a programmer was rewriting the code for a city’s traffic lights, creating a "green wave" so a shipment of illegal goods could cross town without ever hitting a red light.

We were making sure the family never got caught. We were the ones who wiped the security cameras before the cops could arrive. We were the ones who crashed the servers of anyone who tried to talk to the FBI.

I walked to the center of the room, looking at the main wall. It showed a map of Chicago, but it wasn't for traffic. It showed the location of every burner phone, every tracked car, and every person who owed the Capones money.

I stood there, the blue light of the monitors reflecting in my eyes. This was my true office. This was where the real power lived.

I stopped behind a man sitting at a terminal. His shoulders instantly hiked up to his ears. He didn't turn around, but I saw his fingers begin to shake as they hovered over the keys.

"Show me the laundry list for the South Side accounts," I said.

"It's... it's almost done, Mr. Capone," he stammered. He scrambled to open a folder, "The encryption was a bit thicker than we thought. We had to—"

"I didn't ask about the encryption," I interrupted, "I asked to see it. Now."

He swallowed hard, and clicked the mouse three times, his hand jerking. When the list appeared, I scanned the numbers.

"If I see a decimal point out of place when I come back," I stated, "you won't be working in the basement anymore. You’ll be part of the data we delete."

"Yes, sir," he choked out.

I walked toward the back of the hub, through a door made of thick, reinforced steel. This was my private office, the dark heart of the basement. Inside, there was only a single, massive desk and a wall made of high-definition screens.

I sat down and tapped the glass surface of the desk. The blue lights of the hub faded, replaced by a bird’s-eye view of a massive forest.

The Void.

I moved my fingers across the desk, and the map zoomed in. I could see every ravine, every hidden trail, and every swampy patch of ground.

I leaned forward, my face inches from the screen. The forest of the Void looked back at me, but tonight, the green and brown map felt too simple. I tapped a command on the desk, and the layout changed. The map turned a deep, bruised purple and blood-red.

This Hunt was going to be different.

I moved my hand, dragging new icons across the private land. I wasn't looking for cliffs or ravines this time. I was looking for spots where the trees grew so thick the moonlight couldn't touch the ground. I marked a large clearing and added a layer to the map, a series of hidden speakers and low, red lights that would be buried under the leaves.

I wanted the woods to pulse. I wanted the ground to feel like it was breathing.

I opened a side menu of tools, items we kept in the heavy, locked crates in the estate's sub-basement. I dragged an icon for restraints to the clearing. I added tools scattered through the trees.

I sat back, my breathing a little heavier than before. I closed the file and locked it with my thumbprint.

Everything was ready.

All I needed now were the right prey to fill the dark.

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