My Stepbrother's Dirty Little Secret novel Chapter 18

Gianna

━⊰ ❦ ⊱━

R. Capone

I stopped in front of it.

The pain in my feet pulsed, my fingers tightened slightly around the papers. Then I raised my hand and knocked.

The door didn’t open with a handle. Instead, a sharp, loud buzz echoed through the wood, and the lock clicked open on its own, just like his bedroom door.

I pushed the door open, and the office was huge. He was sitting behind a massive black desk, his back to the window. He was leaning back in his chair, a phone pressed to his ear.

"...The Ministry doesn't care about 'potential' threats, Elias," his voice reminded me of the words he said to me last night, "They want the behavioral AI to flag the target before he even buys the burner phone. If the algorithm isn't predicting the movement with 99% accuracy, the contract is dead. Fix the back-end lag or I'll find someone who can."

I stood there, my feet throbbing as I held the folder out, my hand shaking just a little.

Without stopping his conversation, Raphael reached out. He took the folder from me without a word, his eyes still fixed on the wall as he listened to the man on the other end of the line.

"No, I don't want excuses," he snapped, "I want results. The facial recognition analytics are showing a three-second delay in the subways. That’s enough time for someone to disappear.”

He flipped the folder open.

While he talked, his eyes began to move. They didn't just read, they scanned the pages like a laser. He reached out with his free hand and grabbed a red pen from the desk.

I watched, my heart sinking into my stomach, as he began to multitask. It was like his brain was split into two different worlds. One world was dealing with high-level surveillance, and the other was destroying my hard work.

Scratch.

The red pen moved across the first page. He didn't even slow down his speech.

"The risk scores for the offshore accounts are too high," he said into the phone, his eyes narrowing at my chart, "Lower the threshold. We need to see the anomalies before the banks do."

He circled the word improve—the word I knew was wrong. He didn't just circle it, he drew a thick, angry red ring around it. Then he moved to the next line. He underlined a sentence where the grammar was messy. He crossed out a whole paragraph where my voice-to-text had messed up the meaning.

Red marks started to fill the white paper like blood.

He flipped to the second page. His eyes stopped on my rebuilt model, the graph I had worked so hard on. For a split second, the red pen stayed still. He looked at the numbers. He analyzed the math, his brain crunching the logic while he continued to tear apart the man on the phone.

"If the Ministry pulls out, Elias, you're the first one I'm cutting loose," Raphael murmured, his tone so cold it made me shiver, "Don't call me again until the predictive loop is closed."

He slammed the folder shut.

He didn't hang up the phone yet. He kept it to his ear, listening to the man scramble to apologize. For the first time since I had entered the room, Raphael looked at me. His eyes were dark. He looked at me, then looked down at the red-stained folder in his hand.

He tossed the folder across the desk. It slid over the smooth surface and stopped right in front of me.

Red marks covered both pages.

Circles.

Lines.

Notes in the margins.

“The math is good.”

My chest loosened slightly.

“The rest of it is embarrassing.”

Heat rushed straight up my neck.

Raphael leaned back in his chair, “You’re supposed to be translating technical analysis,” he said calmly. “This reads like someone fell asleep on a keyboard.”

His chair moved. The quiet scrape of it against the floor made my stomach twist as he stood up, buttoning his suit jacket smoothly.

Raphael walked around the desk slowly, the red pen still in his hand. I suddenly felt very aware of how large he was.

Tall, broad shoulders and too close. He stopped beside me. I instinctively took a small step away. He followed and the distance disappeared again.

Raphael flipped the page open between us. The red circle around improve stared up from the paper.

“You wrote this sentence three different ways,” he said, “And still managed to make it wrong.”

He leaned slightly closer as he spoke. I swallowed. Raphael’s gaze lifted slowly from the page to my face.

“You’re a senior in computer science, correct?”

I nodded once, “Yes.”

His eyebrow lifted a little, “Then explain something to me,” he raised the paper between two fingers and took another step closer. My back brushed the edge of the desk.

There’s no space left!

My brain screamed at me but I couldn't get a single word out.

He tapped the chart with the red pen, “How does someone capable of building this model…” the pen tapped the numbers again, “…write like this?”

My throat tightened, words crowded my head but none of them came out right. Raphael watched my silence then he stepped closer. His height blocked the light from the window behind him, his shadow fell over the desk. Over me.

Men did that.

They used their size and strength like a weapon, as if space belonged to them like the rest of us were supposed to shrink.

I hated it.

God, I hated it.

But my body didn’t move, it never did.

The office suddenly felt smaller, much smaller.

“The numbers are the only reason I didn’t throw this away,” he said quietly, “Because the writing certainly isn’t.”

My heart began beating faster, the sound loud inside my ears. Raphael leaned down slightly, closing the space between us until I could feel the heat of his body. Our faces were only inches apart now. His eyes moved slowly across my face, studying every reaction like he had all the time in the world.

Waiting.

Watching.

Something in my chest snapped tight.

Before I could talk myself out of it, I lifted my hand and pressed it against his chest. The fabric of his suit was smooth under my palm, but the muscle beneath it felt solid as stone. I pushed him back just enough to break the space between us.

A clear message.

You don’t get to stand this close.

Raphael moved back easily, like the pressure meant nothing to him. His gaze dropped to my hand where it rested against his chest. For a second he simply looked at it.

Then his eyes lifted back to my face.

A slow, amused smile spread across his mouth, it was not the calm, professional expression he had been wearing behind the desk.

This one looked familiar.

The same bastard from last night.

The same man who enjoyed pushing people just to see how they reacted.

After a second I pulled my hand away, once the distance between us felt safe again. My fingers curled back around the folder as I lifted my chin slightly and looked straight into his eyes.

I wasn’t going to step back.

I wasn’t going to shrink.

The message stayed in the silence between us.

I’m not afraid of you.

Not you.

Not your size.

Not your games.

Raphael watched me for another moment, the amusement still sitting faintly in his expression. Then the warmth disappeared from his face like a door shutting.

“Fix it,” he said, “Tomorrow.”

He tapped the folder once with the red pen.

“Or find a different career.”

His gaze held mine for one final second, before he tipped his head towards the door.

“Get out.”

──━⊰ 𓆙 ⊱━──

The door to my room closed softly behind me as Jules slipped inside. She was already wearing pajamas, with a bag of chips crinkled in her hand.

She climbed onto the bed and sat cross-legged beside me, immediately grabbing the report.

Her eyes widened, “Whoa,” she flipped the page, “Did someone attack this with a marker?”

I leaned back against the headboard and rubbed my face with both hands, “It’s bad.”

Jules slid off the bed without a word and walked to my desk, pulling my chair out like she had done this a hundred times before.

Which she had.

“Laptop,” she said.

I pushed it toward her.

The document opened on the screen. Red notes from Raphael’s pen were scribbled across the printed pages beside it. Jules leaned forward, chewing on a chip while she read the sentences slowly.

Her lips moved slightly as she sounded out the words.

I grabbed my phone and took a photo of the report page. The text scanner app pulled the sentences into digital text, then began reading them through my earbuds.

“…this model demonstrates earlier demand detection and improve shipment planning accuracy…”

Jules stopped chewing.

“Improve?”

“I know.”

“It should be improves.”

She typed quickly, fixing it.

The robotic voice kept reading the paragraph. I listened carefully while speaking corrections quietly toward the phone.

Jules snorted, “Did you just write ‘shipment lizards’?”

I grabbed the keyboard, “That’s not what I said. I said logistics.”

She leaned back in the chair laughing, “Apparently the computer heard reptiles.”

I fixed the word and kept listening to the audio playback.

Jules leaned closer to the screen, pointing at another sentence, “This one sounds like Yoda wrote it.”

I groaned, “Just fix it.”

She deleted half the line and rewrote it with simple words.

“You think too much,” she said casually.

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