My Stepbrother's Dirty Little Secret novel Chapter 213

Chapter 213

I froze. I wanted to reach out. I wanted to say her name. My hand actually twitched at my side, my fingers wanting to brush against her shoulder just to see if she was still breathing.

I felt the eyes of the other employees on me, and I forced my face to stay blank. I swallowed the apology that was burning in my chest and pulled my shoulders back.

I turned away from her, and went back to my office. I sat at my desk and pulled the tablet toward me.

I went back to the log that had made me lost my shit. 1-8-H-P. She had written it as 7-B-4-9.”

My fingers flew across the glass, pulling up her files from last week. Then the week before. I opened her report on the server downtime. I opened her notes on the neural bridge. I laid them all out side-by-side in glowing blue windows, my eyes darting between the columns of data.

Every time there was a “b,” she had eventually swapped it for a “d.” If a sequence had a “7,” she skipped the next character entirely.

In the bridge logs, she hadn’t just gotten the sequence backward, she had mirrored it.

I pulled up her very first report and there it was again. A “6” turned into a “9.” A “p” turned into a “q.”

I looked at the notes she’d made in the margins. The handwriting was tiny, cramped, and repeated over and over.

The intelligence was there. I could see it in the way she tried to bridge the gaps. She had built her own system to try and catch the mirrors, a balances that no one without a high IQ could even dream up but there was something holding her back.

And then, I moved the screen to myself and did what I always do the best, my finger moved.

I typed Gianna Toricelli.

The cursor blinked waiting for me to hit enter and strip her life down to data points and bank statements.

I could map her entire history in three clicks, every school record, every debt, every secret she thought she’d buried.

I stared at the name for a long heartbeat, then I hit backspace until the screen was white.

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