My Stepbrother's Dirty Little Secret novel Chapter 31

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.

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