My Stepbrother's Dirty Little Secret novel Chapter 47

47 /103

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.