Page 7 of In Love With Mr. Wrong

“Grayson,” she says without looking up. “You should be asleep.”

“I could say the same to you.”

Her fingers keep moving, swiping through lines of data, voice clipped and low. “I found it.”

That makes me stop. “Found what?”

She turns the tablet toward me. The screen glows with access logs, timestamps, and a set of names I immediately recognize.

“You were right,” she says. “Somethingiswrong with the system. But not in the way you thought.”

I stare at the logs. There, buried between routing commands and authorization calls, are three matching internal IDs. All tied to beta patch overrides.

“Who is it?” I ask, though my gut already knows.

“Alana.”

Alana Beckett. One of our senior engineers. A trusted team member. A developer Margot personally recruited three years ago.

“She had root access,” Margot says, rising to her feet, still clutching the tablet. “She bypassed the ethics flag on our secondary review model. She’s been pushing live updates directly to the core match engine.”

I run a hand through my hair. “Why?”

“I don’t know yet. But she hid the changes under your name.”

My blood chills. “She forged my login credentials?”

Margot nods. “It was meant to look like a performance tweak. A few algorithms adjusted for user sentiment calibration. Nothing that would’ve triggered the system’s compliance alerts. But the changes affected long-term pairing models. They created matches with deeper emotional hooks than were originally calculated.”

I exhale slowly. “So people were being paired… too well.”

She looks up at me, her expression torn between triumph and dread. “Yes. Intentionally. To generate emotional feedback loops. Increased dependency. Obsession in some cases.”

My jaw tightens. “She weaponized love.”

Silence hangs between us. Margot moves away from the desk, walking toward the windows, her bare feet silent on the marble. She presses her hand to the glass like she’s grounding herself against the skyline. Her voice is lower now, almost a whisper.

“I don’t know how long she’s been doing it. I don’t know if she’s working alone. But the changes… they were smart. Subtle. This wasn’t sabotage to destroy us. It was sabotage to reshape us.”

I move to stand beside her, close but not touching.

“What do you need?” I ask.

She doesn’t answer at first. She’s staring out at the lights of Manhattan like they might blink a solution back at her.

Finally, she says, “I need space. Somewhere safe to finish investigating. I need time without distractions, without press, without board meetings or PR spin. I need to do this before anyone else finds out.”

I nod. “Okay.”

She blinks, caught off guard. “That’s it?”

I meet her gaze. “That’s it.”

A long pause stretches between us. The kind that’s too heavy for the room but too honest to ignore.

“You don’t have to come,” she says quietly.

I shake my head. “You’re not going alone.”

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