Page 56 of Rules of Association

“Fuck no,” I hissed as I fumbled around with the settings, trying to stop it before it detonated. My shaking had returned, making fumbling around with this alarm’s more complicated settings difficult, but finally after what seemed like hours, I got it to turn off.

And then there was silence.

Well, there was still the blaring of the external car alarm Con had put on my car last year and I think there was some kind of ticking going on from somewhere in the cellar, but I might as well have been sitting in a library because I couldn’t hear anything aside from the sound of my own breath.

It was ragged and uneven and sporadic, my mind unable to catch onto any coherent thoughts. Now that I was free, I didn’t know what to do next. It had been minutes since that last bang and I could still hear my car blaring from outside. Maybe the guy had turned tail and run.

I should get up.

I should get up and go to the doors and let myself out and drive myself home. I should get in the shower and wash this rollercoaster of a day off and vow to myself to never walk from the shop to the shelter again. I should put one foot in front of the other andget the fuck up.

But every time I tried to lift myself out of that corner, my knees buckled and sat me back down. I cursed at myself for being so unsteady. I shamed myself for being so stupid. I pleaded with myself to just get the fuck up and go home. If I could make it home, I would be okay. I just had toget up.

But I couldn’t.

How could I when I didn’t even know if I wouldmake ithome? That woman today, she didn’t know if her granddaughter would make it home. So many people had no idea if they would live or die at any moment. No clue what was waiting on the other side of their own cellar doors.

I couldn’t get up, so with shaking hands I did the next right thing my brain would allow.

I called someone who would get up for me.

Chapter Fourteen

CONNOR

“Please release us,” Clay groaned as he laid his head on the table in one of Ferguson Enterprises' many conference rooms.

Clint, the initiator of this meeting and the reason we hadn’t already given it a rest, ignored our brother. Instead he just continued thumbing through the mountainous pile of files he’d been working at on his side of the room. “Less talking, more looking.”

“We are never going home are we?” Clay grumbled but picked up another file folder, nonetheless.

We were currently hand-cycling every piece of information that was supposed to have been recorded in the years leading up to Clint’s take over as CEO. Why? Because we still couldn’t get into the goddamn file.

Okay. Maybe I was being a little dramatic. The original file Clint sent over, I cracked into only a few hours after I hung up with him. The problem was once I did, I noticed something weird about it. So weird, that I went digging deeper into the rest of the server before even running my suspicions by my brother.

It was the right move.

Turns out things were just as bad as I thought. Someone was indeed hacking into old files at Ferguson and changing them. From the looks of it, they have been for a while. And they were doing it in a way that was an almost identical to how I secure our files. The only reason I even noticed it is because of this random file Clint needed access to. He still hadn’t told me why, but with the newfound knowledge that there was someone somewhere fucking with us, I had a feeling that it wasn’t just for shits and giggles.

And now, half in the dark but half aware that something was up, Clint was telling us that we needed to know exactly what was being changed.

It was almost insulting that behind all of this, I still hadn’t been able to trace the changes back to a source yet. Whoever was messing with us was covering their tracks well, making me look like a dipshit in the process.

Especially when it came to my mother.

You could only imagine how certain someones took the news that an unknown source was hacking into the Ferguson network and changing the integrity of old financial documents.

DocumentsIwas supposed to be guarding.

Spoiler, the first someone (Clint) was furious. He blamed me and the“stupid”computers, before he ultimately blamed himself. Always the martyr.

Second spoiler, the other someone (my fucking mother) was livid.

“Connor,” Mom had said through teeth that were so smashed together, I was afraid they’d break. “You insisted on doing this job. What is the point of you doing it, if it's not done right?”

“Mother,” I had said through my own teeth. The video call we were on bolstering my confidence as it served as a barrier between me and the real woman. “It’s impossible for me to catch everything. It’s even harder for me to catchanythingwhen you refuse to actually listen to my advice.”

“Oh?” Throwing her hands in front of her she gestured wildly at me. “Well please, advise us son.”

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