Page 12 of Filthy Little Fix
He'll hate that.
"Took you long enough," I say. I don't move, don't even try to hide the smirk that wants to creep onto my face. "I found it. You've got a rat."
He furrows his brows, and it takes him a moment to take his eyes off my crotch. He steps inside, pulling the door shut behind him. This is the real conversation.
"What are you talking about?" he demands.
I finally look up, meeting his gaze. "You're getting bled. Every Tuesday. And it's someone on your payroll. Someone with access to your core systems." I look down, aiming at a specific page "Thisrsyncbackup you're using is calling an external domain. Sending sensitive data out. It's a professional job, disguised as a maintenance task."
Mr. D's eyes narrow, dark and heavy.
"Show me," he growls in a mixture of rage and disbelief.
I don't bother with words. My wrists are still cinched tight behind my back, so I just tilt my head, pointing my chin towards the pile of papers on the floor, specifically at the one I just mentioned. It's page 73, if he bothers to look.
He stares at me for a long moment, trying to bore holes into my skull, trying to find fear. He won't. I don't have it.
Finally, he snaps his gaze to the papers. He doesn't move towards them, just glares as if the paper itself might bite him.
Mr. D, however, doesn't utter a word. His eyes, which moments ago seemed intent on burning me alive, now simply drift away. He turns his back on me and walks out of the room, the metal door groaning in a searing protest as he shoves it open. He doesn't close it. Just leaves.
Luca stares after him the whole way, rooted to the spot. I can feel his gaze saying,what do I do with this lunatic?Mr. D didn't give him any orders, and his desperate discomfort is palpable once Luca's eyes fall back on me.
The silence is heavy and strange. I stare at him. He stares back.
The cold of the cement feels more intense on my knees, and my hands, still bound behind my back, tingle.
He's perplexed. He doesn't know what to do at all. His eyes are fixed on me as they would be on some caged supernaturalentity. He glances at my crotch. Then at my face. He frowns. Too bad I can't give him the show of a hard hostage anymore.
I almost smile.Almost. My body isn't cooperating much with the displays of dominance right now. That insistence, that familiar warmth… it's gone. I don't think I could stay hard analyzing code and picking apart other people's screw-ups. I preferred it when they punched my face and stepped on me.
Luca takes a step to the side, then another. He doesn't know if he should guard me closely or keep his distance. He's a mafia man—ofaction, not of babysitting an insane hostage. But, if I didn't know better, I'd say he's evenscaredof me.
Then, we hear it.
First, a muffled shuffle of heavy footsteps coming from the corridor, mixed with a low, almost inaudible hum that I identify immediately. Two voices murmur, one higher pitched, the other deep and impatient. From the door Mr. D left open, a man with glasses appears.
Luca straightens up, hesitant. The noise grows louder, and then Mr. D himself emerges in the doorway, pushing the bespectacled man forward. He stumbles over his own feet and almost drops the laptop—with a Linux penguin sticker—he's carrying. Behind him, another man, also carrying a thin, powerful notebook.
They reek of disinfectant and anxiety, these two library rats. Nothing like Mr. D's brutes.
"On the floor. NOW," Mr. D orders. The two nerds freeze, terrified. "You know what happens to those who waste my time, don't you?"
The man in glasses, already thin, shrinks even further. The other one pales completely. They stumble to their knees, clumsy, fumbling to open their laptops with trembling hands. Their fingers look like jelly as they try to power up the machines.
"I want that vulnerability. Now. In front of me. Every line of code." Mr. D steps closer, his gigantic shadow swallowing them whole. "If I have to repeat myself... if I have to wait one minute longer than necessary... I will use these laptops to break every bone in your hands. Understood?"
The nerds' shoulders hunch. One of them swallows hard, his throat clicking. I feel a tingle, a prickle of something akin to pleasure. Oh, if all that rage were directed at me… threats sound so sweet in his voice.
The man in glasses types something quickly. "The firewall logs look normal, Mr. Dante."
I chuckle. So Mr. D isDante. Probably the older one.
"You won't find anything in the firewall," I say. Mr. D's eyes snap to me, blazing. "It's always the arrogant ones who use Linux. You can tell by the way he types." The man in glasses glares at me. Mr. D doesn't give a damn about my observation. "The vulnerability isn't on the surface. It's something disguised as routine. Page seventy-three, backup script." I nod with my chin toward the scattered papers. "Around the middle of the page, in line 400."
The man in glasses, visibly irritated but too scared to retort, starts leafing through the mountain of printed papers scattered on the floor. "But how do you?—"
"He said page seventy-three," Mr. D cuts him off without hesitation. His eyes, for a split second, fix on mine. The same rage as before, the unpronounced confusion, and a challenge. It's the hotter thing that's happened since these codes ruined the night.
