Page 3 of Left of the Slash
After a moment of silence, Olivia’s perfectly manicured eyebrows shoot to the top of her head. “Well, don't all speak at once. Does anybody care to explain how this happened? It’s a breach of contract on our end, which opens the door for the judge to drop us and potentially sue. Once he goes, others will surely look to follow. Obsidian isn't some giant corporation that can withstand a massive fleeing of clientele. Our contracts are nowhere near big enough, so we can't afford this or the negative publicity that comes with it. So, somebody speak up and tell me how the hell this happened.”
I'm the new guy on the block, so instead of blurting out my opinion, I wait for the veterans in the room to make their voices heard. But they don't. I look at each face sitting at the table, and none of them looks like they want to say anything. It only takes a second for me to realize what this is.
Mutiny.
They don't like Olivia, and they hate that she is inexperienced in cybersecurity, so they'd rather watch her drown than throw her a life raft. Without their input, she will surely sink to the bottom of the ocean, and they're all making sure she knows it. Jon is the most experienced person here, yet his eyes are glued to the table like he's watching his favorite show on the polished wood. It’s a tense, muggy situation that makes the room feel sticky.
“Well?” Olivia blurts out. “Doesn't anyone have anything to say? You all worked hard for my father for years, now you've become mute all of a sudden? Jon? You've got nothing? You're supposed to be my right hand man. Nothing to say? No evidence to show? Not in the mood to prove how you're more equipped for this job than me?”
Jon says nothing. He doesn't even look at her. I glance at Nick and Stephen, and they've begun mirroring Jon by staring down at the table like children being scolded by their mother. Jon is clearly the ringleader of this fucked up little circus, and for reasons I can't explain, I don't like it.
Eden looks like she feels so sorry for her new boss, and it’s obvious that no one will come to Olivia’s aid in her moment of need. Are they all willing to risk Obsidian going out of business just because Jon didn't become CEO? These men would rather burn the house down than let it be led by a woman. This is ridiculous, and I can't let it go down this way. These assholes are trying to freeze out the female CEO, and something about that feels like sandpaper chaffing my fucking skin.
My father's name is Quincy King. Thinking about him is hard because of how things turned out. He's in prison now, but before he found himself knee-deep in debt to Philadelphia gangsters, he was a good dad who raised me by himself after my mother left us for a man whodidn’tsteal money for a living. And even though she left us, my father always taught me to respect women. He never let me speak ill of my mother, even though there were times where I was furious with her for abandoning us like we were nothing. No matter how mad either of us got during conversations about Mom, my dad never allowed me to disrespect her, and he never did either. I learned a lot from my father, and while some of it was not good, he made sure I knew that men are not supposed to hate women. The world is full of these types of men—assholes who can't come to terms with their own fragility, issues, or sexuality and take it out on the “weaker” sex because it makes them feel stronger, but they’re really weak. They're coconuts—hard on the outside, soft as fuck on the inside—and it’s my job as a man who respects and cares for women to expose the gooey center of these assholes.
I clear my throat and sit up straight. “It’s a DAV.”
Olivia’s eyes shoot over, her brow still furrowed but with less intensity. “Excuse me?”
“A DAV … direct action virus,” I restate. Now everyone is looking at me, especially Jon, whose gaze has tiny fires forming behind it.
“Andyouare?” Olivia asks.
Not exactly the response I was expecting, but okay.
“Quinn King,” I answer. “I’m the new CSE.”
Olivia tries to melt me with a gaze as hot as the sun before asking, “I don't recognize you. Who hired you?”
Jon sighs and cuts in before I can respond. “I did, and he was promoted, not hired. We needed to fill Peter’s vacancy, and young Quinn here was the most qualified.”
“Young? Just how young is he, Jon?” Olivia asks as if I'm not even in the room.
“Twenty-seven,” Jon replies. “Just eight years younger than our CEO.”
Jon’s last words suck any remaining warmth out of the room, and I see Olivia’s muscles go rigid. She clenches her jaw but forces herself not to reply in the angry way I can tell she wants to. I recognize that move. I do it all the time.
“I see,” she says, practically grinding her teeth. “Okay, Quinn King. Can you elaborate?”
Jon sighs and rolls his eyes, and I see Stephen fight back a smile because they know what a DAV is. They have been in this game long enough to understand the lingo, but Olivia is clearly brand new, and I know both of them will return to this moment in a later conversation between the two of them—a conversation that will label Olivia an idiot for not knowing what she’s doing.
“Yeah, a direct action virus … it’s really simple, actually,” I explain with all eyes on me. “Once it was downloaded to the email server, the virus copied the judge’s emails every time he rebooted the system and sent them to the hacker. All incoming and outgoing emails were at the hacker’s disposal, and he clearly chose to leak the most damning ones.”
Olivia scoffs. “Well, if it’s so simple, how did it get through our firewall? We’re supposed to be a company that protects our clients from this sort of shit.”
I clear my throat at her cursing again. Maybe it’s the toxic darkness in me, but I like that shit.
“There’s a few ways it could've gone,” I say. “It could be as simple as Judge Knight clicking something he wasn't supposed to and granting access to the virus, downloading it himself by complete accident, or it could be more complicated—like Obsidian’s security protocol being lowered somehow. Thatwould take some savvy hacking skills, but it’s possible if the hacker was determined enough and had time on their hands.”
All of the eyes in the room are gawking at me, but I keep my focus on Olivia. If she's as new as they act like she is, then she needs all the information she can get. Being upset about her taking her father's place won’t change the fact that she has, and I’m too new in this position to risk it over some outdated, corny ass misogyny. So, Jon can cut his eyes over at me until they get stuck that way. Like I said before, I have to be Quinn King every step of the way. Fuck what they think, and fuck their old-fashioned, out-of-touch worldview.
Olivia nods her head slowly, the muscles in her face finally relaxing a bit and letting her true beauty shine like sunlight through a magnifying glass. Fuck. She's gorgeous, and I hate it because she's my boss and Jon just inadvertently told us all that she’s thirty-five years old to my twenty-seven. I don't have a snowball’s chance in hell with her, and she doesn't look like she’d be interested in literally anyone anyway, but I’ll be damned if I'm not totally attracted to her, and that includes her icy demeanor. Some of us are just more capable of handling ice than others.
I make sure to maintain eye contact with Olivia, because it’s clear she's used to everyone else looking down at the table when she speaks with such fire, and I see the moment she nods her head.
“Is it possible for us to find outexactlyhow this happened, Quinn?” she asks.
“Possibly. It depends on how good the hacker is. We can open an internal investigation and see where it leads, which would be protocol for a breach like this, but it’s not a guarantee that we find out how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
