I wished it on every woman to have delicious aches in places that shouldn’t protest every time you moved if you were going to be sitting in an un-cushioned chair for most of the day. Fortunately, they were nothing a hot shower and some yoga wouldn’t cure. Feet on the floor, I snapped up my robe, went to the bathroom, threw some logs and kindling in the fireplace, getting the heat going. Once, I checked the iPads Brocklyn had no problems with leaving plugged overnight and found nothing that needed my attention, I plopped down in front of the fire to exercise.
In the middle of a lying hug stretch, the name sounding about right for the pose I was in and bare assets out for the world to see or rather Brocklyn, who ascended the stair. He spied me working out and missed a step or three. “Motherfucking biscuits!” discharged as down he went, taking an unintended seat in the center of the staircase.
Up I got, half out of my mind, racing up to him. “Brocklyn! Are you okay? Where does it hurt?” Frisking him for injuries, he sat quietly until I was somewhat mollified he was fine and cupping his jaw in both hands. “Brocklyn, if anything hurts, you have to speak up.”
His mouth cocked back, thirty-two pearly-whites on full display. “I told you, you were going to kill me, woman.”
I reared back. “Brocklyn, it wasn’t my fault you forgot how to walk down the stairs.”
His eyebrow arched. “Wasn’t it?”
On my knees a step below, I plopped my hands on my hips. “No!”
“Okay, fine. In the morning, I’ll be the one in front of the fire with all my God-given gifts spread wide as the fire accentuates each nook and cranny between my legs. Let’s see if you remember how to do stairs.”
I envisioned it as he narrated and we couldn’t be falling down steps daily. “Yeah, no, don’t do that. I’d miss the whole flight of stairs and faceplant at the bottom. I’ll work out in one of the bedrooms from now on.”
“Yeah, nooooo, don’t do that,” shot out of him in a hurry. “I’ll keep still and watch until you finish. Better yet, wake me so I can be there from the beginning with a front row seat and cup of coffee.”
“Perv!” My insult was tailed by a small grin.
He snatched me to him. “I wasn’t the one biting my ass cheeks last night, so who’s the bigger perv here?”
I did explore his body pretty well. “No, you were the one biting my ass cheeks and second set of lips… and nipples and—”
“Okay, I get it. I’m the bigger pervert.”
And he was the faster kisser because his lips joined me the second he was done speaking. The spot before the fireplace became a location for activities other than yoga. When winded and thoroughly fucked fast and furiously, Brocklyn carried me right back up the steps for another quick hot bath as he threw breakfast together.
I was seated at the table when he transferred hot grits, scrambled eggs and bacon to me. We ate and talked, learning that his childhood and adulthood wasn’t as glamorous as I supposed it was just because he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He was raised in a single-parent home with a weekend father that wasn’t there most weekends, couldn’t be faithful to save his life, but encouraged independence.
His mother was off on a worldwide cruise for the next few months and he didn’t want to trouble her with his crisis, wanting to handle it first. I didn’t agree—family deserved to know about crucial matters. We weren’t ever going to agree on that, so I changed the subject.
“I had two foster parents. They weren’t worth a damn though. If they had been, I might’ve avoided some of the trouble I got into with my, um, ex.”
Brocklyn scooped grits with eggs chunks in his mouth. “What kind of trouble?”
I pointed at the devices strewn around the table. Apprehensive about his reaction, I gave account of how I became a hacker under Javion’s tutelage. At the end of that tale, Brocklyn was furious, just not with me.
“Are you fucking telling me that he introduced you to hacking by having your rob your foster parents and dump the money in a government-issued bank account for you?”
Verifying, I bobbed my head. “Many times. The small takes were overlooked. When taking the whole check got me arrested, I realized how stupid I had—”
“Deidre,” he bit out. “don’t you dare finish that sentence. You were fifteen when he chose you for grooming. The bastard was eighteen, an adult or supposed to be who knew better.” Brocklyn threw back his glass of juice like it was a shot of whiskey. “He shouldn’t have been dating you let alone taking advantage of you and your situation. You were targeted. Fucking piece of fuck!”
Reaching across the table, I took his hand in mine, attempting to soothe him. “I’m okay. I know exactly what he did. He played me, waited ‘til my situation was dire and pounced. But, karma is a bitch. He did ten years for robbing a corporation at the same cabin I abandoned his ass at when a snake crawled out of an old couch into my lap. I took the car to get back home where the cops were waiting. I didn’t tell them he put me up to the larceny, but they had been watching him for a while, which is how I got on their radar.”
I could laugh about that now, so I did. “I told them where he was though. He needed a ride anyway. They caught him red handed transferring money from one place to another unauthorized. I decided earning money was better.”
“Good girl.” Brocklyn kissed my knuckles. “The fucker comes near you again and he’ll have me to deal with.”
We were done eating, so he swept away our dishes. Pecking me on the temple, he left to check the gas level on the generator and hunt more reptiles that weren’t playing by the ‘tenant’ rules. Shudder! I became immersed in the digital puzzle his finances and freedom were twisted up in, finding nothing new. Lunch and dinner magically materialized on the table for me. Night fell, bringing in the new morning. Brocklyn lingered nearby, waiting for me to hit another dead end before leading me upstairs.
The rest of my days washed, rinsed, and repeated. Wake up, have sex in numerous positions and places at different speeds after I exercised. Eat, chat, do tasks befitting our stations in life, make love, bathe, then sleep. Sometimes, not in that order. Some things remained the same. Every day, I fell a little more in lust and closer to in love with him. He and DeAngelo’s daily chats gave me a deeper insight into their relationship. They would die for one another, as it should be, and it was nice to know Brocklyn had that in his world.
On my last day at the cabin, close to the time he’d fix lunch, an iPad beeped, signaling the completion of a program’s task. At this point, I had given up on being victorious in the war against Brocklyn’s foe. The son of a bitch or just bitch was just too good.
Maybe, I should have kept my hacking skills sharpened and downloaded the latest software.
Well, I didn’t, was going to have to find the culprit the hard way—scrolling down a digital trail logged in a file for later reviewing if I wasn’t lucky, which I wasn’t since the IP addresses search was a fruitless endeavor. “How in the hell do detectives do this shit every day?”
I wasn’t going to find anything by talking to myself and staring at the iPads still running programs being thwarted by superior malware imbedded deep in the Devereauxs’ systems, refusing to budge. Opening the file, I started the tedious search in forty-eight months’ worth of dated transactions and amounts for not one but two firms.
Quickly, purchases for trips taken back to back snagged my attention and just looked shady as hell. The more I scrolled, the more this phenomenon turned into a regular occurrence for one attorney, Karena Espinoza.
“Damn, is she immune to jet lag?” I asked no one.
Brocklyn was chopping wood again. I promised myself I would get up, close, and personal with that before going home… whenever that was. I wasn’t in any hurry. Brocklyn probably wasn’t going to kick me out. DeAngelo hasn’t demanded I get my ass back to work.
“He won’t do that. This is his brother we’re talking. You mean you’re talking about. And I will keep Brocklyn’s feet on free ground so help
me God.”
So, I was staying put in the cabin until I couldn’t.
Because I had nothing better to do than read through never ending lines of transactions that seemed benign at first and second glance… Let’s just face it, I was bored to tears. It would be much more fun to look up the actual receipts and their contents in the systems of stores where the purchases were made, in different cities all over the world. Except, I didn’t get the business owner’s permission to enter their finances.
Where would the fun be in that? the evil spirit on my shoulder petitioned.
“Let’s get a closer look at what Karena actually likes to spend her employer’s money on.”
With password cracker software, it was like taking candy from a baby when breaking into gateways with firewalls that supposedly kept even the government out. Not possible, big brother wouldn’t stand for that. I trolled the system, cackling at the stupid woman who was going to get pink-slipped for submitting travel expenses masking things offices don’t need. Lingerie, expensive wines, lattes…
Okay, that last one was valid. Lawyers didn’t get much sleep, but why would one woman in Brocklyn’s firm spend copious amounts of time in café’s worldwide if her office was based in the KY? Logically, people visited cafes every day, some all day, but something about her expenses were awfully bothersome. One, she drank heaps of coffee. Two, why was she out of town so much?
God willing, my suspicions weren’t putting two and two together, batting a thousand with developing tunnel vision on Karena. Still, I couldn’t let it go. Most people went into cafes for three reasons no matter what side of the world they were on: company, coffee, and free internet access that didn’t discourage entering systems anywhere else in the world without consent. But , if you were up to no good, what would make cafes, international ones at that, a good place to go repeatedly?
I bit into my blunt-shaped thumb nail, fishing my brain. Nothing but the free Wi-Fi in cafes kept coming to the forefront. Scowling at the taste the acrylic nail left in my mouth, I put the nasty nail to better use, tapping on a nearby iPad on the table, its screen long gone black from inactivity. Not anymore. My mindless tapping animated the device. Instinctively, I looked down at the screen coming to life. A log of the IP addresses I followed nowhere and everywhere all over the world were opened, leaving me at square one. Letting my eyes roam the room, I went back to thinking about the lure of free Wi-Fi in cafes all over…
I froze then blurted out, “The world!” “Motherfucker! It was right there, all you had to do was look at the damn employees closer, Deidre. You’re losing your touch.” I’d have smacked myself if my hands weren’t occupied already, grasping for the iPad with access to Brocklyn’s systems.
Delving deeper into Karena’s complete employee file and every single expense for the last two years, she worked under him as an associate, one rung down from partner. Matching several IP addresses I’d tracked uselessly to the places she visited internationally, I knew what was bothering me about her excessive café- trips. With each different location, café, home, or company, IP addresses changed. That would throw off anyone tracking a digital trail from the information highway. Checking the history of the device itself used to connect to the internet in diverse countries would’ve saved time if we had a suspect from the start.
We didn’t, and that wasn’t the worst of it. I assumed, even after warning Brocklyn about doing that very thing the day I got here, that an IP address scrambler was being used to misdirect me, when it wasn’t. Too many IP addresses were coming up because Karena had been to too many places. I made a rookie mistake by simply assuming I knew her moves. I was human though, and guilty of pointing the finger at technology when Karena simply took the hard way, the lesser road traveled to conceal her device’s location: hiding them in plain, honest sight for me to misread all on my own.
“You’ve found her ass though, Diedre, and that’s all that matters. Now, bring this bitch to justice for Brocklyn.”
Pep talk over, I had work to do.
Chapter Nine
~Deidre~
As I typed and dug into Karena further, my mind wondered why she would target Brocklyn. That begged the question, was she a scorned bed buddy of his. Diving deep into my feelings about that, I came to the conclusion that the bitch better get over him and quick if they had dated or just bumped uglies. Whatever. He had the right to call things off when he was no longer interested. She had the right to move the hell on.
She was also stunning, more of his type than me: white, bone-straight blonde hair, blue eyes, and telltale asymmetric features of a classic beauty. Hell, she was even model-thin, but couldn’t be in two places at one time. The brothers assumed—there was that word again—that there were two people planted in each firm working in cahoots. To get a fair outlook at what was possible and what wasn’t, and stop the damn assuming, the opposite side of their assumptions had to be taken into consideration too. Which meant…
“One person could be causing all this chaos.” I pondered how to be in two places at one time with the right info to upend a life because you just felt like it.
“What…” I roused the iPad opened to DeAngelo’s systems.
“If…” I entered Karena’s full name.
“It was one person with enough knowledge of both brother’s firms’ operations?”
The file took longer than I liked, about two seconds too long, to load. It wouldn’t be loading at all, instead blinking ‘no search results’ at me immediately, if she wasn’t in the system. Her file popped up as I suspected it would though. She had four years under her belt at DeAngelo’s firm, starting in the IT department. Internet Technology meant access to passwords, new and old, to any computer in an office. And IT department was a hacker’s playground. She had a college degree and six years’ experience in IT.
“Fuck,” I groaned, “Brocklyn never stood a chance.”
Karena’s accomplishments didn’t stop there. She took the bar two years ago, switching jobs to junior attorney. When Brocklyn left DeAngelo’s firm, so did she strangely.
Karena was ticking too many boxes and smart, brilliant enough to use assumption on someone else’s part to cover her tracks. Guessing Brocklyn would know why she made those tracks in the first place, I snapped up the tablets with her details and loped for the front door.
“Brocklyn!” I yelled from the porch.
“Come to the back, baby!” his swift answer reverberated on my right side.
‘Baby’ melted my insides to putty, to do with what he wished. Over our days and nights together, I began trusting him to do the right thing by me and to be honest with me. Absolutely assured he would, I hopped off the edge of the porch quickly, retracing the direction his voice took to me. He bent over the generator at the moment off, refilling it with gas. The snow crunched under my feet rhythmically as I made my way to him. He glanced up long enough to smile at me then put his attention back on his duty.
I stopped beside him, levitating the tablet with Karena’s latest photo taken for his office records under his face. “Who is she? If she’s a bed buddy, then just be honest. No secrets.”
Narrowing his eyes at the photo, he grimaced. “Karena Espinoza. She… Goddamnit!” He thrust the gas can away, snagged my hand, and ran back the way I came.
Panicking, I dashed after him to keep from getting dragged. “Brocklyn, what is it?”
“DeAngelo!” He tossed over his shoulder.
What about DeAngelo, who Brocklyn never called that? What did he think happened? I asked that too, growing more concerned with his silence. He jumped the porch then glimpsed behind him at me hurdling it too. When satisfied I had cleared it, he was off again, solo that time.
“What do you need?” I screamed after him as he vanished in the cabin.
“A phone!” came back at me who was swerving around the corner of the doorway on one leg.
“Mine is on the kitchen table!” Immobilizing in the heart of the living area, I implored, “Please tell
me what is going on?”
“She’s not my bed buddy, she’s DeAngelo’s ex from high school?” And a patient stalker who’d been set off.
“Well shit,” I uttered.
Brocklyn was more than frantic, he was frenzied, casting things away if it wasn’t what he was looking for. When he found the sat phone behind the improvised Wi-Fi box, he fumbled it in nerveless fingers. I went to him before he destroyed the thing or dropped it accidently.
“Brocklyn, let me do it while you catch your breath, baby.” I didn’t wait for his compliance, snatching the phone from him and dredging up the last-dialed list.
DeAngelo’s phone began ringing in my ear. Brocklyn paced. I rubbed his back. He walked out of my range only to walk back in it again as if needing solace but couldn’t keep still to get a sufficient amount of it.
Third ring, DeAngelo picked up. “I’m a little busy here, Diedre. I have—”
A woman’s hysterical plea of, “Let Me Go!” drowned him out.
“Karena Espinoza,” I supplied dryly. “I guess the shit hit the fan today.”
Whatever Karen wanted, she’d made her play for it.
Brocklyn rushed to my side, flipping the phone sideways so we both could hear. “Lo, are you safe?”
“Sort of, brother,” he said a little too calmly. “I have this crazy bitch face down on my desk, waiting for security and the cops to arrive. She’s been watching you, Brock!”
“I’m not crazy!” Karena screeched, “I love you, DeAngelo! I did it for you! He was making our family look bad with his sleeping around!”
“Does that nut have an inside voice?” I enquired for my eardrums’ sakes.
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