My Fake Billionaire Damaged Boyfriend
Chapter 11

Izzy

I don’t know why, but Dimitri holds my hand as we head up the stairwell of my apartment building. It’s not a very big place, and unlike the tower where he lives, it’s a grungy little building filled to the brim with renters and rats.

Unlocking the door, I’m not proud of the mess of boxes on the floor still, or the array of unfinished unpacking gear in the kitchen nearly taking up what little counter space I do have left. There’s old navy paint on the walls, dented and scratched white from people and objects knocking into it before my time here. The floors don’t match, and I’m not sure who picked two different sets of oak shades of flooring, but I can only imagine it came from the clearance isle at the nearest home improvement store.

Beyond all of that, and the pathetic cot of a bed in the room nearby, Dimitri doesn’t seem to care. Instead, he launches forward to the far window, gripping the screen on the device that might be my second-best invention yet.

“What is this thing?” he asks, his eyes wide while he turns over the box of a computer screen in his massive hands, “This… this is an old microcomputer. How do you have one of these, Izzy? They are from the nineties.”

“Another gift from my parents,” I admit, “But this is going to help us break into the software.”

His eyes seem to glint with the realization as soon as I say it, “Because it can’t access the internet? You don’t have it set up yet?”

“I never have,” I breathe, “It’s never touched the internet before. Which means—”

He bounds across the living room, scoops me up off the floor, and pulls me into his arms so my feet no longer touch the ground. With a quick spin, I can’t help but settle into his strength, my lips falling naturally against his. He k****s back with more vigor, the intensity of his tongue damn near unbearable, but I love it too much to stop him.

When I come up for air, we both blush, and he releases me once and for all.

Landing on unsteady knees, I straighten my posture and blush through the awkwardness of such a moment. “Okay, we should probably focus on the software.”

“Yeah, yeah. Of course. Whatever you say, Kitten.”

Pulling up a spare chair, he slides into the desk beside me, and I turn on the computer to the cute little ringtone it always offers. His smile is so cute and short, like he’s reliving something that was lost in his past. I know he mentioned he is thirty-six, so it makes sense that he probably had one of these growing up, but he comes from money.

I bet he upgraded every chance he got, while I was stuck with the original.

I pull out the cardboard box in glossy ink print and take out the drive of Ivica software. I bought it in the hopes that becoming familiar with the software would get me the job, but I ended up not needing it until this moment. Popping the floppy disk into the monitor, it hums as it disappears, and the screen comes alive.

“Okay, only problem now is that I can’t use the internet until we’re ready to do some damage.”

His brows pinch like he’s not following. I don’t wait for the questions; I just start with the explanation.

“If I mess with the software like this, it’s only going to ruin my version. If I connect it to the mainframe once we’re inside, and take a wrecking ball to the code, then Alek will feel it on his end.”

He eventually nods knowingly and replies, “Oh, okay. I get it. So, can you hook up your little backdoor replaceer to this thing?”

Biting my bottom l*p, I retort, “No. We have to manually replace the engine.”

“F**k,” he g****s, “That’s going to take a while.”

“Maybe. But it’s going to be worth it.”

He nods, his hand clutching my thigh, “It’s going to be worth it,” he repeats, “Well, little hacker Kitten. Get to it.”

I start my dive into the software, losing track of the world around me for what feels like light years. My head is on a constant humming cycle, my brain rattling and shivering in my head while I work to break into the system. It’s an easy thing to replace the code past the typical customer’s window, and I make it inside the guts of the software fairly quickly.

Now, it’s just about getting to the engine and breaking into the darker side of things. My fingers are number-rummaging through the endless code, and the zeros-and-ones are starting to make me dizzy. Eventually, I come across the odd cursor of a break in code and I sigh in relief while I rest my head down on the desk.

“Finally. I found it, Dimitri.”

When I don’t hear movement, or his voice in reply, I begrudgingly sit up. Peering around the living room, I nearly jump out of my chair, seeing the once wasteland is suddenly well put together. My body shudders in shock, the coffee table is adorned with a lit candle that I didn’t know I had, and the small bistro set of a dining table is screwed together and sturdy—unlike how I left it in pieces and in boxes.

Turning the corner into the narrow kitchen, all the boxes are broken down and placed into a neat stack and tucked away near the trashcan I didn’t know I had. His sleeves are rolled up, the fabric bunched around his muscular, tattooed arms while he reaches for the top shelf of one of the cabinets, putting away dishes that have yet to be used.

I take in the sight, feeling like I stepped into a portal of an unknown world where the floor isn’t littered with cardboard strips, and the countertops aren’t covered in half-popped bubble wrap.

When I finally replace my voice, I ask, “Wh-what have you doneto my apartment?”

He gives me a puzzled look before coming back down to earth with his arms crossed over his god-like chest, “Well, for starters, I put together your dining room table. What have you been doing; eating on the floor?”

Scratching the back of my neck awkwardly, I can already tell the guilt is alive and well inside of me. He can see it, too.

“I have a desk in the bedroom,” I breathe, “I eat there.”

“Yeah, next to the expensive setup of monitors? You could spill something and short that whole setup, Izzy.”

“I didn’t ask for a lecture, I just came to tell you I found the backdoor manually.”

“Good,” he sighs, “Let’s get to it, then.” He shuts the cabinet door on his way out of the kitchen, stopping so my back presses to the inner sheath of the doorway while he practically traps me in this spot. His arm hooks over my head, his chest brushing mine while his free hand drapes under my throat to steady my gaze onto his. “You need to take better care of yourself here, Kitten.”

“I can take care of myself just fine. I’ve been doing it a long time, Dimitri.”

He hardly seems convinced, leaning in for a k**s that I can’t help but avoid.

If his lips touch mine now, we will end up in bed together again—and I don’t need another distraction right now. Pulling free of his magnetic lure, I slip away and settle back into the office chair, my eyes land on the search engine. From here, it’s all standard. But once I connect to the internet, we will have a very short amount of time to gather information and shut it off.

Even I can’t trace the untraceable, and we need to make a big enough impact on Alek’s software to get his attention and to pull it away from the fact that Dimitri and I have been hacking from his house. It’s not too complicated of a plan—it’s the execution I’m worried about.

“Alright, Kitten. What’s the plan now?”

I stare at the search engine curiously. “Well, I don’t know. We need to make enough damage that he notices it, and that it pisses him off. We just can’t let it last too long. I don’t want any shot of him tracing this back to us.”

He nods in firm agreement, “Alright. Makes sense to me. How do you want to do this then?”

Biting my bottom l*p, I nearly chuckle to myself. “If it’s a search engine for names, that means there’s a database in here, right?”

“Yeah, of course. Why do you ask?”

“I say we flood it.”

His smile goes coy, “I like this already. But what can we flood it with?”

I shrug, tipping backward in my chair to hear it squeak methodically, “We could paste a bunch of funny photos inside of it.”

“Okay, okay. Good start. What if the flood links to cookbooks or something? We can paste in the most boring literature imaginable.”

“I don’t have your company how-to-code book on hand, though.”

His eyes narrow, “How did you even know we had a how-to book to begin with?”

Biting back a snicker, I reply with, “Well, Alek uses it to prop the office doors open. They’re big and heavy enough to hold the doors open, and boring enough to skim through when you’re pretending to work. I found it on the shelf.”

“Oh, you’re so funny,” he taunts, “Let’s try something a little less damning towards me.”

“Good point.”

Tapping his chin, I can see the lightbulb flicker over his head, “Oh, I have the best idea.”

Readying my fingers over the keys, I give him a steady nod, “Alright. Let me hear it.”

“We should flood it with punk rock music.”

I c**k my head, unsure how we would even do that, “Wait, you want to flood it with music? You own a punk rock club. How would he not figure out it’s you breaking in?”

“It’s Seattle, Kitten. It’s the only music that matters around here. Besides, we jam-pack the engine with it, we discombobulate the algorithm with it, and he will be too annoyed to notice the words are lyrics. I have whole folders full of music and samples that I keep on hand for the club; just in case something happens to the sound system. We can wire my phone into the system, copy the files over, and let Alek rock out to some good tunes.”

I can’t help but laugh, “I would love to see him get mad over that.”

“Good. Let’s do it, then.”

He pulls out his phone, and I get ready to plug in the computer to the internet line. With the countless wires we have strung onto this system, and the half-unsure looks in our eyes right now, we hit the system all at once, flooding the engine with information and shifting the focus from bidding information to hard rock music and turbulent drum solos.

I crash the system so badly that the code comes to a frozen halt, the screen dimming through green and purple streaks until it’s clear that this isn’t going to work anymore. I take the internet cord off, shut down the software, and close out the application altogether.

I stand back, admiring my work, and Dimitri does the same, his hand resting lazily on my lower back.

“Well, I guess that solves it.”

“Yeah,” I whisper, “Hopefully it gets his attention off our first hack.”

“You just have to get stuck when he tells you to track this down, alright? Act confused and play the part well. Any slip up, and he will suspect you’re involved. I need you safe, Kitten.”

“And I need you to stop calling me that,” I sigh.

He shakes his head, the software flickering away to darkness at last, “Not a chance, Kitten. You know my stance on this. Curiosity and the cat; remember?”

“This isn’t curiosity. This is hacking into a dirty system and trying to cover our asses while we do it.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. Good thing you have seven lives, Kitten.”

He’s not wrong.

I’m going to need them all to take down Alek Ivica.