Page 248 of Love Me in the Dark

She just doesn’t know it yet.

But as I access her computer remotely, I start to plan.

I watch the blue light from her monitor flicker across her face when I activate the shitty built-in camera that comes standard in all company laptops.

She’s back at her makeshift desk, sipping from a mug that’s probably cheap and filled with bitter tasting coffee, eyes scanning lines of code like they’re something sacred. She doesn’t blink often. Doesn’t fidget. Just breathes in that quiet, measuredway that tells me she’s lived through worse than a broken patch or a snapped login chain. Calm in the middle of chaos.

The city outside her window is rotting and decrepit, barely a blip on the skyline. The walls of her apartment are thin. The pipes knock every time the neighbors flush.

She deserves more.

Soon.

I can almost taste her surrender when I finally take what’s mine.

I pull my laptop into my lap and open the internal request system.

“Asher,” I say, not bothering to check if he’s still nearby. He always is.

“Sir?”

“I want a high-tier system sent to her apartment. Touchscreen, full optimization. Our best machine.” I’m already making mental plans for her to take her place at my side.

It may take her a minute to accept it, but she will.

Just like everything else I give her.

“For her?” He doesn’t sound skeptical—just confirming. Always efficient.

“Yes.”

I type the order myself, routing it through a shell incentive program I spin up in forty seconds. “Call it... accelerated resource reassignment. Tell her she’s being rewarded for problem resolution rates. Make it sound official. Bury it in the HR stream.”

“Understood.”

“And Asher?” I glance up at him. “Include monitoring.”

He nods once. No hesitation.

The system will give me access to usage logs, keystroke analytics, audio. Video. If she disables it, I’ll know. If she doesn’t read the terms like most people don’t then I’ll have full,unrestricted access to every single thing she does. And she’ll have allowed it, all without me having to hack a computer in my own system.

She won’t see it coming.

I flick back to her file. Her most recent complaints have already been buried by lazy supervisors and underpaid interns. I delete the originals and the logs that prove they ever existed. Then I create a new department, assign it a fake extension, and route her HR profile there.

From now on, everything that touches her from her pay, shifts in her schedule, internal communication—will come through me. I’ll be her own personal assistant.

I adjust her hours again. Just a nudge in the right direction.

She won’t know it yet, but I’ve already started controlling the flow of her life.

She’ll feel it, though.

The silence between her and her managers will stretch wider.

Her inbox will grow quieter.

Her assignments will grow fewer—but better.