Page 47 of The Honeymoon Hack

“Will and I have played a lot of Forza and F1,” I blurted, my cheeks heating. “So it kind of felt natural. But apparently not too natural, since I just plowed into a wall.”

“Who’s Will?” Jake asked.

“My bestie,” I said automatically, still busy getting my car back on the track.

“Husband, you mean?” Claire’s voice carried a note of curiosity.

Oh, shit. “Yeah, I’m still getting used to that. We only got married a couple of weeks ago.”

The race ended with Claire in first and me somewhere in the middle after my crash. She set down her controller and stretched.

“Thanks for the race,” Claire said. “I should grab some food before Davy’s gets too busy, then hit my rack.”

Hit my rack?That was an odd turn of phrase for a data analyst.

“See you tomorrow,” Sandy-Sarah called as Claire headed for the exit.

The moment she disappeared through the doorway, the group’s dynamic shifted.

“Has she given you the Claire treatment yet?” Ken asked me.

“The what?”

“Her security interview thing,” Jake explained. “She treats every new employee as if she’s conducting background checks.”

“She’s so fucking intense,” Sandy-Sarah said, shaking her head. “Remember when someone left a server rack unlocked last month? She wrote a three-page report about security protocols.”

“With footnotes,” Mr. Glasses added. “Who footnotes an internal memo?”

A snort-laugh escaped me before I could stop it. “She wrote footnotes?”

“Did you know she built our Wi-Fi monitoring AI?” Sandy-Sarah continued. “Like, the whole system. From scratch.”

I almost spit out my iced tea. “Shebuiltthe AI?”

“Apparently, it was some kind of personal project,” Jake said. “Management loved it so much they implemented it facility-wide.”

Building surveillance AI wasn’t typical data analyst work. It required advanced programming skills, a deep understanding of network architecture, and, most importantly, a security mindset that prioritized monitoring over privacy.

“Or when she tried bypassing the HSMs during her second week here,” Ken added. “Pardeep nearly had a stroke.”

My stomach dropped. “She tried to bypass the Hardware Security Modules?”

“Yeah, some kind of ‘security assessment,’ she claimed,” Mr. Glasses said with air quotes. “Scared the hell out of management. Apparently, she got really far before they stopped her.”

How far exactly? How did Claire’s hacking skills compare to mine? If she’d failed to breach the HSMs, did that mean the vulnerability was genuinely secure, or had she simply lacked the right approach?

If Claire had already tested that avenue and presumably failed—since the HSM system was still in place—it meant that potential infiltration routes might be completely closed to us. But why would she be probing the facility’s defenses in the first place?

“She got white-level access faster than anyone I’ve heard of,” Jake said. “Usually takes years to build that kind of trust.”

“Record time, according to Pardeep,” said Ken. “Makes you wonder what her background check looked like.”

“Or she’s got some kind of special arrangement with Moss,” Sandy-Sarah suggested.

“What kind of special arrangement?” Ken asked with a smirk.

“Ew, he’s like sixty,” Mr. Glasses said.