Page 58 of The Honeymoon Hack

I jumped, flattening a hand on the notepad in case I’d written anything I shouldn’t have.

Ken stood beside my desk, coffee mug in one hand, looking friendly and relaxed.

The total opposite of jumpy me.

“Sorry,” he said with a slight grin. “I didn’t mean to sneak up on you.”

“It’s fine. I was just…” I gestured vaguely at the screen. “Getting through these.”

“The exciting world of incident response.” Ken pulled over a spare chair and sat. “You look about as thrilled as I was during my first week. Do you have any questions about the actual system? The one we’re currently running, not the museum piece from the video?”

I glanced toward the doors. Claire had only been gone for five minutes at the most. “I asked Claire about that, but she said I need to finish the modules first.”

“Right. Thenewtraining method.” Ken’s tone made it clear he wasn’t impressed. “More efficient, apparently. We used to do a lot of job shadowing, letting newer members of the team actually use the software and see how real calls are handled.”

“That makes more sense.” Although it would make snooping impossible. “Especially for people who’ve worked in similar environments before.”

Ken followed my gaze, then gave me the same look he’d given me in the gaming room after Claire left and everyone started talking about her.

“Tell you what,” he said, lowering his voice slightly. “Let me log in with my credentials and open the quality review database. From there, I can show you how the interface works and what it’s like to chat with our clients. Sound good?”

My stomach flipped. This was exactly what I needed.

And if Claire checked my access history, she wouldn’t find anything because anything I did would be under Ken’s credentials.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

“It’s fine.” Ken was already pulling his lanyard off. He withdrew my ID from its slot, the screen went dark, and he inserted his own. “I can’t leave you alone with my access, but there’s no rule against showing a new employee how things work.”

The screen changed. New menus appeared in the navigation bar—Quality Review Database, Client Search, System Logs, and Asset Management.

Access to everything a yellow badge could see.

“This is the main dashboard,” Ken said. “You’ve already gone through the menus in the training, so let’s dig into the details. What do you want to do first?”

A too-specific request would be suspicious. Too vague would waste this opportunity. But I hadnoidea what I was looking for. If Ken weren’t sitting here, I’d search for Fenix. Then the shell companies Mum had been investigating in connection with Dad’s framing. And then the individual names. Twenty of them tucked inside my brain.

However, I couldn’t exactly type those in while Ken was watching.

“Can we search for someone famous?” I said it lightly, almost jokingly.

Ken laughed. “No celebrities in our client database, unfortunately—at least, not by their real names. But let me retrieve a client I was working with recently. They had an interesting setup with multiple subsidiary companies.”

He entered a search query, hit Enter, and the results loaded—three entries, each with a different company name but the same parent corporation. Ken pointed at the screen, explaining how the relationships were structured in the database, how authentication worked across subsidiary accounts.

I nodded along with what he was saying, but my brain was already racing ahead. As soon as he logged out, I’d lose this access. I needed to remember every detail of the interface, every menu option, in case I found a way in.

“Let’s open the recording of my call?—”

The Bridge doors opened, and Claire walked in.

Shit.

Ken stood and stepped slightly away from my desk as she approached us.

“How’s the training going?” Claire’s smile didn’t waver, but something shifted in her eyes as she glanced at my screen. “You logged into her console, Ken?”

“Just showing her the client search interface. Thought some hands-on practice would help reinforce the training videos.”