Page 64 of Undeniably Corrupt

“I thought you were sleeping.”

“Same shit, Liora.”

“Fuck you, Vander. No one said you have to be an asshole when I’m simply doing my job by making sure you do yours.” I pick up a stress ball on the corner of his desk and chuck it at him. It bounces off his head, and he looks up at me in shock.

“Did you just throw that at me?”

Oh shit. I cover my mouth to stifle my laugh before I swallow it down. “You’re lucky it wasn’t a paperweight. You evidently live in that room and not at your house and are clearly avoiding me, but that’s not an excuse to go radio silent when the company needs you.”

He doesn’t look up. “The company has survived worse than my unavailability for a few hours.”

“A few?” I splutter incredulously. “You’ve been in here since Monday. It’s Thursday, in case you didn’t know that.”

“I haven’t been in there the entire time. Just for the last couple of days.”

“Good to know, asshole! And while you’ve been holed up inyour closet doing who knows what, the rest of us have been trying to keep things running. Now we have an incident and a freaking meeting all at once.”

He pins me with an icy glare. “We employ over a thousand people in this building alone. Three hundred of them are incident responders. You’re telling me I’m the only one who could handle this?”

“Who should I have delegated it to?”

“Their freaking department.”

“The CEO called you directly. I fielded the call. I thought you’d want to know. And if it’s so easy to delegate it, then why aren’t you?” My phone pings with an incoming message that I open to read.

“What is that?”

“A guy I met at the club on my last night there. He’s blowing up my phone again. Maybe I shouldn’t have given him my number or sent him that picture of me, but he was hot.”

“Liora,” he growls my name. “Now is not the time to fuck with me.”

“Oh, but it’s so fun.”

He’s not amused, but neither am I. I’m pissed and oddly and annoyingly hurt that he’s been avoiding me like this to the point where he locks himself away and stays who knows where doing who knows what. “They’re screenshots from Mr. Daniels.”

“Good. Forward them to me.”

I send them to Vander’s email and go to leave when he stops me with a curse.

20

“Fuck! It’s Cerber Spiders.”

I turn back to Vander, who is still locked at his desk. “What’s that? Because that sounds like creepy baby food.”

His eyes meet mine for a flicker of a second before they return to his monitors. “Cerber. Not Gerber. They’re a hacking ring. It’s ransomware. They’ve encrypted files and are holding them hostage along with customer information, including social security numbers, addresses, and bank routing numbers. They’re demanding payment in cryptocurrency for their release with a twenty-four-hour timeline. That was fast, though after last time, I’m not shocked they did it this way.”

“Can you stop it? Like you did last time?”

“Likely, yes.” He leans back in his chair, his arms behind his head. He looks exhausted, and my heart tugs a little.

“What about the meeting?”

He grumbles. “Text me in an hour and a half. I’ll shower and get in there.”

“Do you have clothes? I can run home.”

“I havestuff here.”