by Jane Porter
It would be a disaster of epic proportions.
“It’s bad enough we lost that ten-billion-dollar contract,” Leo finished.
Massimo rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, hoping to alleviate the pulsing prick of pain in his forehead. He had been cooped up in here for too long. “It’s not my fault if people remember the trail of destruction Silvio left in his wake.”
It had taken Leo and him close to fifteen years to restore their family company—a multi-billion-dollar finance giant, Brunetti Finances, Inc.—to its original glory. In fact, it was still a work in progress.
For Greta, it was the family legacy, the name Brunetti synonymous with its prestige. Even now, she could call out half the skyscrapers littered through Milan that had housed the main offices of Brunetti Finances through its two-hundred-year history.
For Leo and him, however, it was the satisfaction of building it up again, bigger and better, a force to be reckoned with, after their father had almost brought it to its knees.
But...for the last six months, more than one contract had fallen through at the last minute. In the first one, they had found that an accountant had leaked their bid details. In the second one, the subcontractor they’d hired had been bought off. Leaving an unholy mess on Leo’s hands.
On top of that, there was this security breach Massimo had discovered a week ago in his own brainchild company, Brunetti Cyber Securities.
Someone was clearly targeting their business. The security breach was far too much a direct attack to ignore. If Silvio wasn’t being monitored 24/7 at a clinic with no resources at hand and no communications beyond Leo, they would know the culprit was him. Their father, once they had grown taller, bigger and stronger than him, despised being powerless.
“Are you sure Silvio’s the only enemy we have?” Leo asked, cocking an eyebrow at his brother. “What about your recent fling? She’s certainly making a lot of noise.”
“Gisela and I are done. Four months ago now.” Massimo let his displeasure show on his face. Leo had no business delving into his personal matters.
“Sì, you and I know that. Does the daughter of the most powerful banking tycoon in Italy know that? Maledizione, Massimo, the woman calls me now.”
The pain behind his eye intensified. If everything hadn’t been going so wrong, Massimo would have laughed at his brother’s expression.
Leo didn’t even give out his number to his own mistress. Who was, very conveniently, a supermodel who had a shot at the end of the world, with an expiry date of two more months, if Massimo’s calculations were right. The last one had been a CEO who met his brother once every two weeks for six months. Before that, had been a photojournalist studying migration patterns of an exotic bird species in Antarctica who went into hibernation for about ten months out of a year.
Leo seemed to have the algorithm for the best kind of mistress all figured out—distance, just as ruthless as him and ambitious. All his relationships ended on amicable footings, too.
It wasn’t that Massimo wanted a cold and clinical relationship like that. He just didn’t have the time or the energy for a deeper one. And he wouldn’t for the next twenty years at least. He doubted he knew what deep, meaningful relationships looked like, anyway. His mother and Silvio—it had been a war. Fought by her, for his sake.
“You need to do whatever is needed to make her understand,” Leo added. “Do not antagonize her father in the process.”
Massimo hated when Leonardo was right. “I’ll take care of it.”
It had been a stupid move tangling with the selfish, spoiled socialite Gisela Fiore. But after the months he’d spent designing his latest product—an e-commerce tool and its subsequent release hitting ten billion in revenue—he’d needed to play. Hard.
Which Gisela excelled at, according to her reputation. The only thing she excelled at. A torrid two-week affair had ensued. At the end of which, Massimo had been itching to get back to work. As was his reputation.
Except Gisela was still sending him alarmingly disturbing texts full of threats followed by sobbing messages. When she wasn’t camping outside the Brunetti brothers’ office building.
“Do you want to hear about the hacker or not?” he challenged Leo.
“Please.”
“I found the trail last night. I also figured out how he gained access through the multiple firewalls I built. Both times.”
“Two times?” Leo asked with cutting focus to the gist of the vast problem on their hands.
“Sì.”
“Cristo, you’re a freaking genius, Massimo. How is that even possible?”
It wasn’t arrogance that made Massimo nod. Computers were his thing. The one thing he was the master of. “The hacker is obviously extremely talented. A true genius, no doubt.”
Leo’s curse exploded in the basement. A few minutes later, his brother was all business again. “But you have the proof tying it to this person, right?”
“Sì. I used the bots to piggyback onto the malware he—”
“Normal people words, Massimo, per favore,” his brother said with a smile, for the millionth time in their lives. “Words a small brain like mine can understand.”
As always, a spurt of warmth jolted through his veins at Leo’s joke. His brother was no fool. But when Massimo had been at his lowest, Leo, with his words, full of concern and praise, had urged him toward realizing his full potential. “I have proof. I have even triangulated the hacker’s physical location. New York.”
“That’s fantastic. I can arrange for a meeting with the commissioner in a half hour. He’ll get the cybercrime division involved. We’ll have the hacker behind bars by tonight and the identity of whoever orchestrated this—”
“No. I don’t want the polizia involved. Not yet.”
“What? Why the hell not?”
“I’ve already figured out a cyber club where this hacker plays. I’ve established contact.”
“Contact with the hacker? Why?”
Massimo shrugged. He couldn’t exactly put it into words—curiosity, thrill, even a certain amount of camaraderie. The hacker intrigued him. “I want to get to know him. Learn how he operates.”
“Dios mio, Massimo, he breached our security. Twice.”
“Essattemente! He could do it again and again. You have to admit that there’s something...fishy about the whole thing. None of the clients’ financials were leaked. I have bots working everywhere they could be sold, like black markets, on the Dark Net. They haven’t surfaced anywhere.
“It’s as if the hacker is taunting me, playing with me. He’s hard to pin down.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Let me develop a relationship with him. Let me get into his head. When I know how he works, how he’s doing it, I’ll spring the trap.”
“I want your word that he won’t hit our servers again.”
“You losing faith in me, Leo?” he taunted, that resentment in him finding voice. Reminding him that Massimo wasn’t still the always sick runt their father went off on whenever he was on one of his frequent alcoholic tirades. That he wasn’t the younger brother running to his older brother’s arms to hide from his father. That he was the computer genius who’d designed products that generated billions in revenue.
Leo paused at the high-tech sliding doors, frowning.
“Give me a week and I’ll give you the hacker, his life story and the proof of his illegal activities, all tied up with a bow like a Christmas present.”
“A week. At the most,” Leo pushed back. “I want him behind bars.”
One week later
Massimo stood outside the cyber club exit—a metal door of undistinguishable color at the rear of a dilapidated building in one of the run-down neighborhoods of Brooklyn. A far cry from his penthouse that overlooked Central Park that he’d left behind an hour ago.
March snow carpeted the parking grounds in the dark alley, thankfully suppressing the odors emanating from the vast trash containers that stood two feet from him.
The hacker, he’d found, was very much a creature of habit. Unlike Massimo, and much against the popular culture’s rendition of a chaotic, free-spirited genius. Two evenings a week, the hacker came to this club, at exactly eight minutes past nine p.m. and stayed for exactly forty-three minutes. Before going completely off-line.
Like a junkie allowing himself a very strictly mandated and measured fix.
Massimo hadn’t found him anywhere else.
Which meant all Massimo had had were two sessions of forty-three minutes to get to know how the guy operated. And he had. Hackers were a mysterious and antisocial bunch, and yet boastful, too, especially someone at the level at which this particular one operated. All he’d needed to do was compliment him on his modification of a security challenge posed by the master of the club. He hadn’t quite owned up to the breach but the connection had been made.
His heart fluttering against his rib cage like a caged bird, Massimo tucked his hands into the pockets of his trench coat. Adrenaline hadn’t hit him this hard since the release of his latest software product. No, that wasn’t true. The last time he’d been this excited had been when he’d shored up the tunnel this very same hacker had created into BCS.
The metallic whine of the heavy door made his spine lock. Buffeted by the collar of his coat against the harsh wind, Massimo watched a slight figure swathed in black from head to toe, a dark contrast against the snow clinging to every crevice and roof of the building, walk down the steps.
The howl of the frigid wind pushed the hood away from the figure’s face, revealing a delicate jawline with a wide, plump mouth. A too-sharp nose and a high forehead. Broad but sharp cheekbones. A pointed chin. Slender shoulders held an almost boyish figure with long legs swathed in black denim and knee-high boots.
Jet-black hair, wild and curly, the only thing that betrayed the fact that she was a woman. No, the soft fragility, the sharply delicate bones, couldn’t be mistaken for a man.
A painfully young, delicately beautiful woman.
It couldn’t be her... This fragile young woman couldn’t be the hacker that had taken down his firewall, could she? Couldn’t be the diabolically intelligent computer genius that Massimo had been chatting up for the last week. The hacker that Leonardo wanted behind bars pronto. The one who’d kept him up for a fortnight now, given him sleepless nights...
Not a single one of his girlfriends had ever done it.
He laughed, a harsh bark that sounded loud in the silence.
Like a deer caught in the headlights, the hacker’s feet frozen in the snow, her face turned toward him.
Brown eyes with long lashes alighted on his face and paused. He saw her swallow, felt that gaze dip to his mouth and trail back up to meet his eyes. A soft sound, almost like a kitten’s sigh, filled the silence around them. Followed by the soft treads of her boots as she returned to the car.
No, he wasn’t wrong.
He’d even had a quick chat with the hacker from his car before he’d stepped out. He...or she had been inside that building. On an impulse, Massimo grabbed his tablet from the car and sent a quick message through the chat boards.
It wasn’t a sure thing since the hacker never used the chat boards outside of the cyber club. And yet, Massimo had teased him today with a glimpse of the new security software he was building for Gisela’s father’s company. He knew the hacker had been intrigued, had even stayed beyond the forty-three minutes he usually allowed himself.
Vitruvian Man: I can show you the double encryption layer for the new design.
His heart raced. Dios mio, he felt like a teenage boy waiting for his first kiss.
The woman paused, pulled her phone out from the coat jacket. Massimo realized what it meant to wait with bated breath.
His tablet sent out a soft chirp that sounded like a fire alarm in the dark silence.
Her reply shone up at him.
Gollum: Not tonight, thank you. My time’s up. Maybe next time.
The message flashed on his screen and a smile curved his mouth, a flare of excitement running through his veins.
So polite, he’d thought during his chats with her. A certain softness buried even in the software jargon in contrast to the ruthlessness with which she’d attacked his firewalls.
It was her.
She was the hacker he’d been chasing, the hacker who it seemed was truly Massimo’s match.
In the few seconds it took him to accept this new discovery, and course-correct his strategy for her, she’d reached her car.
His long legs ate up the distance. The tightening of her shoulders made him stay a few steps from her. He didn’t want to scare her. Not yet.
“Why Gollum?” he said, keeping his tone soft, even as anger and excitement roped through him. “Why not Aragorn, or Gandalf the Wizard?”
She turned. Her eyes ate him up, her breath coming in short, shallow spurts that had nothing to do with the cold. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
When she made to pull the driver’s door to her beaten down Beetle, he crowded her. Still not touching.
The subtle scent of lavender filled his breath, a jarring thread of softness that made him breathe hard. He lifted his phone, the screen showing the chat boards. “I know who you are. I have proof of what you did to Brunetti Cyber Securities. Every last bit.”
The smile faded from his face just as the innocence dropped from hers.
The pointed chin lifted up, the expression in her eyes clear and sharp. “What do you want?”
He let the full power of his fury settle into his words. “Your purse, please.”
She looked at the sea of white snow around them.
“There’s nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. I recommend doing as I ask.”
Slowly, she pulled a wallet out of her back pocket and handed it over.
“Natalie Crosetto,” he said loudly. The name reverberated in the silence, and he breathed a sigh. “You’ve led me on a merry chase all over the internet, Ms. Crosetto, and now, I will run this game. We will go back to my hotel and you’ll explain to me why you’ve been attacking my systems.”
“No!” She took a deep breath. “You’re a stranger. You can’t expect me to let you just...kidnap me!”
“What do you suggest, then?”
“My home. Please. Tomorrow morning.”
“I didn’t take a trip over the Atlantic to let you escape me once I found you. We’ll go to your home if that offers you a modicum of security. You’re free to keep your cell phone and dial the police if you feel a threat to your person at any point, even.
“But you’ll answer each and every one of my questions and you will do so tonight.”
That stubborn chin raised even as her mouth quivered. Scared, and yet she challenged him. “Or else what?”
“Or else you’ll be behind bars tonight. I will even let you call the cops yourself. And you’ll stay there for the next decade, if I have anything to say about it.”
Copyright © 2019 by Tara Pammi
ISBN-13: 9781488044649
His Shock Marriage in Greece
First North American publication 2019
Copyright © 2019 by Jane Porter
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