On that front he was right. Our boss, Chuck Bennett, couldn’t navigate his way out of a paper bag, let alone a computer, making his position as director of operations at an IT company a big fat joke. But Chuck the ignoramus wasn’t the one Kyle had to worry about.

“It’s not Chuck who does the looking; remember that. Not everyone is as stupid as you like to think they are,” I said, giving him a sideways glance.

He didn’t have anything to say to that, because he knew I was right.

This wasn’t the first trick my geek buddy had pulled in the office. They were minute annoyances that I took little notice of, but they drove Chuck crazy. He had gone on a total witch hunt last month after Kyle had performed a basic DDoS attack on our company website, replacing the Holt IT Solutions logo with a picture of a dog licking its ass.

Chuck had ordered my department to poke into emails and personal files on all workstations looking for the culprit.

Kyle was lucky that I had been the one tasked with sweeping his laptop. He hadn’t been particularly smart in covering his tracks, and I had gotten rid of at least a dozen scripts he had cobbled together for his kiddie hacker crimes.

I hadn’t wanted Kyle to get into trouble. He was a good guy. At only twenty-two he was decent at coding, which was what he was paid to do. We had bonded over our mutual antisocial tendencies. We were an oxymoron. Two people who spent most of our lives avoiding other people had somehow formed a semblance of friendship.

Kyle Wright was one of the few people I bothered with at all. And that was mostly because he wouldn’t let me ignore him.

Sometime last year he had decided to go full-on skiddie. Using his adequate tech savvy, he slapped together very basic hacks and attacks, and his unsuspecting coworkers had become his guinea pigs.

He had latched on to me when, after a particularly annoying email phishing scam, I had phished him back. I had shut down his computer and deleted the code he had accumulated on his hard drive. All from the comfort of my own work space. I had attached a signature. I wanted him to know that I had his number.

Normally I wouldn’t have bothered to retaliate, and I definitely wouldn’t have revealed myself to my target, but I had wanted to make a point. I had wanted Kyle to know that there were people out there who could do a lot worse and had no problem doing so.

The thing about Kyle was that he looked like the hacker you see in the movies. With hair that hadn’t seen a comb in weeks and clothes that he probably picked up off his bedroom floor, he spent his evenings playing online RPGs and piecing together open-source code to wreak havoc on the men and women at Holt IT Solutions.

But he was harmless.

He didn’t know what it meant to cause real chaos.

“Maybe if you’d finally teach me some stuff, I could come up with something better,” Kyle said, dropping his voice so we weren’t overheard.

“Or maybe you could stop playing elementary tricks on your coworkers. It’s lame,” I reprimanded him as I would a younger sibling. Kyle might have been only five years younger than me, but sometimes it felt like more.

“Eh, I’m not hurting anyone. Though I was chatting with a few people on IRC last night and they were talking about a botnet attack on a porn site. They want to pull a full-scale data breach and then post it. You know, name and shame all those dirty pecker heads.” Kyle ran a hand through his greasy hair, standing it on end.

I gave him a sharp look. “Don’t be an idiot, Kyle. You start down that road and you’re just setting yourself up for trouble,” I lectured. He had no idea what a slippery slope he was on. How easy it would be to get caught.

How easy it was to do worse if he didn’t get caught…

“I’ll be careful—”

“No you won’t. I still have to scrub your hard drive once a month because you leave so much crap behind. Pull your head out of your ass,” I interrupted. “Now, I’ve got work to do. Real work. And so do you. Use that brain of yours for something productive.” I turned back to my computer, ending our conversation.

Kyle knew the drill. “Yeah. Okay. Sorry about the shit blast. Obviously it wasn’t as funny as I thought it would be.”

He sounded dejected. I didn’t have a lot of weak spots. Charlotte was one.

At times Kyle was another.

Maybe because he reminded me of my sister. Or how she was before.

Vulnerable. Mostly innocent. Well meaning but with a streak of mischief that was destined to get him into trouble.

I patted Kyle’s arm. “It was funny, Kyle. Really funny. Who doesn’t laugh at poo?” I gave him a smile and Kyle brightened.

“Yeah? You think so? Maybe I should use sound effects next time—”

“Go do actual work, Kyle.” I chuckled and he finally went back to his desk.

I rubbed at my temple, my focus not on the mindless job in front of me. I could do this stuff in my sleep. I knew my way around the company’s network like the back of my hand. I had helped build it. Maintain it. I also knew how to take it down if I wanted to.

But that wasn’t the hat I wore during the day.

Right now I was Hannah Whelan, network administrator.

But tonight I could be someone else. I tingled.

It felt a lot like the buzzing in my gut when Mason had smiled at me this morning.

But better.

So much better.

The phone on my desk rang and I startled. I picked it up, cleared my throat, and said, “Hello?”

“Harriet, I need you to look into the email hack this morning,” Chuck Bennett barked into the phone.

I didn’t even bother to tell him my real name. He knew it. He just insisted on being a dick and using every name but the right one.

“Already on it,” I told him.

Asshole, I mouthed, though I would never have said it aloud.

“I’m getting really tired of these. Shouldn’t you and your team be on top of this? Can’t you even maintain secure firewalls? I thought I hired someone with some basic network skills. I’m beginning to think either you’re really good at bluffing your skill set or your résumé was an out-and-out lie, Hillary,” Chuck snarled in my ear.

I didn’t even bother to get angry. Sure, Chuck’s prickishness hit every single one of my buttons, but I had learned to let his nasty comments—and inability to use my proper name—roll right off my back.

Though I had contemplated uploading kiddie porn to his computer and making an anonymous call to the police.