The Damaged (The Insiders Trilogy 2)

A funny look was on his face, but then he nodded and pulled his hand free. “Okay. I was going with the fist bump. A sibling handshake works, too.” He raised an eyebrow. “We’re doing this?”

We were doing this.

“I can hack ’em.”

He frowned. “I don’t know if we should do that. That can be traced, can’t it?”

I opened my mouth to respond, but the door swung open and I realized it hadn’t been shut the whole way.

Hoda stood there, pale. “You can hack?”

Shit.

“Crap.”

Matt shared my sentiment.

“Yeah.”

She gulped now. “Did you hack me?”

Um …

Her eyes bulged out. “You did, didn’t you?”

Another question I felt was better off not being answered. I looked to Matt with that one.

He gave me a pitying look back.

Yeah. He wasn’t helping.

She took another step inside. “What did you do? With my stuff, what did you hack?”

Oh wow. Now that was the question I couldn’t answer.

I coughed, looking away.

“Oh my God,” she whispered under her breath. But she was thinking and frowning. “Nothing changed. I never got an alert. I should’ve.”

I just drew in a breath and held it.

“You didn’t change any of my passwords. You didn’t get any of my social media taken down. There were no extra charges on my accounts. What—what’s the point of hacking if you weren’t going to do anything with it?”

She was assuming I couldn’t still get in there, but that made me wonder if I could do the same program with Quinn, or at least with Camille Story’s program. Hoda was another computer person, but something was telling me Camille Story would be the more anal and paranoid of the two. She probably had programs set in place, and I wouldn’t know that unless I was actually at her computer.

That gave me an idea, and that meant truth time was about to happen.

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to deal with the fallout, but I was calculating that Camille Story was a bigger problem than Hoda. At least right now she was.

So.

Here we go.

I spoke clearly. She needed to hear everything. “I’m still locked into your system.” I didn’t wait to see the shock, or the alarm. I pushed past that, saying further, “And I hacked everything. Your social media. Your email. Your school account. I even got into your online journal, and the second and third backup journal you have there. Your drive. Your online drive. I got it all.”

Her entire face was hanging on the floor.

“I can monitor anything you do. Your bank statements. All of it. So here’s what I’ll do. You get me into your apartment, into that back room, with an entire evening sitting behind Camille’s computer, and I’ll pull out of everything of yours. All of it. It’ll be like nothing happened. I don’t know your passwords. My program doesn’t need to know those to get in. I’ll take my stuff all down.”

Her eyes were glazed over, but she was fast adapting. “For one night sitting behind Camille’s system?”

“Her entire system. The motherboard. I need access to that room, and I’ll take it from there.”

She visibly swallowed. “How are you going to—I mean, she has an entire system just to load up her laptop, and that’s the one I can see. I can’t even imagine what she’s got on her computer.”

I glanced to Matt. He was watching us like a hawk.

“That’s for me to handle. Get me a night in there and you can watch me pull out of your stuff.”

Her eyes narrowed on me. “I can’t see you in there?”

She was referring to her accounts. I shook my head. “No.”

“Damn.” Her eyes clasped shut for a second. She sounded defeated. “You’re the genius in the program, aren’t you? The one that’s above the rest. I knew there was one, but I couldn’t tell who it was.” She laughed to herself. “I thought it was Dax, but I wasn’t sure. He got an A-minus on the last quiz.”

Yes. So scandalous. An A-minus.

Matt snorted.

Hoda glared at him.

He shrugged, smirking at her.

She glared again, but really, the effort was lost. He didn’t care.

He felt moved to share. “I’m in a different league, girl. Scare down, not up.”

She scowled, but some of the heat was gone. “Whatever.” She nodded at me. “I’ll get you in.”

Score! “Okay.”

“But I want to watch you pull your stuff out of my programs.”

Not a score. “Sounds fair.”

But that last picture of Kash and me in the hallway … I was waiting for the right time for my revenge on that one. We came to a truce, but not about that last picture. Hoda would find that out in due time.

This was the moment in the conversation where she should leave.

She didn’t. She remained.

Matt and I waited.

A beat later, her head lowered, and what I assumed was the real reason she was in my room came out. “I wanted to thank you for letting me come on this trip, and I got an email from Ms. Wells. Goa was cc’d on the same email. They’ve approved us to all sync in for class tomorrow.”