The Insiders (The Insiders Trilogy 1)

Once I was connected, I sat back.

A satisfied smile on my face.

I got to work.

Mrs. Quinn Francis was first up, just because she was the last person I saw. She wasn’t a soft target, and it wasn’t long before I got into her social media accounts, saved half her emails to my online drive, and went through her private messages. A nagging voice was whispering that this was wrong, but I shushed them. They weren’t that damn loud, and it’d been way too long since I’d been around a computer.

The next target was still soft—or the next three targets. All of my siblings.

I only skimmed their stuff. By then the voice was speaking up a bit louder and I had a little twist in my stomach, thinking of going through little Cyclone’s emails. But damn, that kid had a lot of them. I wasn’t surprised, if he was building a robot rabbit. I found his computer and saved that file to my phone. The rest went to my online drive.

I was going to help him. That’s what I was telling myself.

Seraphina was up, and I didn’t see anything interesting there. Conversations with her friends. Complete files dedicated to male models. One of her friends had a mean girls book, and clicking through, I saw that the little shits were vicious to their classmates. Christ. They rated each person based on clothes, hair, manners, associations, personality, and intelligence. There was an overall cool level assigned at the end, and—surprise, surprise—only the girls who were moderators for the file got the highest cool score.

I went down Seraphina’s own rating and paused at her overall score.

She got a ten for clothes, for hair, for manners, for associations. She got a four for personality and a six for intelligence. Her cool level was five.

I reared back at that. She could see this. This was on her network. Those girls did that to her, knowing she would see it.

I hadn’t met my sister, but by God, blood stood for something with me. All those little bitches just got on my medium-core target list.

I didn’t snoop in Matthew’s social media accounts and emails. Those were all I could find on him, but I was assuming he had a remote computer at his own place.

There was one more family member, but I paused. He was the big bang. He was the ultimate hit, and because of that he was saved for last. Now it was time for my hard target: Marie.

Hacking into the Chesapeake administration network, it didn’t take long for me to find Marie’s files. From there, I tunneled my way to her personal computer. If she was there, she could see someone had access.

Going through all of this, I’d lost track of time. I knew it was longer than I thought, because I recognized the stiffness in my back and neck. My ass was protesting, and I hadn’t gone to the bathroom in—I had no clue, but my bladder was screaming at me.

I shoved it all down and got to work.

I took all of Marie’s files. All. Of. Them. And there was no voice telling me this was wrong. That woman had hurt me. I didn’t care, at that moment, if she meant well. She had filleted me, saying I was a fraud. Well, honey, let’s see who the fraud is after this evening—

Shut down!

My screen froze, fritzed, and it began to shut down immediately.

No, no, no.

I was scrambling, my pulse picking up.

They found me. That was fast. I was good—damn good. I could cover my tracks. I went through back doors they didn’t know were there. Unless … Fuck. I gulped. Unless my father himself wrote his own security measures, but who actually did that? He was too big-time now.

Still. My screen was flashing at me now. I had only seconds to erase my final trail.

Four.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Three.

I screamed, shoving back the chair and typing faster than I had in ages.

Two.

“No!” I was up, and I yanked on the cord, cutting the connection, and once that was done—I couldn’t move.

What had I just done?

I raised a hand to my forehead, feeling the sweat up there. I’d been in the zone. I’d been doing things I hadn’t even realized I was doing. Shame was spreading through me at an alarming rate, and I fell to my knees, my mouth gaping.

What had I done? Oh my God. What had I done?

I was hurt. I took it. I digested it. And then seeing my stepmother had been too much for me, knowing my mother would’ve compared herself to that woman. I’d been blind in my need to strike back.

I hadn’t—I hadn’t been thinking. Walking from that house, feeling a bombshell going off in me, I only reacted. I needed to do what I did, and the computer was it for me.