Page 49 of They Break Beauty

That was how he’d done it.

The bastard had written a script on my system that had caused the audio file to play after a few seconds’ delay once I’d connected my laptop to a HDMI cable—basically when he knew I was going to be in presentation mode.

Piece of shit.

It had taken me a couple of hours once I’d arrived home to locate the hidden file and erase it from my system.

Hours that could have been better spent studying and learning.

I’d already lost the rest of the day because of the humiliation of it all and left campus immediate afterward, missing three classes.

The idea of going back there tomorrow after this was mortifying.

But if that asshole thought I was just going to take this lying down, he had another thing coming.

He wanted the part of me that had been lost along the way then he was going to get it.

Just not in the way he intended.

So after I’d determined the source of his interference, I’d then spent the rest of my time honing in on him through his hack into my system.

The guy was good. He had many failsafes in place. Firewalls didn’t even begin to cover it.

Fortunately, this wasn’t exactly my first rodeo.

I’d delved into network security—or the reverse—for years after that awful nightmare that had destroyed my life. It had been my way of trying to take back control of things.

I hadn’t touched it in a long while.

That didn’t mean the skills weren’t still there, though.

And he was about to pay the price.

“Whoop!” I cried, throwing my hands in the air as I finally managed to breach his system.

And then I sank back against my chair in the kitchen and watched as the worm I’d programmed went to work eating its way through his hard drive and decimating the thing to fucking nothing.

My stomach rumbled as I watched in sadistic satisfaction.

That was when I realized that I’d just immediately sat down and opened up my laptop about six hours ago and I hadn’t moved from the kitchen since. I hadn’t even taken my coat off.

Well, I had time now.

I pushed out of my chair, intending to make a sandwich—a new recipe I’d been looking forward to with cheese, ham and slices of apple—when my phone buzzed on the table top.

Picking it up, I was startled when I saw it was him.

Hell Spawn: Nice try. Color me impressed, baby.

Brianna: No idea what you’re talking about.

Hell Spawn: Your denial is pointless. You think I don’t have things in place to notify me of any breaches?

Brianna: I guess your detection is shit and slow on the draw.

Hell Spawn: Because your worm is tearing through my system as we text?

Brianna: Aww, payback’s a bitch, huh?

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