Page 32 of Indecent Demands

I shook myself clear of such dark thoughts. I was in a pickle, and I had to focus on how to get out of it. I shouldn’t be reminiscing about my pain. Seth was covering for me for now—in exchange for sex and staying out of his way—but how was this going to end, really?

After cleaning up the kitchen, I roamed around the house, finding a computer in what looked like it would someday be a library. There were books haphazardly piled everywhere, and a few sets of bookshelves, with one big comfy armchair, but the rest of it wasn’t assembled. I itched to start decorating this place myself. I could already picture in my mind’s eye the potential colors for the walls, and putting a nice big thick rug in the middle of the room, and adding a couple more chairs for reading . . .

I shook those crazy thoughts from my head and started toward the computer that was sitting on a desk in the corner that had a double monitor set up. Ah, this was a gamer’s system, of course. It didn’t fit in the library but right now it worked just fine. Didn’t surprise me that Seth was a gamer. This looked like a severely modified PC setup he had, complete with some custom keyboards. Nice.

Honestly, I salivated a little sitting down at this elaborate and expensive setup. This was the kind of gamer or computer geek wet dream that I only hoped to someday be able to afford.

I booted the computer up and frowned when I was greeted with a login screen. Right. I grabbed my phone and pulled up a sophisticated app I had installed, then put the phone next to the computer and ran my encryption program.

Within ten minutes, the app decoded the password and logged me in, and I was able to access everything. Excellent.

I couldn’t log into the company without Seth noticing, so to start with I just straight-up hacked into the system. Unless Seth was looking for suspicious activity and caught me in the moment, he wouldn’t see anything—there would be no trace of me. And I wasn’t planning on changing anything. I just needed to get into Harcourt’s files and take a look.

Because one question was seriously bugging me: how had he noticed the thefts? It had taken Seth some detective work to figure out how I was changing the numbers, and he’d had to discuss it with individual department heads to realize those numbers were fake. Had Harcourt done all of that detective work himself? Was he better with coding than he let on?

In all my years stealing from these billionaires, I found there were two kinds: the tech bros who actually knew what they were doing with the computer technology, and the men who were just good at sales and could sell the idea to investors but hired others to do the actual work of making the app, company, coding, or whatever they were selling run smoothly.

Harcourt hadn’t struck me as the latter. His whole company was built on the idea that you would use them as angel investors to get assistance in your own startup. There wasn’t a ton of new or crazy technology involved. Harcourt’s company rather served as a consultant and advisor to the new company or entrepreneur, and then to established investors and companies, they were a way to see that new company was legitimate. They gave you clout and verification.

Now, Harcourt wanted to take the company public, that much I’d found. That would require him to take a closer look at how things were run so that he could report good numbers to the examiners of Wall Street. But if he had done the amount of work to identify the thief, then surely he wouldn’t need to call Seth in and let Seth do all this homework for himself? Surely he could have just told Seth what he’d found and let Seth then do the final stretch of tracking down who had made these changes?

I scoured Damien’s documents. According to the financial records, we were spending more than we expected but we weren’t quite in the red. That was what I’d planned. I tried to steal directly from the accounts and salaries of the C-level executives who were grossly overpaid and wouldn’t notice, but wouldn’t take the company itself into a downward spiral.

Wait . . . I lifted the funds from the executives directly. Hmm.

I went back into their cryptocurrency accounts. Personally, I was not a fan of crypto. It was basically a Ponzi scheme, and thousands of people had been stolen from by people like Harcourt who promised this was the currency of the future when the fact was you needed a ton of money to buy the computer power to do the calculations (‘mining’) to equal a new piece of bitcoin.

There were classic pump and dump schemes everywhere in the cryptocurrency world and nothing was regulated. The market regularly crashed. And the assured ‘privacy’ wasn’t really true. Any transaction was ripe for theft because once made, it couldn’t be undone, but what was more—since transactions couldn’t be undone, you could follow them all the way back to the original person and learn that person’s identity even if they tried to use a pseudonym.

I hacked into Harcourt’s cryptocurrency wallet and checked the history. I recognized my microtransactions, but there were other transactions as well. I set about tracking them down.

This was going to take a while.

In the meantime, while I ran some programs to follow the threads, I could work on the other part of my plan.

Seth had a well-stocked kitchen, and he’d kindly made me breakfast. Why not make him dinner for when he arrived home from work?

I left the computer programs running, and with ingredients I found in his kitchen and refrigerator, I set about making a beef and bacon stew with mashed potatoes. That took me a few hours, and I left it to simmer while I checked on the computer again—only to hear the front door open.

Shit.I quickly put Seth’s computer into screensaver mode so that the screen was dark and it looked like it was off, then hurried back to the kitchen just as he entered.

“I smell something delicious,” he said with a smile. “Did you cook?”

I lifted the lid on the pot of stew and gave it a stir. “Well, you made me breakfast.”

He came over to the stove and stood next to me. “You really didn’t have to.”

“No, seriously,” I said with a shrug. “I know you’re doing me a favor, not turning me in right away, so it’s the least I could do.”

Seth didn’t look convinced that he was really doing me a ‘favor’ but he didn’t ask about what I’d been up to today, and he didn’t head into the library to look at the computer.

Phew.That had been a close one. I’d just have to wait until the first opportunity to go and look at what my results were when Seth was occupied.

And hope he didn’t discover what I’d been up to.

Chapter13

Seth

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