Page 2 of Indecent Demands

Chapter2

Ariana

It never ceased to amaze me how exceptional filthy rich assholes were at convincing people they were actually good guys,really, definitely a philanthropist who earned his wealth and wasn’t a corrupt jackass who benefitted from handouts to amass his success.

Maybe it was just that people were so desperate to believe in the myth of a benevolent rich man, a savior, like the kind you saw in comic books—the Batmans and Iron Mans of our fantasies. Maybe it was that the ones struggling hoped with a little luck and hard work that they, too, could be so rich and loved.

Who knew the real reason. All I really cared about at the end of the day was being able to balance the scales a little. Taking back some of what corporate greed owed and redistributing it. Until the day the government got off its ass and actually taxed the rich like they deserved, it was up to people like me to set things right—or at least as right as I could.

That was why I was here, at Smirtech. Balancing those scales, so to speak.

Damien Harcourt was another guy who loved to present himself as the easygoing multi-billionaire with a humble, Zen smile, but I knew that his startup was benefitting from the disenfranchised and slick political pay-outs the same as all the others.

Damien ran Smirtech as a company that had a new way of funding small companies and productions in order to give them a helping start. Real benevolent of him, right? He’d recently expanded into crypto, which had led to massive expansions and investments, all unsupervised by regulations or laws.

Crypto was uncharted territory for many and confusing for a lot of people, and it wasn’t regulated or managed properly. With no oversight and most people in the dark as to how it worked, that digital currency was perfect for anyone who wanted to rob people blind.

Damien Harcourt wasn’t any different.

It was only a matter of time until the reckless way he played with his clients’ funds for his own selfish financial gains sank him and his company completely. But until then, I was going to skim off his portion of all that excess greed myself and give it to people whoreallyneeded it.

With that money, I was able to actually give people cash in hand, the number one thing they needed to get them out of debt and into better situations. There were so many so-called programs to help those who struggled, but how many of those government agencies gave them the money they needed to fix their problems as they saw fit? Dignity and the ability to make their own choices were important to people. Food stamps and housing were great and necessary, but they didn’t get rid of credit card debt or help with uninsured medical expenses that piled up.

I liked to think of myself as a modern day Robin Hood. Skim from the obnoxiously rich and corrupt, and give to those in dire financial situations.

Getting a job at Smirtech had been easy. This wasn’t my first rodeo, after all. I had an excellent resume working at both financial firms and handling cryptocurrency, and Smirtech was in desperate need of people who actually knew what they were doing with the latter, as well as experienced in handling other people’s money.

My resume was real, actually. I had never been caught skimming at any of my previous jobs, and I had always gotten out before it was too late. That was something most people who tried to do any kind of thievery, moral or otherwise, didn’t realize. You didn’t jump ship when the writing was on the wall—you gracefully bowed out while things were still going really well, and before anyone noticed the missing money.

I’d started immediately by setting up a bank account from which I could funnel funds from the company into various GoFundMe campaigns to help people with their medical debt and other necessities. Once that system was automated and I’d set the parameters, I could focus on finding local people who needed cash in hand and convert the crypto personally for them.

It was important to me to set up both an automated system and a manual one. If it was just one or the other, it was more easily detected. But with a combination of the two, the trail was much more difficult to find. I had access to all of the company’s accounts—or, well, I did once I wrote myself a computer script that gave me access to them—and I could fudge the books so that it looked like the usual expenses.

In my experience, newer guys like Damien Harcourt were too focused on spending their wealth to realize that some of it was going missing. They were too busy being high on their success. Honestly, a lot of the prior places I’d hit before had gone bankrupt through nothing I’d done, but simply because their founders and C-level execs ran the place into the ground by overextending the company and spoiling themselves with excessive expenditures.

Maybe that was the beginning of my downfall—I had grown complacent. I had decided somewhere in the back of my mind that I would never be caught, and I had acted accordingly.

Or maybe it was just that I hadn’t gotten laid in far too long.

I came into work on Monday and immediately knew something was up when Tony, my supervisor, waylaid me. He looked like he hadn’t slept, which was normal when it came to Tony, but he had an extremely manic look in his eyes, which was very different from his general sense that he was sleepwalking through the day.

“There’s some kind of inspector here, from a security company,” he said in a panicked tone as he dragged me by my arm through the office. “I need you to talk to him.”

A new security company? I frowned as I tried to process what this might mean, while also hoping it wasn’t going to be a problem for my extra-curricular activities. “Why me?”

“Because you’re more articulate than I am, and you’re prettier than I am, and I haven’t had my coffee yet,” Tony said, then added in a lower tone, “Also, he’s incredibly handsome and I know I’ll just make an idiot of myself the moment I open my mouth to speak.”

I laughed. “Tony, you have a boyfriend.”

“That doesn’t mean I can no longer be an idiot around handsome men.” He let go of my arm but put his hand at my back instead, pushing me forward into the conference room on our tech floor.

I was going to roll my eyes, but then I saw the man standing at the head of the conference table frowning down at a laptop, and instead I nearly tripped over my own two feet.

Okay, so the guy was very handsome. Gorgeous and incredibly hot, actually. He had neatly trimmed dark blond hair and a square jaw, with attractive features that could grace a men’s magazine. He was tall and lean, but his arms beneath the crisp white shirt he wore looked strong enough to pick me up with just one hand.

And this guy was intech?He looked the complete opposite of all the nerdy geeks I worked with on a daily basis.

Regaining my composure, I swallowed hard and walked up to him, sticking out my hand in a professional manner. “Hi, I’m Adriana Kent. I work in the IT department here at Smirtech. How can I help you?”

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