Page 5 of Unspoken Promises

I scrub my hand down my face. “You already know I have one problem with my cybersecurity issues. You think I need two right now?”

“Hey,” his tone is dismissive, “I thought the hacker competition was supposed to be a good thing? Now the winner is a problem?”

I stop myself saying what really comes to mind.Nobody was meant to win.But I’m a man who considers all details, so I did tell my brothers when we launched our first contest like it that a winner presented a win-win scenario. It would expose a weakness in our system and give us a chance to have a talented cybersecurity engineer on board at GhostEye. All of that is true. None of it I wanted, despite us desperately needing better talent.

Even though it would be beneficial to have someone we could trust to help us, trust isn’t my strong suit.

I grit my teeth. “You didn’t think to talk to me about it yesterday? That maybe I’d need time to arrange a role specification for her?” I spit out my newest problems. “I need to decide who’s going to manage her and then change their remit. And there’s the relocation package compensation from the contest. This isn’t something I can sort at the drop of a hat.”

Santi could get it if he’d take one moment to think things through, but he doesn’t care about anything but his breeding and training business these days. He gets a paycheck from GhostEye, but it’s dividends, not for actual work. My younger brother doesn’t get how important this is,or how risky it is having someone like Ava working for us. It could be like opening the floodgates, and we’re already impossibly close to a big fucking problem.

We’ve been hacked seven times in the last eight months. We’ve been managing to hide that problem from public view. Only Rio and I understand how big that is. We could lose our investor if word got out. We could lose everything even if it didn’t. Who knows what a hacker might demand.

Especially in our line of business. Our software can decrypt the world’s most widely used masking software. It’s going to make the dark web an impossible place to hide; criminals are no longer able to do sordid business behind encrypted sites. Law enforcement love us. Criminals want to take us down. The stakes are higher than ever. Both Rio and myself have received death threats multiple times over the years.

But I’ll never tell Santi how bad it is. We scraped the surface of the issue with him so he’s not totally in the dark, but I want him to enjoy his own career, so Rio and I made it seem smaller than it is. There’s nothing to be gained from his worry, so here I am, dealing with Santi’s casual mic drop.

I turn off the shower and put him on speaker, switching over from our call to my schedule for the day which, as usual, is not only rammed but double-booked in some spots. “I don’t even have five minutes to deal with this…”

“Pull your panties up, Zo.”

I ignite almost instantly. “Excuse me?”

A one-syllable, easy laugh hums through my speaker, and I could seriously punch him through the phone.

He pulls his cell away from his mouth and tells a groom to get the farrier in today.

I growl into my end. “Santi…”

He comes back on the line. “Sorry… Listen, I know you think it’s just another one of myharebrained moments, but I actually thought this one through. Put Ava on those hacks you mentioned. It will free up time for you.”

I grit my teeth.

“See? I took lemons and made lemonade.”

Clearly, he can’t see how fucked his suggestion is.

I roll my eyes and damn do I wish he could see it. “Mexico is private business.” I can’t blame Santi for not fully understanding since we deliberately minimized what was going on.

“Why can’t you put her on it? The girl is good. Some might even say she’s better than you, since she hacked your software.”

I bet he’s wearing a shit-eating grin and is pleased with himself that he figured out a way to get me below the belt. Payback for years of older brother shit back in the day. I wasn’t even that bad, but in his mind he probably has confused me for Rio for some of it. Until I started wearing glasses, my twin constantly pawned his mischief off on me.

The telltale clunk of a large barn door opening reaches my ear. It’s more than annoying that Santi is out there playing cowboy while I’ll be chained to my desk fixing the problems he sends my way.

I protest again, but the minute I say the words, I know they’re wasted on him. “It’s too confidential.”

“Yeah, and everything else she’ll be working on at GhostEye isn’t? She’s going to need a nondisclosure agreement no matter what she does.”

It’s true.

The faint voice of a man saying good morning is the next to follow, and I know Santi needs to get to the gallops to watch his first horse train before it gets any hotter out there.

But he deserves more busting before he gets out to play. “While you were making lemonade, did you think about where she will live?”

I’m not sure I’d like Ava working in Silicon Valley because Rio is a great CEO but he’s gone a lot. I want to keep an eye on her. She’s too goddamn clever to leave unattended, and I work from home more than half of the time these days. Fuck, I hope this doesn’t mean I need to go to the offices.

“She can live here,” he suggests, as though he thought about this, too.

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