Page 40 of Power

“He’s going after everything that was once mine.” Tarun wanted to prove a point with what appeared to be a forced engagement with my ex-fiancée. Salena looked anything but consenting. I found it hard to believe that her father had let this happen, but then again, he wasn’t against giving his daughter away if it meant filling his pockets with money.Piece of shit.

“Let me see if I can find the IP address from where it was originally sent,” Jai said as he took control of the mouse and keyboard. He clicked on a tab and typed something into the search field.

“Well?” My patience was waning.

His eyes flicked back and forth as he read the data he needed on the monitor. “The IP address is showing that it was sent by your computer in your office.”

I shook my head, truly perplexed. “That’s impossible. No one has access to my computer except for you.”

“Whoever sent it probably altered the address and used yours to throw us off. Hackers do it all the time to get through firewalls.”

“What about the coordinates of where it was taken?” If we could get the coordinates, then we could move men to scour that location.

His fingers flew across the keys again. “Dammit. It’s encrypted,” Jai exclaimed as he banged on the keyboard.

Of course, it was encrypted. If this had been sent by Tarun or his men, they wouldn’t have made it easy for us to solve. They liked working in riddles.

“Can you decrypt it?” I asked.

“Yes, but it could take weeks. Tarun has a good tech team behind him, so I’m sure this won’t be easy to crack.”

“We don’t have that kind of time. We need to locate this asshole now. He’s fucked with us one too many times.” I clenched my hands into fists, trying to contain my frustration. When I was frustrated, I punched shit.

“He probably used a newer and more complex method of encryption to encode the coordinates, but decryption that way can take a long time if we’re trying to hack the location,” Jai said.

I didn’t know much about encryption techniques. My technical knowledge was limited. I relied on Jai to fill in the gaps for me. “How sure are you that he’s used this type of encryption?”

“Fairly certain. It’s the most common method people use these days because of its level of security.” Jai clicked the mouse a few more times and opened a new program. After inputting some information, a status bar appeared, signaling that something was being processed.

“There. I’ve set up the decryption cycle. The system will alert our phones to let us know if coordinates were decoded.”

“What if this doesn’t work?” I asked.

“It’s very possible that it will not. This type of encryption is difficult to hack. The program will either just keep running in a loop and never end or it will error out when it exhausts all of the possible combinations of bits to make up the coordinates.”

I stared at the picture. My ex-fiancée sat in front of a window that overlooked lots of tropical green trees. She could have been anywhere in India from the setting in the background. Nothing specific stood out to me about her location.

She looked so broken—a shell of the woman she had once been. I hadn’t spoken to her in years, but I still felt protective of her. I cared about her and didn’t want her to be the subject of Tarun’s abuse because of his vendetta with me. She deserved better than this fate. She’d had a free spirit when I knew her, and to see her like this was difficult. She was just another casualty of this business, a game piece used by the men who controlled the board.

Jai’s voice interrupted my thoughts. “I downloaded the photo to the cloud so that Amelia can access it too.”

Dread filled my gut. What if Amelia was next? Her vacation request had just been approved for Thanksgiving next week. She was taking a week off to fly back to Seattle.

What if Tarun tried to take her while she was away? She had no idea how much danger she was in. If something happened to her, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.

Tarun would stop at nothing to take whatever was mine. And Amelia wasmine.

Chapter XXIII

Amelia

My vacation request had been canceled!What the fuck?!I was supposed to be flying out to Seattle this weekend to spend the week with my mom for Thanksgiving. I had already booked my tickets and started packing.

I was stunned as I sat staring at the email from HR saying that my once-approved request had been “canceled due to increased staffing demand.”What does that even mean?!It was Thanksgiving week! What could possibly be so important that they would need staff in the office?

I didn’t even really work for the company. My job had nothing to do with anything related to keeping it running smoothly. This had Shyam written all over it, and I was enraged.

I marched down to his office and demanded his secretary let me see him. She said that he was in a board meeting. I was more irritated that I couldn’t storm into his office and tear into him immediately like I wanted to. His secretary asked if I wanted to leave a message, but I spun away, too enraged to reply to her. It was rude, but I wouldn’t have been able to form a coherent sentence anyway.

---