Page 36 of Rules of Association

Tiney snickered and my older brothers turned to me with purpose in their eyes. I almost lost my breath I was so exasperated.

“I’mtwenty-eight,” I gritted.

Clay shrugged, “It’s never too late to learn about the—”

I left the room before he could even finish.

* * *

I only felt a little bad for bailing on my siblings, but I’d truth was, I didn’t want dinner. I wanted to hear from Ceci and if that wasn’t happening I wanted to go home. Not because I was waiting around in case she decided to show up or anything. Just…because.

It worked out well anyway.

Immediately after getting home and working off some steam by running the beach, I showered the day away and headed into my computer room to work on the file Clint sent me.

The room was one of my most prized possessions. Small, compared to most rooms in the house, it was actually a large storage closet and a small office room merged together to make my own personal computer lab. One wall was dedicated for the various servers I’d programmed for my systems. The other wall was for the computers and monitors. I had several, mainly to aid in my inability to just work on one thing at a time but also simply because it looked cool. Having an entire wall of computers was much more impressive than having three, even if that meant I had to pay an arm and a leg to keep this room alone heavily air-conditioned.

The file Clint was trying to access was supposed to be a simple catch and retrieve. Like I told him, he really couldn’t get all the functionality he needed on a day-to-day basis with a tablet, but he insisted on keeping it with him when he needed to work on the fly. Which was fine, just limiting.

I scratched at my head as I moved around the computer room with a cup of warm tea and only my pajama pants on. Tiney had talked me into drinking chamomile before bed and now I was hooked on the stuff. It soothed me, oftentimes helping me relax my ever-cycling mind before going to sleep, and I wasn’t planning on doing much after I figured this file thing out, so I might as well get ready for bed.

Geez, it was only ten-thirty.It’s like I didn’t know what to do with myself without a certain bright eyed troublemaker beating down my door.

Using the specific system I allocated for work only, I logged into the Ferguson Enterprises server. Then, pulling up the same command codes as before, I tried to access what my brother couldn’t on his puny little tablet earlier and…I got nothing.

I grunted.

That was strange, I had to admit. Our company’s system was simple, bordering on outdated, which meant my commands usually worked on the first try. Not being able to get in now, with my superior network and materials, gave me the tiniest feeling of anxiety. So I tried another one. And nothing. I tried manually accessing the location through search and finally the file came up, only, it had a large red bar across it. A box for a password glaring up at me.

I froze.

The hair on the back of my neck prickled with alert attention as I looked at the screen. I had master access for the entire company’s logs and data. If something was locked, hidden, or encrypted in a way that wasn’t protocol, it went through me.Always. And I hadnotlocked this down.

Which meant someone else had.

“What?” Clint answered my call on the second ring.

“What’s in this file you’ve been trying to access?” I asked, all the while I tried logging the usual passwords in. They all failed.

“Just a financial log from a few years ago. Why?” He answered. I couldn’t tell where he was, but he wasn’t at a crowded restaurant and he wasn’t with our siblings. I would have heard them both chastising and giggling like they always were. Instead, I heard dead quiet aside from the click of Clint’s keyboard always typing. My guess was he’d gone back to the office to work late.

“It’s encrypted, Clint.” My voice sounded irritated to my own ears as I tried the sixth password combination with no luck. “And it’s behind a protection log. I can’t get in.”

“You—”

“I didn’t do it. Did you?” I asked, but I knew the answer and the feeling of dread washing over me confirmed it.

“No,” he said slowly. “Connor, what does this mean exactly?”

“I dunno,” I said. “But if someone is locking files away and hiding them inoursystem, my guess is it can’t be anything good.”

“Can you be here first thing in the morning to figure it out?” He asked, a sliver of urgency breaking through his usual even keel.

Call me on edge, but his question irritated me. “Clint I don’t have the tools there to do anything.”

“We have all the same tools any other company of this size has. What else could you need?” he grumbled.

“Itold youwhat we need,” I grumbled right back. Because this was the issue. With him, with my mom, with my whole goddamn family. They didn’t take what I said seriously. They thought just because we’d skated by on whatever worked fine for years that we didn’t need updates, upgrades, innovations. And they didn’t take my opinion as professional guidance. Because how could you be a professional at something that wasn’t valuable? Or at least that’s what they thought.

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