Page 38 of My Fake Billionaire Damaged Boyfriend

“He was the one that stole it then,” he grunts, watching me carefully while I use the blanket as a shield over my body. “So, he’s made it impenetrable then, right?”

“At least from my software, yeah. He said it would take four years for the device to find the backdoor now. I believe him. It took us under an hour before, but I’ve been running it on my computer all day and it still didn’t find anything.”

“Fuck,” he says.

I just nod in agreement to that frustrated remark.

“Well, how are we going to get to it now? We have to have some kind of proof to give to the authorities when we hand him off to be arrested at some point. We have no search engine to go off of now.”

My body is light with despair. We’re never going to be able to solve this problem without the search engine as proof. How can we get to the bottom of how and why Alek is doing this to his customers if we can’t even back it up with evidence? Now I just feel stupid for not handling this sooner.

We proved something pretty major already, and we know it to be true, but we have no way of reaching it now.

“Wait,” I mutter, my mind shifting to the first and last time we searched through the backdoor. “Did you get any kind of notification when you bought my identity from the search engine before?”

His eyes widen. “The auction. That’s right, I bid and won that whole file on your past and your personal details. I haven’t even thought to check where that information could be.”

“It might lead us inside,” I groan, charging forward to the computer.

He pulls out the chair for me, and I fit in perfectly at his desk. There are so many expensive monitors before me that I’m nearly overwhelmed, but I keep focused and carry through the daunting task of finding this entry into the back door.

If we get it in our grasp, maybe we can finally take down Alek Ivica and get past this weird situation in which we find ourselves.

I’m tired of lying about how we’re an item when he’s made it perfectly clear we are not. I mean, I’m sure Dimitri Wilde is just chomping at the bit to be cut free of my company. I can tell after our encounter in my office that things are still tense. He talked me down from giving up and throwing in the towel due to some frivolous self-loathing.

But he’s still a man that lives in a different world than me.

His setup of computers, VPNs, and the mere size of this office alone proves we are not from the same cloth at all. He’s from a world of platinum and shimmer. I come from the backroads and a chipping-paint house in Oregon that wasn’t even the place I had grown up. It was the place kept from me until it suited the better interest of my parent’s passing.

They protected my siblings even in death and put me on the chopping block once more.

So that begs the question still ringing through my ears tonight: Who the hell would want me?

I get lost in code, distracting myself completely while I hurry to get this task done and over with. Dimitri has disappeared from my peripherals, and I don’t mind it. He’s probably watching from a distance, curious and coking his head like a cute puppy that sees something new.

Meanwhile, I’m breaking through his system, through the code, looking for something that will allow me access to the information again. It’s only now that I realize the flash drive was plugged into the computer when he bought my identity in the auction.

So maybe, just maybe, I can retrace the footsteps in my flash drive software to figure it out once more.

“Here,” I say, mostly speaking to myself. I unleash my decoding bug into the whole file, not to find anything, but to spit out what it already knows. To my surprise, and my dismay, it works like a charm. “Hey, it’s right here, look at that!”

A warm, firm hand scrolls down my back and causes me to hiss in shock, my heart falling straight into my stomach when I realize Dimitri has been two steps away the whole time. I guess my zoning out was more for my benefit than anything else.

He just wanted to watch me work.

“What does this mean?” he asks, pointing to the asterisk that is labeled at the top of my profile to auction. “It looks like a new link. Should you click it?”

I shrug and reply with, “What worse could happen? It’s not like it’s going to blow up in our faces.”

We both exchange a careful look, knowing that’s exactly what could happen. But at least not literally. Every time we make headway, something yanks us back down to reality. Treacherous, murky reality. I can’t stand the thought of starting over on this task again, so as the cursor hangs over the lit-up asterisk, I inhale a deep, calming breath.

“If this sends us to the start and wipes us out from the beginning, then I’m out.”

Dimitri pulls my chair to the side a bit, his eyes widened in shock. “What do you mean, Kitten?”

“I just mean that I can’t beat him anymore,” I admit. “If this fails, I’m out of ideas and out of my software. It took forever to just get this flash drive put together. I can’t possibly make anything better.”

His eyes narrow as my voice cracks. “What was that?”

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