We were taken to a resort, where we broke off into two separate large cabins. Both attached to a main building housing the kitchen and eating area, along with a game and media room and a larger living room with a massive fireplace. The two separate cabins each had a smaller kitchenette area and sitting rooms, but it was obvious that the main building was where everyone was supposed to hang.
Dax and Melissa assumed that one cabin would be guys, the other for the girls.
Nope. Didn’t happen.
One cabin was Matt, Tony, Chester, Guy, Fleur, and Cedar.
The other cabin was Dax, Shyam, and the three other guys. Melissa went with them, and she gave Torie a pleading look, so that’s how Torie and Tamara ended up in that cabin, too. Hoda trudged behind them.
I started to head after them, but Matt hooked an arm around my neck and tugged me with him. “Nope. My sister stays with me.” That was how I ended up in their cabin.
Liam and Carl took a room that was the most in-between both cabins as could be. There was one sleeping room in the main building, tucked in the back hall, and that’s where they tossed their bags. It made sense, too. Carl wasn’t fitting in with the computer group. He’d taken up with Guy if Liam was with our classmates.
A lot of people.
I was forgetting the whole reason we’d come on this trip until Matt came to my room and leaned up against the doorway. He folded his arms over his chest, his head cocked to the side. “Thanks for doing this.”
I paused in my unpacking. I was more grabbing a change of clothes, but everyone was “unpacking,” so I felt that was the appropriate thing to do.
“For doing what?” See. I’d forgotten.
He frowned at me. “For helping to distract me. Quinn being out, and her having her hooks in Camille. That makes me all ragey. I want to be like Kash and bash someone’s head in, but I can’t. Not with those two.” He gave me a dark look, coming in and shutting the door behind him. “So my question to you: what are we going to do with them?”
I paused. And gulped. Unease trickled down my spine.
“What are you talking about?”
“No way am I letting Kash have all the fun. Camille Story, that’s on me. I fucked her and ditched her. I primed her to be all vengeful. And Quinn, that’s partly on me, too. Us being here, that’s helping me keep a clear head, but no way am I sitting on the sidelines. I want my hands dirty.”
Yep. Another gulp.
This wasn’t good.
I sighed, letting go of my bag and turning to face him more fully. “Matt,” I started, speaking low.
“No.” He spoke over me. “No way. Quinn tried to hurt you. She wanted to end you. I get the Calhoun part; that’s on Kash to deal with. But Quinn and Camille—we should get a piece of that pie, and I’m thinking Kash isn’t going to include us, so that means it’s on us. What are we going to do to handle them?” He motioned between himself and me on the “we” part.
I had to gulp a third time.
A different feeling took root, an excited feeling, an anticipatory feeling, a predatory feeling. It was slow, but it was spreading.
Oh yeah.
I think I was liking this a whole lot, probably more than I should’ve.
I whispered, “Team Batt?”
My brother gave me another dark look, a wicked gleam, and I shouldn’t have liked how he flashed a triumphant grin, but I was feeling everything he just said.
He gave me an approving nod. “Oh yeah. Team Batt.” He held out his hand.
I wasn’t sure what to do with it, so I reached out, opened it, and shook it.
A funny look was on his face, but then he nodded and pulled his hand free. “Okay. I was going with the fist bump. A sibling handshake works, too.” He raised an eyebrow. “We’re doing this?”
We were doing this.
“I can hack ’em.”
He frowned. “I don’t know if we should do that. That can be traced, can’t it?”
I opened my mouth to respond, but the door swung open and I realized it hadn’t been shut the whole way.
Hoda stood there, pale. “You can hack?”
Shit.
“Crap.”
Matt shared my sentiment.
“Yeah.”
She gulped now. “Did you hack me?”
Um …
Her eyes bulged out. “You did, didn’t you?”
Another question I felt was better off not being answered. I looked to Matt with that one.
He gave me a pitying look back.
Yeah. He wasn’t helping.
She took another step inside. “What did you do? With my stuff, what did you hack?”
Oh wow. Now that was the question I couldn’t answer.
I coughed, looking away.
“Oh my God,” she whispered under her breath. But she was thinking and frowning. “Nothing changed. I never got an alert. I should’ve.”
I just drew in a breath and held it.
“You didn’t change any of my passwords. You didn’t get any of my social media taken down. There were no extra charges on my accounts. What—what’s the point of hacking if you weren’t going to do anything with it?”
She was assuming I couldn’t still get in there, but that made me wonder if I could do the same program with Quinn, or at least with Camille Story’s program. Hoda was another computer person, but something was telling me Camille Story would be the more anal and paranoid of the two. She probably had programs set in place, and I wouldn’t know that unless I was actually at her computer.
That gave me an idea, and that meant truth time was about to happen.
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to deal with the fallout, but I was calculating that Camille Story was a bigger problem than Hoda. At least right now she was.
So.
Here we go.
I spoke clearly. She needed to hear everything. “I’m still locked into your system.” I didn’t wait to see the shock, or the alarm. I pushed past that, saying further, “And I hacked everything. Your social media. Your email. Your school account. I even got into your online journal, and the second and third backup journal you have there. Your drive. Your online drive. I got it all.”
Her entire face was hanging on the floor.
“I can monitor anything you do. Your bank statements. All of it. So here’s what I’ll do. You get me into your apartment, into that back room, with an entire evening sitting behind Camille’s computer, and I’ll pull out of everything of yours. All of it. It’ll be like nothing happened. I don’t know your passwords. My program doesn’t need to know those to get in. I’ll take my stuff all down.”
Her eyes were glazed over, but she was fast adapting. “For one night sitting behind Camille’s system?”
“Her entire system. The motherboard. I need access to that room, and I’ll take it from there.”
She visibly swallowed. “How are you going to—I mean, she has an entire system just to load up her laptop, and that’s the one I can see. I can’t even imagine what she’s got on her computer.”
I glanced to Matt. He was watching us like a hawk.
“That’s for me to handle. Get me a night in there and you can watch me pull out of your stuff.”
Her eyes narrowed on me. “I can’t see you in there?”
She was referring to her accounts. I shook my head. “No.”
“Damn.” Her eyes clasped shut for a second. She sounded defeated. “You’re the genius in the program, aren’t you? The one that’s above the rest. I knew there was one, but I couldn’t tell who it was.” She laughed to herself. “I thought it was Dax, but I wasn’t sure. He got an A-minus on the last quiz.”
Yes. So scandalous. An A-minus.
Matt snorted.
Hoda glared at him.
He shrugged, smirking at her.
She glared again, but really, the effort was lost. He didn’t care.
He felt moved to share. “I’m in a different league, girl. Scare down, not up.”
She scowled, but some of the heat was gone. “Whatever.” She nodded at me. “I’ll get you in.”
Score! “Okay.”
“But I want to watch you pull your stuff out of my programs.”
Not a score. “Sounds fair.”
But that last picture of Kash and me in the hallway … I was waiting for the right time for my revenge on that one. We came to a truce, but not about that last picture. Hoda would find that out in due time.
This was the moment in the conversation where she should leave.
She didn’t. She remained.
Matt and I waited.
A beat later, her head lowered, and what I assumed was the real reason she was in my room came out. “I wanted to thank you for letting me come on this trip, and I got an email from Ms. Wells. Goa was cc’d on the same email. They’ve approved us to all sync in for class tomorrow.”
Crap. I’d forgotten.
Matt started laughing. “Kash was busy.”
Kash was—or someone who worked for him.
Erik was standing in the hallway and I directed my question at him. “You’re getting paid triple overtime, right?”
He flashed me a grin. “We’re being compensated, yes. Mr. Colello treats his employees well.” His gaze slid in Hoda’s direction, and there was a burn there.
She flushed.
“Hey!” A knock sounded, but Torie had already announced her presence. She stepped in, took in Matt, Hoda, and me, and grinned. “Looks like an interesting party in here.”
Matt lost some of his smirk. “What are you doing in here?”
Her eyebrows pulled in at his tone. “Relax. Food’s ready. I was sent up to let you all know.”
He clipped his head in a nod.
Torie added to me, “I’ll let everyone else know.”
“Thank you.”
She left, and Matt had had enough. He shot Hoda a pointed look. “Get gone. I wasn’t done talking to my sister.”
Another flush, but this one was redder. Her mouth tightened. “Right.” Her eyes found mine, but she didn’t say anything more, and she only raised her hand up in a halfhearted wave. She left, too. Matt followed her to the door, shutting it so even Erik couldn’t overhear.
He didn’t make me wait.
He turned and announced, “Okay. So. I’m going to fuck either Fleur or Cedar this weekend. I’m assuming that’s why you invited them, for me.”
He would’ve been right, but I hadn’t been thinking that. Not exactly.
“I wanted you to know. It’s not a slap in your face, but I’m not coupling up with anyone here, and I either fuck, get blitzed out of my fucking mind, or raise holy hell to distract myself from doing what I really want. I’m trying to play it smart, so that means I gotta fuck. And a lot. I’m probably going to do them dirty.”
I winced. “You do not need to share all of that. Trust me.”
“I am trusting you, that’s why I’m telling you. If they get in your face about something, just know the real deal. It’s just fucking. That’s it. I’m not going to be nice to them. There’ll be no promises from me. They’ll know the score is straight sex. I’m giving you a heads-up.”
“Great.”
Another clipped nod from him. “So I’m going to go.”
“Right.” And to be a smartass: “Thanks.”
He shot me a grin before opening the door and saluting Erik. “She’s all yours to guard.”
He was gone and Erik was still standing there. He looked at me through the opened door. “He’s in a mood.”
Yes. Yes, he was.
I was missing Kash all of a sudden, more than I had been before.
I wanted him to call me. I wanted him to fly here. I wanted him to crawl into bed with me.
I wanted to be standing in his arms right then and there.
But I wasn’t, and that was just how the cards fell.