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I turned away and headed toward my—our—temporary office. I was halfway down the hall when I heard Mike.
“Anne. Hold up.” He jogged to catch up with me.
I gave him my practiced smile. “What’s up?”
“Are you all right?”
“Totally fine. Why?” I was more out of sorts than I thought, if Mike noticed. He’d never struck me as an observer of people.
He shrugged. “Just an impression. I know everything is stressful right now. Trust me, I know. If you need an ear from someone who gets it...”
I wouldn’t be talking to him. I forced my smile to reach my eyes. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”
Maybe I’d misjudged him. From every other time we’d ever spoken.
I set up my laptop and tried to dive into work. After a few false starts, I managed to lose myself in admin tasks.
“Hey.” Luke’s tone was quiet when he interrupted a few hours later. “Lunch?”
I shook my head and kept my eyes on my screen. I’d walk down the street and grab something quick when he was gone. The more time I could spend engrossed in my work, the less I had to think about how Luke and Chase used me as a prize in a dick measuring contest.
“Before I go, Jamie’s been calling around off and on all morning. She hasn’t found any rooms yet, but she’ll keep trying,” he said.
I didn’t want to keep her from her work. True, this was part of her job, but— “Don’t worry about it.” My voice was raw. “I’ll sleep on the couch.”
“A—”
I glared at him. “The couch is fine.”
“All right.” Luke left again.
I let out a long sigh and dropped my face into my hands. I hated this. Why did they have to... Why couldn’t they have just... They could have just told me.
Then again, I could have done the same, instead of making assumptions and swimming in fantasy for so long.
That didn’t make what they’d done any more right. I couldn’t forget that. They’d bet me as a prize.
I turned my attention back to my laptop.
Well, attention was a loose term. I wasn’t focused on anything. The email from Zane was a welcome distraction.
Rumor was, more than a decade ago, before the company was even known as Rinslet, he’d hacked their network and distributed a release version of a game weeks early.
He’d been hired to keep people like him from doing the exact same thing, and while this situation wasn’t identical, I wondered if it ate at him that it happened under his watch.
His email might as well have been in a foreign language. I understood enough to know it contained computer names and IP addresses, but the rest escaped me.
I called him on my cell phone, in case I needed to wander to someplace more private. “Tell me what I’m looking at.”
“Someone, presumably from Team Percival, hopped almost every development machine in the building, to connect and upload that content.”
That didn’t make any sense. Rather, I understood what he meant, but not why anyone would do it. “Indulge me and let me talk through this?” I said.
“Sure.”
“Typically, a person hops connection points to hide their location.” The concept was, as I understood it, to use one internet connection to get to another and another and another, until it was difficult or impossible to find out where they’d started. “Which means they wouldn’t want all those points in the same place, and they’d prefer unsecured or at least less secure spots to connect to.”
Zane clucked. “Typically.”
