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I shake my head. “Don’t ask, please. It’s too long a story. I’ll have to tell you about it later when I finally manage to get my shit together.” I smile at him. “You have any coffee left?”
“You’ve missed a lot in the office, too. The coffee is long gone. I drank it all, got jittery, and then had more.” Blake shakes his fingers out to prove his point.
“Well fuck.” I knew it was too much to ask, but a girl has to have some hope. “I’m not mentally prepared for this meeting today.”
The laptop in my bag is a dead weight, dragging me down, and I feel lopsided as I walk to the desk to scrounge. I’ve got to have something in there to give me a little jolt, a sugar rush. Anything. Because there’s no way in hell I’m missing this meeting, and I need to be totally up on my shit to deal with what’s bound to happenafter.
Blake’s eyes go steely. “Then get prepared,” he replies. “Don’t go in there half-cocked. It’s good to be confident, but if you get ahead of yourself, then you’re going to aggravate people.”
“Yeah, great advice. I’ll go do that.” Hopefully, he’ll choke on the sarcasm. It’s too much to bear having no coffee, no sugar and listening to his less-than-sage advice.
My fingers skip over a bevy of candy and gum wrappers, but nothing I haven’t already dug into.
Looks like I’m going into this completely unprepared.
Twenty-five minutes and counting.
Time to escape.
It’s what I always do when things get a little too suffocating or more than I can bear. I pop in earbuds and open the laptop, logging in to my online lair for some gameplay and letting my favorite tunes drown out whatever Blake is trying to say to me.
Pass on it.
He’s the kind of person who likes things done by the book, in a certain way, but gives nothing to anyone else. The type of person who expects everyone else to do exactly what he does, think the same way, and then gets insulted when you don’t. Which keeps us at odds a lot of the time.
A tough nut to crack, of course. The longer the music seeps into me, the better I feel, though, and soon Blake is nothing but a stray thought in the rear of my head where all stray thoughts go.
My online lair is the literal only place I’m actually free and powerful, and I don’t have to worry about anyone but myself. The online forum is about a step from the entrance to the entire dark web. Dark web adjacent, as I like to call it. I’ve created a place where people can dip their toe into things they really have no business sampling, or buying, or talking about and determine if they like what they see or not.
Like how they feel.
If I’d had a place like this growing up, things might have gone a little differently, I like to think. Who knows. Maybe I was always meant to end up in this place, being the person I am today.
I’m the admin of the site, and the guys under me, the hackers I employ for Broderick, use this as a free space to talk without fear of repercussions.
And who knows.
Maybe that one newbie dude will be on, too, for some banter before I have to put my game face on again.
I check the status of EnemySquare only to find him idle. It’s been about ten hours since he logged on last. Aw, too bad. I tap my fingers against my knee, biting the inside of my cheek. My stomach gives a half-hearted growl, whether for food or for coffee, and is ignored. To my detriment, of course, because I’ll pay for it later.
The strange newcomer to the chat room the other night got the same rigamarole I put everyone else through, except his answers tickled me.
The more I think about him, the more I want to know.
The finger tap transfers from my knee to my chin. I should have already checked on the new guy because I've checked out every single user who joined my underground dungeon. Who lurks behind the screen name? Who wants a taste of the hunt I offer as the gatekeeper of the dark web?
Another layer of power, I think. It’s a way for me to control the environment. Anyone who acts like a complete piece of shit gets booted by me and blocked.
And because I realize I can’t have any side of me relax at any point in time, I type in a few strings of code to delve deeper into EnemySquare. I need to know who I’m talking to.
I glance up at Blake only to have him point to his watch as a reminder. I shake my cell, showing him the alarm I set to make sure I don’t escape for too long.
I’ve got this.
The initial start of the dig is the best part for me. It’s the curiosity of the unknown, of uncovering layer after layer until you come to the gem at the center. The truth. If you want it badly enough, in this business, you can always find the truth. Whether or not it’s something you can live with is another story entirely.
It’s almost stupidly easy to track the IP address of the user. Stupidly easy to figure out that EnemySquare is—
