“Curly fries. And Cajun wedges?”
“Yep.” She nodded, then placed the additional order. “Come on. Let’s try and beat the boys. I’m pretty sure we can throw them off their game.”
“How?” I stared at her, intrigued.
“Distract them?”
“How?” I repeated.
“I’m sure we’ll think of something.”
We didn’t manage to throw them off their game. Winter’s “distraction” techniques, which involved getting Cassius to tell jokes and flirting like mad with Cade, were an epic fail. After three games, Caiden ended up as the overall winner, and Cassius had moved into second place, with Zayde in third.
I was normally fairly good at bowling, as was Weston, but there seemed to be a bit of awkwardness in both of us after our moment in the corridor. I could’ve been projecting, in fact, I was 90 percent sure I was, but we were both distracted and playing badly.
The tiniest spark of hope sprang to life inside me.
It remained until we were leaving the bowling alley. The girl who West had been flirting with earlier was standing close to the exit, and as we made our way outside, she curled her finger at him with a sultry smile on her face.
When he broke away from our group, heading in her direction, I didn’t wait to see anything else. I rushed outside as quickly as I could, swallowing the feelings that I knew I couldn’t afford to have for him.
Weston Cavendish would never be mine.
FOUR
My computer pinged with a message alert, then another. Mercury and Xenon.
Navigating to Xenon’s first, I rubbed my brow. Bloody headache.
Xenon: Yes I’m a genius. All done
Yes. The job had been a tricky one, but between me and Xenon, we’d done it. The assignment had come from Xenon’s boss, and the weird thing was, the client was none other than my dad, Arlo. Did he know I was the one dealing with it? I wasn’t sure, but I knew not to underestimate him. Whether my dad knew it was me or not, fuck it. I’d do what I needed to do. In this instance, the assignment involved looking into the background of the head finance guy at Alstone Holdings, Mr. Martin Smith.
Alstone Holdings was the company that was founded by three families—mine, the Drummond family, and the Lowry family. Primarily in construction and land acquisition, they owned most of the land and property in Alstone and the surrounding area and had far-reaching business connections that stretched across the country and even internationally.
Something about this particular employee had thrown up red flags—my dad had suspicions around discrepancies in the accounts, numbers that hadn’t been adding up—and although this guy had an explanation for everything, my dad wasn’t convinced. He wanted to pin something on him legally but wasn’t above illegal methods to do so, which was where I came in. I was supposed to be looking out for anything that would stand out as suspicious. That didn’t give me much to go on, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me.
How did I get involved in all this shit to begin with? It had happened when I was playing with my newfound set of skills and had managed to break into Kryptos, a legendary hidden system deep within the dark web. About half a second after I’d been greeted with a flashing K symbol, my entire network had been taken over by an unknown controller. Nothing worked, and I’d fucking panicked, watching helplessly as my system destroyed itself before my eyes. Me, a cocky sixteen-year-old, thinking I was this invincible genius hacker, until I wasn’t.
Half an hour after it had happened, my system was back online as if nothing had happened, complete with a message on my screen and a link to a hidden portal on the dark web. Within the portal, I’d been given various tests, and afterwards, my formal offer of employment. Hacking into Kryptos had been a test of skills, and apparently, I’d passed.
All of us were anonymous, assigned code names when we began working for Promethium. Hence my nickname, Nitro. Over the years I’d been doing it, I’d come to know my colleague-slash-fellow hacker Mercury…not know, exactly, but we’d built a kind of online friendship, and we trusted one another and helped each other out. Then there was Xenon, higher in ranking than us, and above him was Promethium. There was a huge network of us out there, all working for Promethium and collectively known as Kryptos, but I only really interacted with Mercury and Xenon.
Back to my current task. My dad had asked us to look into this guy’s background and go through his correspondence to see if there was anything that would connect him to the discrepancies in the company finances. Problem was, the fucker had a level of encryption on his phone that I couldn’t manage to get through, so I’d asked Xenon to help. Not that he’d do anything for free—no, he wanted an undisclosed future favour in return. Something I’d probably end up regretting, knowing him.
Leaving my computer to filter through the data from the guy’s phone, I headed for the kitchen to grab a drink. My housemate and best friend, Cassius, was already there, thumbing through his phone, and he looked up with a grin as I entered.
“Alright, mate? You done with your computer shit already?”
“Nope.” Swiping a bottle of water from the fridge, I thought about it for a minute. Fuck it. It could take hours for the software to analyse all the data on the phone, depending on how many emails and messages he had. And my headache was getting worse. “Actually, yeah, I am. You wanna head out?”
“Always ready.” He bounded up from his stool, grabbing his keys from the island, and headed around to meet me.
“Where’s everyone else?” The house seemed quieter than usual.
“Cade and Z are working out in the basement. Winter’s at uni, said she’d meet us when we were ready.”
“Okay. Just gonna check a message from Mercury before we go.” I stopped in front of the door to the computer room, but Cass grabbed my arm to pull me away.
“Leave it. It’ll still be there when we get back.”
True. He hadn’t sent me an alert, which would’ve indicated it was urgent. Whatever it was could wait.
“You’re right.”
“Always am.”
Rolling my eyes at his words, I followed him out of the door.
“Best of three?” Cassius didn’t even wait for my reply before racking up the pool balls again.
Placing my beer down on the high table next to me, I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand before replying. “Yeah.” We were in the Student Union bar, after the world’s quickest trip to the campus library to pick up some books. My workload was heavier this semester, and I was juggling it with my part-time job doing IT support right here at Alstone College. The job was easy, and it was additional experience for the future. But it was an added time suck, especially now I had this additional assignment for Kryptos.
Still, there wasn’t really any need to worry. My classes were easy…all other than economics, but I had Winter to help me. Now she was living with us, we’d fallen into the habit of going through my economics coursework in the evenings in front of the TV.
Speaking of Winter…
“Doubles?”
I looked up from my pool cue to see her grinning at me. I returned her smile as she swung her bag from her shoulder, dropping it to the floor.