The Damaged (The Insiders Trilogy #2) - Tijan by Tijan

“You sound pretty sure about this.”

“Fact.”

“So you’re saying that whatever the reason my mom is sleeping with my father, and because he’s going to eventually cheat, I shouldn’t get worked up about it because it’s not going to go anywhere?” Talk about a doom-and-gloom vibe.

“Just being a realist. It sucks for your mom if she’s got feelings involved.” He sounded hesitant. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think your mom will let herself go there emotionally. She’s too smart, and she’s a good mom. She won’t want this blowing back on you, especially with what you’ve gone through. That’s my prediction.”

“Then why are you telling me?”

“Because you asked what your mom was hiding. Didn’t feel right knowing the answer and not sharing with you. And because I love you and I know you’re a realist, too. If your mom is doing something with her eyes wide open, which I’m sure you’ll assess tonight at dinner, then you’ll feel better about it, because you really want to just make sure Chrissy Hayes is okay at the end of all this.”

“You sound like you know me.”

“You have a big heart, you got a shrewd mind, and I know every inch of that body of yours.” A dry chuckle came from him that I swear was acting as a caress, sliding over me. “I know my woman.”

My voice was hoarse. “When are you coming back?”

“Probably early morning. You want me to wake you up?”

“You know me, you should know that answer.”

Another chuckle, this one echoing the arousal I was feeling. “I’ll wake you up.”

After hanging up with him, I went home. I had about an hour to change or get ready before Matt would be picking me up, and it’d be Matt’s driver. Not just Matt. Both Kash and Peter thought it was a good idea if all of us had two guards on us at all times, at least until the media attention died down. So because I only had an hour, I opted to stay in what I was wearing. Dinner was usually more casual, although that was when Marie was there.

Payton would be there. The Quinn-look-alike aunt. Just thinking about her, I started tensing up. She hadn’t said a word last time, but she’d been there. Staring. Always in the background. Seraphina was hanging on her almost the whole time, and Cyclone kept running over to her for hugs, so the two little ones were attached, to say the least. They hadn’t been like that with Quinn, so I was trying to tell myself that meant something. Trust the kids. They usually knew. Still, none of them had almost been kidnapped because of her. So maybe I was dealing with trauma, but there was extra trauma that I thought I had processed out of me. Maybe not?

I sighed.

That meant I had shit buried, and I’d read enough psych books to know that stuff would not stay buried. It’d come up.

It always came up.

Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten out of counseling so fast … But no, I’d been ready. I hated going in there and talking it out with that counselor. Loathed it. Me ending those sessions was a good thing. I felt like I could breathe, once I knew I didn’t have to go in and dredge up both kidnapping events. And I really liked not having to see her get quiet and pensive, stare at me as if she could literally read all my haunts and demons, and then write down notes. Those notes. I hated that notebook she had. I wanted to grab it and burn it, but I knew she wouldn’t let me. I asked once what she was writing and she told me it was her own code, so nothing would make sense to me.

That pissed me off even more. I wasn’t stupid, but she treated me like I was.

And since I had an hour, I did the time calculations in my head.

I’d be in the car with Matt for forty minutes to the estate. Dinner would probably be two to three hours. Ser and Cy would want us to stay after, so by the time we’d be heading back I was looking at not getting to the apartment till ten, and I was being generous with that guess. Matt would try to talk me into going to Naveah, but I couldn’t.

I looked through my assignments and there was a whole code I needed to finish.

Maybe … I was thinking here, because what I should do now and what I wanted to do weren’t lining up. I should do the code, but I really wanted to hack Hoda.

Crap.

If Matt was texting on the phone the whole drive up, I could do the code then, or most of the code. Could I? Yes. I was going to try for it.

That meant I had fifty minutes to hack Hoda and the other ten were for the bathroom and me changing clothes.

I went to the office, settled in, and within a minute I was already running the program to get Hoda’s password. First up, her social media accounts.

All of them.





THIRTEEN


Within the hour, I had uploaded my programs to Hoda’s Facebook, her Twitter, her Instagram, her emails, because she had five separate addresses, and her website. The program acted like a window. It was a back window she didn’t know she had, but I could get into her accounts anytime I wanted or needed.

I could watch her activity.

Was it an invasion of privacy? Yes.

Did I care? No.

She thought I hadn’t earned my place. She underestimated me. She released that image of Kash and me, so in the way of us Hayes women, vengeance was totally appropriate here. She screwed with me, I was going to obliterate her if I so chose.

I just wasn’t there, yet.