Page 157 of Sexting My Best Friend's Brothers
I stare blindly at the black screen, the deep unease in my gut rapidly doubling.
Tessa is falling apart. The secure servers are being probed. Harper is asking questions.
“Keep a strict twenty-four-hour watch on the logs,” I command. “And Asher?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t tell Tessa. She looked incredibly fragile today. She absolutely doesn’t need this on her plate.”
“Copy that,” Asher says.
I cut the line.
I walk back over to the glass window, staring down at the sprawling city. The oppressive heat of the afternoon is breaking, the atmosphere growing heavy and suffocating.
I have a terrible feeling the silence is officially over. The ambush is about to begin.
27
ASHER
Chaos is just a pattern you have not decoded yet.
That is what I tell myself. That is the mantra that keeps my heart rate at a steady sixty-four beats per minute while the world burns around me. Most people see noise; I see variables. Most people see a fire; I see the thermodynamics required to extinguish it.
But right now, looking at the three monitors arranged in a semicircle on my desk, I am struggling to find the pattern.
“Talk to me, Asher,” Ethan barks from behind me. He is pacing the length of the server room—our War Room—like a caged tiger, his tie discarded and his top button undone. “What are we looking at?”
“It isn’t a probe anymore,” I say, my fingers flying across the mechanical keyboard. The click-clack sound is usually soothing, a rhythmic anchor, but today it sounds like gunfire. “The probe was just a knock on the door. They didn’t wait for us to answer. They kicked it in.”
On the center screen, lines of red code are actively overwriting my beautiful, clean architecture. It looks exactly like a wound opening up in real time.
“Sector four is compromised,” I state, keeping my voice flat to suppress the panic clawing up my throat. “The encryption keys for the Confessions database are being brute-forced. Whoever this is, they are not using a laptop in their mother’s basement—they are using a botnet with massive processing power.”
“The Confessions feature,” Owen says, leaning over my shoulder with his usual relaxed posture completely gone. He smells like stale coffee and the sharp tang of stress sweat. “Asher, that’s the vault. That’s the anonymous user data. If that gets out…”
“I know the variables, Owen,” I snap, typing a rapid command to reroute the traffic. Access Denied. “If the Confessions data gets decrypted, the anonymity of two million users is destroyed. We promised them a safe space to share their darkest secrets. If those secrets are linked back to their real identities…”
“It’s a nuclear bomb,” Ethan finishes grimly. “We have politicians on this app. CEOs. Influencers. If their anonymous confessions about affairs, addictions, and corporate fraud get leaked…”
“Mosaic is dead,” I say. “Trust is our currency. If we lose it, we are bankrupt, and we lose everything.”
A new window pops up on my screen. It isn’t a system error. It’s a chat box.
[Unknown User]: Knock knock.
Acid floods my gut. A manual override. The hacker is not just an automated script; they are present, actively watching us try to stop them.
[Unknown User]: Nice firewall. Did you build it yourself? It reads like a script-kiddie job from 2018.
“They’re mocking us,” Owen says, his hands curling into fists. “Cut the line, Ash. Pull the plug.”
“I can’t,” I say, my eyes scanning the dense packet data. “If I sever the connection now, the fail-safe triggers a massive data dump. They have rigged the database with a dead man’s switch. If I disconnect them, the information automatically uploads to a public server. They have us in a chokehold.”
[Unknown User]: Let’s play a game. I have 40 terabytes of dirt. Nudes. Confessions. IP addresses. I’m going to release 1% of it in… let’s say… two hours. Unless you pay the toll.
“Blackmail,” Ethan growls.
