Sure fucking feels like it, Jamie.
The room darkened.Let go of the fear. Let go of the effort.Don’t fight your body, don’t instruct it, don’t force it to do anything. Just relax and sit back and watch.
She closed her eyes, stopped trying to inhale, imagined Jamie’s accent rolling over her, his hand on her chest and her belly. The room dived but slowly her lungs inflated. A whoopee cushion finding its normal state. She exhaled again, and then relaxed. After a few breaths she opened her eyes.Jamie.
Forget denial. This time she was skipping straight to anger.
“You don’t own me,” she said, her voice cracking.
“Right now, I think I very much do.”
“No.” She pointed to the laptop. “It’s the password.You don’t own me.Lowercase, no spaces, no apostrophe.”
He studied her a second.Hurry the fuck up.Then he ambled back to the table, one hand in his pocket, and tilted the screen. Samira stopped breathing—not with a panic attack, this time. The clock was seconds from running out.
He typed the password, one-fingered, searching for the letters like he was unfamiliar with the layout of a keyboard, and pressed Enter.
“Nothing’s happening,” he said, after half a minute. “Just a blank screen with an egg timer.”
“Oh, there’s plenty happening,” she said, her voice sounding like it was coming from someone else. “It’ll take a while to process.”
“How long?”
“That depends how many files you have on your Gold Linings server.”
He stared at her. “What are you talking about?”
“I broke into your server.”
He scoffed, giving his head a quick shake. “There’s nothing you could have found on those servers that would...” He laughed, fleeting and harsh. “Oh man, that’s good. That’s really good. That’s what you think you have on me? Those servers...it’s only as much data as my lowliest staff member has access to. Wow, for a minute there, you actually had me worried.”
Oh God, was there truly nothing there?
No one put insignificant data behind three-level security. She narrowed her eyes. “I don’t think you understand.” She damn well hoped he didn’t. “I’m not talking just about your cloud server but thetrésoryou hide on there.”
For a microsecond his smile wavered. “That’s impenetrable.”
“Nothing’s impenetrable, Senator. You see, Charlotte gave me the password before your goons captured her. That was your first level of security. You may have noticed your cell phone is missing?”
He blinked. Fitz swore.
“That’s your second.”
“But you—” He looked at the laptop, his forehead wrinkling. “Fuck.”
“The second you entered that password, the computer scanned your face, and your files began copying directly from Gold Linings onto twenty newly formed websites—hylandhacks.com, thedirtonhyland.net, teflontristan.co...”
Face reddening, he picked up the laptop and bent the screen back until it snapped. He twisted it into two pieces and smashed his fist onto the keyboard. She felt detached, floating over the scene. She’d won but this was no victory. Charlotte’s body, crumpled on a concrete floor. Latif’s body, a mess of blood. Rafe. The crinkles at the corners of Jamie’s eyes.
A tear rolled down her cheek. She blinked her eyes clear. “Destroying the computer will make no difference. There was nothing at all on it.” She felt deflated but...calm. In shock, probably. “Until you entered that password I had nothing on you at all. I don’t even know what’s in that folder but your level of security told me it was precious to you. It was just an educated guess but I’m thinking I guessed right.”
The senator turned to Fitz, who seemed to have shrunk, his face pale and hard. “Find those websites and shut them down.”
“It’s too late for that, Senator,” she said. “Do you know how many social-media followers your daughter has?”
“What the fuck are you talking about now?” His neck seemed to have thickened, purple veins ready to burst.
“Not only did you just hack into your own vault by looking at that webcam, but you triggered a series of scheduled posts to go up on your daughter’s social-media accounts directing her followers to my new websites, where they can download every document at their leisure. And she is on pretty much every medium there is. How many million followers? Oh and she’s just sent private messages to every major media outlet in America and the UK.”
