When I'm with You (Hope Town #3)(6)

The second my dad realized how much I hated just about every aspect of CS, he decided to put my computer knowledge to work, and I’ve been doing the IT shit that no one but Maddox has ever been able to do since. Of course, when you can hack into just about anything, even Maddox couldn’t keep up with me. It’s never been more than a hobby out of boredom, or stinginess to get free porn. No matter how much fun I find the challenge of a good hack, the last thing I want is to spend my hours locked inside some dark room staring at computer screens. The plus side, though, is that the pay is ridiculous, and because of my time here, I was finally able to save enough to start living my own dream. So for the last six months that I’ve been working here, I’ve gone down to part time. Eventually, I’ll be too busy for even that and only come in when they need my skills for a special case.

Unlocking the front door, I walk through the doors of CS. I look over at the picture of my Uncle Coop front and center when you walk in before moving to disarm the security system. The lights flick on after I punch the codes into the high-tech monitor. It takes a few seconds of my fingers flying over the screen to rearm the system and make sure the screen registers me as ‘in,’ so the alarms don’t start blaring the second I move farther into the building. With a sigh, I walk around the empty reception desk to the thick closed door that separates the lobby from the offices. I press my thumb on the panel, waiting for the multiple locks to disengage as they recognize me before pushing the heavy door open. I repeat the same process when I get to my ‘office’ door; only, this time, I tip my head up and look into the camera above the door as it registers my facial imprint before disengaging the door lock and allowing me to walk into the dungeon. Or IT central, rather, but dungeon fits.

Not a single window exists in here and they painted the walls black for a reason I will never f*cking understand. Being that it houses about twenty computers and enough technical crap to give the biggest nerd a wet dream, the air in here is kept cold as shit to prevent anything from overheating.

We monitor numerous residential and business properties around the clock, so this room is always humming, but since we don’t currently have any active cases that require constant monitoring, things have been quiet in here. I hate when we get those cases. Maddox and I tend to switch off duty with a few other guys since it becomes tedious to stare at that shit for hours on end.

I move around the hub in the middle of the room that houses the bulk of our monitors and slide into my chair. My desk is pushed up against Maddox’s, forming a square of sorts in the back corner of the room. It’s easier this way, and our own personal computer monitors are designed so that, when we need to, we are able to swing them around to face the other person when another eye is needed. It’s easy enough for me to get lost in my coding, surfing the dark corners of the internet looking for all the things that people think they’ve hidden forever. However, when he’s sitting in his chair, I always feel like he’s studying me more than he’s studying his own monitors.

Secretly, I don’t mind his dark looks or attitude since his frustration usually warrants it. I’m usually easily fifteen steps ahead of him on cases he’s been stumbling through for days. Normally, anyone at the receiving end of his death glares would probably shit themselves but not me. No, I love it because while he focuses on being pissed at me, I can focus on things he doesn’t need to notice me taking in. Sitting on the left side of his desk, butted up to the wall and turned slightly so I have it perfectly in my line of sight when I jot something down, is a picture of his girls.

Maddi and Ember.

But I only have eyes for Ember.

I do my best to ignore the taunting frame to my right as I quickly power on the computer. I grab the file I had been working on yesterday before I closed up, and it doesn’t take long before I lose track of the things around me. I’m finally able to let go of the tense feelings I’ve been carrying around all morning.

I had been working steady for an hour or so when I hear the steady beep of the security system, alerting me to someone else showing up for the day, but I’ve been so close to closing this case that I don’t budge. They’ll see me show up on the security panel when they shut that shit off. I designed that brilliant system, knocking the old shit Maddox had installed out of the water. The iPad-size panel I had fiddled with when I came in the doors this morning not only works for the boring alarm functions of arming and disarming, but this one also keeps a running tally of the bodies in the whole office.

After an incident that ended with the death of Uncle Coop, they had installed some safeguards. But none of them had made this place as secure as my program. Now, you need to go through a few steps just to get in the front door when no one is manning the desk, but also, thumbprint and facial recognition is needed once you get deeper into the bowels of the building.

Which brought me to my favorite feature of the system. The second you step foot in the front door, the system recognizes you by a series of body and facial scans, leaving a small icon of your face on the bottom of the screen. It’s helpful for everyone at CS to know who is in the building at all times. New clients sometimes act like they have a giant stick up their ass when we require them to be put into the system, but it beats the alarm going off all day during consultations because it doesn’t recognize someone who’s been past the main lobby longer than the registered safe period, which it’s designed to do for our well-being.