My Fake Billionaire Damaged Boyfriend
Chapter 19

Izzy

We’ve gone from a lavish home with a bed that’s like a cloud, to an underground building made of concrete walls, no light, and a tall, steel fence that has to be opened by two guards’ keys just to get through to the parking garage. It’s a tunnel that leads underground, my heart in my stomach while I try to adjust the cuffs behind me.

The agent sitting with me takes my arm, undoing the cuffs before we come to a stop in the long, dark parking lot. I tip my head in thanks, looking over my shoulder for Dimitri. When the long line of cars comes to a stop, my stomach is in knots, and the driver unlocks my door first. I jump out of the car and rush to the little car nearby, Dimitri coming out of the backseat with his wrists undone as well.

He catches me in a tight hug, as if we hadn’t just seen each other about an hour ago. My stomach g****s against his chest, and he holds me tighter, kissing my cheek over and over until the agents tell us which way to go.

“Here we are,” Gage says, ushering us into a stairwell. We follow Dimitri keeping his arm around my lower back while we climb down to a lower floor. “Alright, everybody inside. I need all cyber-crime units in the main meeting room. The IT specialist needs to get set up in conference room B, and our targets can get comfortable in the break room for now.”

My brows furrow. “Why can’t we be in the meeting room?”

“It’s a closed meeting,” he says.

Dimitri comes forward, purposefully standing before me as he faces Gage. “She is the one that has found the most shred of proof here against Alek. I think she deserves the right to be in that meeting if it’s about this project.”

Gage grits his teeth slightly, coming toe-to-toe with the man I adore. “And I think you should stand down. I can have you and her sent to a federal holding cell if you’d like, or I can let you hang out in the breakroom where there are some donuts and coffee. Choice is yours.”

I know Dimitri is frustrated, and I am a little bit too, but it’s not worth getting tossed into a cell. I pull him back until he concedes, coming with me as a petite woman points me in the direction of the break room. There’s a table full of fresh breakfast pastries, more than just donuts, and there’s a long line of coffee dispensers and mugs.

I go to make us both cups of coffee while he plops down in a seat, defeated.

“Here,” I say, scooting him my mug. “We should probably wake up a little bit.”

“I’m already awake. Having to be arrested before morning will do that to you, I guess.”

“Yeah, I understand. But it’s for the best, right?”

I want to see his genuine reaction, but he finally tips his head. It’s either to placate me and my nervousness, or to just be prideful and agree to what he’s said in the past about us being safer with these agents than outside and in the open.

“Look at it this way, we don’t have to go to work.”

He smiles gently before his lips turn into a dim frown again. “My whole company is going to think I’m arrested. My stock price might plummet.”

“Only for a minute. When it comes out that we’re heroes then it will go back up.”

“You think so?” he asks, finally sipping the coffee I made him. “I guess it’s a good assumption. Plus, if Alek is taken down in the end, that helps me in the long run.”

I nod in agreement, still curious about what that meeting is about in the next room. “I wish they would include us a little bit, you know? Why wouldn’t they let us sit in? They want me to help decode the software. I should be in there.”

“I agree,” he harrumphs. “But we can’t know anything for sure. They’re probably just rambling through the next agenda or whatever. It’s nothing major, I’m sure. If they wanted you to be in there, then it’s something you should know. If it’s about the coding issues, or how to break through the backdoor and extract it for proof, then they’ll tell you afterward.”

“Yeah, you’re right. I should assume they’re just talking about something else that doesn’t have to do with this coding crap.”

“Here,” he says, pushing me to the nearest plate of breakfast delicacies.

My stomach growls again in response. “Alright, if you insist.”

I dig into the sugary treats, my mind in desperate need of a distraction anyways. It feels like forever of us meandering through nonsense of conversations before another sign of life comes forward. I tense, Agent Mccoy a bit intimidating to see in his suit, with his broad posture and narrow glare.

“You, come with me,” he says, pointing to me. Still, Dimitri stands, and Mccoy gives him a sharp look.

“No, you stay here.”

“I’m going with her.”

“You’re going to get on my nerves if you keep this up. I don’t have a problem with having you restrained.”

I come closer to Dimitri now, kissing his cheek and ushering him to sit back down. He finally abides, though not happily, and sinks into his chair. I brush my hands across his cheeks, and he grins, taking my wrists in his grasp so he can line his lips against my knuckles.

“I’ll see you soon, Kitten,” he mutters.

I blush at that nickname in the presence of this man, but it doesn’t bother me too much. I like being Dimitri’s focal point, and I think he agrees to that dynamic as well. We’re sweet to one another, except for last night. That was a sore, rough time between us.

And I can’t wait to do it again.

“Down here,” Mccoy barks, his tone trying to get me to hurry my pace. I follow through, heading down the hallway a few steps behind him. The cinder walls and the windowless sight of this building makes me uneasy. I yawn, knowing it’s daylight outside but not being able to confirm it as easily as before.

“In here please,” he says, pointing to a conference room.

I walk into the space, all of Dimitri’s stuff set up like normal. There’s a chair pulled out at the desk for me, and I sit down, a few other agents pulling up their seats to be closer to the screen. The monitor clicks on, thankfully restoring the last point where I had been running my flash drive software through the information that we bought off of Alek’s secret scheme.

“Just go slow,” Mccoy says. “We have some proof by this screen that he’s up to no good. I want the whole cake, though, Izzy. We’re looking for the search engine, the backdoor, all of it.”

I swallow hard, knowing it sounds like an easy request, but it’s not.

“I haven’t tried this before,” I warn. “I’m not too sure how I’m going to do it, just that I will give my best shot.”

“Good, then let’s get to it.”

So, I get to work. I fight through levels of code, rewriting and typing lines of code out like it’s my sole purpose on Earth right now. Everyone is watching my every step, and I fear they are judging me as I work. One of them points out a mistake, but although he’s technically right, I’m not going by the book here.

I fear that’s going to be the biggest hurdle to get over right now. They seem to think I’m a running, talking textbook, and I’m not. I have no real formal training outside of some college classes online, and while it was valuable information, it didn’t make me this good.

I’ve had years of practice and honing in my craft. I am a good worker, a decent coder, but I never quit.

They still seem less impressed with my work as the hours creep by, and I replace myself digging into a deeper well of zeros and ones with no end in sight.

I lean back, stretching my sore knuckles while the agents seem keen on the same. Someone mentions lunch, and half of them file out of the room. Mccoy paces behind me, checking his watch before agreeing on a longer break. They all disperse, and I’m told not to mess with a thing without them being in the room.

The urge to defy them is so strong that my fingers begin to throb.

“Hey, you,” a light voice says.

I spin in my chair, Dimitri in the doorway where he smiles with two plates of sandwiches and chips in hand. Although I’m still pretty full from breakfast, I take the plate as something to pick off of later when I’m working, he bites into his sandwich, sitting down beside me while looking over the work I’ve done so far. There are notes scattered everywhere of my every move, the agents doing their job a little too intensively and writing down every stroke of a key I’ve made up until this point.

“Wow, you’ve been busy.”

“A little bit. What have you been doing?”

“Nothing, they won’t let me out of that damn breakroom. Even posted a guy at the door, like I’m going to run off. Like there is anywhere to run off to. I was shell shocked when they finally said I could see you. I grabbed you a plate of food and came right over. It’s like they’re trying to keep us apart or something.”

“I don’t know why,” I mutter. “You should be here with me. We wouldn’t have anything without your help and input.”

He grins, but waves my words off in dismissal. “You’re doing all the hard work,Kitten. It’s nothing for me to just sit by and let you work. I don’t mind it, but I do miss being able to k**s you as often.”

I blush and lean forward, meeting his lips halfway before the monitor starts going berserk. I hiccup in shock, pushing back to the monitor where the screen begins to display a new line of code, one that I’m not so sure is supposed to be there.

“Whoa, whoa,” I gust, needing Mccoy to get here now so I can get back into this. “Go get him.”

“I’ll be right back,” Dimitri says, hurrying out of the room.

The typeface comes against the screen so fast that I can hardly read it fast enough, the code unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It’s not code at all. It’s plain English, and a cursor on the other side of the system is moving through the inner workings of the system.

It must not know I’m here… or maybe it does and it’s trying to tell me something.

“F**k,” I whisper to myself, reading the text in a long dump of letters that finally make sense.

Someone is trying to tell me something, but the information isn’t good.

I turn around quickly, my back to the screen when Dimitri and Mccoy come back into the office, both of them panting haggardly. I pull as much of my body in the way, needing to hide the words as they come, but the agents swarming the room don’t let it last. One of them pulls me aside to see the text on the screen, and I fight to stay put, my eyes locked on Dimitri’s.

“No, no!” I bark, needing to hide it from his sight.

“Move, dammit,” Mccoy snaps, yanking me across the room practically.

“Hey! You don’t handle her like that, she’s helping you!” Dimitri barks, anger in is blue eyes.

“You better watch yourself, man.”

“You watch yourself, and keep her back,” Mccoy hollers in reply, pointing at me as I curl into Dimitri’s arms carefully. “She’s interfering now, and I’ll have you both arrested for real in a minute if you don’t—”

“Boss, look at this,” one of the other agents says breathlessly, pulling his focus. “You need to read this.”

Mccoy snarls as he gives me a warning of a look, Dimitri leaning in to read the words, but I push him back, all the way to the doorway, just so he doesn’t see it. He’s starting to get just as frustrated, confusion weaving his wonderful, masculine features together in utter agitation.

“What are you doing, Kitten? Stop that.”

“I don’t… want you… to read… that…” I say between hard attempts to get him out of the room. He doesn’t listen, and I can understand why, but I’m trying to protect him!

“Someone, get me everything that has to do with this claim right now!” Mccoy says, his voice unkind. He turns around at once, grabbing my arm and yanking me to the side so my back hits the wall, his face nearly in mine as he lowers his voice. “What did you do? Who is on the other end of this system?”

“I don’t know! I was just sitting there, and it started typing. Someone must be in the software code like I am, and they are trying to help, but—”

“What the hell?”

Dimitri’s voice caves at last, and I feel sick to my stomach as I watch him standing before the screen, reading line of text after horrendous line of text that I know he wasn’t aware of before.

I wish it wasn’t true, but it seems to be the reality now.

He turns to see me, teary-eyed and trembling. “What is this?”

“Someone knows something,” I whisper, tears crawling down my face as I reply. “I didn’t know, Dimitri. I didn’t want you to get hurt, I didn’t want you to read it.”

He shakes his head, furious more at the world than at me, but it feels the same. He turns and storms out of the room at once, my heart ripped out of my chest as it’s dragged with him. Mccoy pushes his hand against my shoulder, pinning my back to the wall when I try to go after him.

“You, stay put. I’m going to have you run diagnostics to see who is making this claim. In the meantime, I’ll make sure he’s put in a place where he can calm down for a while.”

“I need to be with him,” I plead through my tears. “Please, just let me—”

“No. This is a federal investigation, and someone is interfering with information that could be fake, or could be real. We need to know the truth sooner rather than later. You’re going to sit down and look through that interference and see who is in the system with us. I will have my men dig around to see if that information is true or not.”

I let my head fall slightly. “He needs me right now.”

“He needs a break, and I suggest you help figure out the truth. If what that person is claiming holds even a drop of water, then we will have to formally charge Alek Ivica with murder.”

My body winces at that word.

Murder.

The murder of an innocent man. The murder of a person that I’m sure did nothing, absolutely nothing, but stand in the way of someone else’s greed, and lost their life in return. It hardly seems fair, but that’s the gist of such an ugly word.

Murder.

The murder of the man I love’s father.

I can only imagine what Dimitri is going through right now, and I wish I could make this better, but I don’t know how. Someone has broken into the code I’ve been rummaging through in search for the back door, and instead left a breadcrumb of information that could blow open this entire ordeal even more than I thought possible.

It’s a new lead, a new thread I have to follow, and it pains me to think that I have put up with replaceing this truth out among the rest. I’m a coder. I’m not a negotiator or some alley that speaks through the cyber world about the alleged murder of Dimitri’s father.

He hasn’t even talked about his dad to me, and I’ve never known anything other than what Alek told me.

Dimitri’s father was Alek’s business partner, they developed this software together, and Dimitri doesn’t have a dad.

I feel queasy with nervousness, and I clutch my stomach in utter frustration. This can’t happen. This just… this just can’t be true.

“Sit down and stay put,” Mccoy bites in warning, shoving me into my desk chair. I watch him leave, barking at other agents to go wrangle the man I love.

I realize now I should have told him that earlier. He should know I love him, and that I want to help him, but that I was too afraid of him seeing that claim put so bluntly on the computer screen. It might be a lie, though. It might be a prank, and I hold out on that hope with everything I have.

If it is true, and Alek has done the unthinkable in order to acquire this software and run it uncontested, then it will just drive me further to replace out the truth and shut him down once and for all.

I was doing it for myself before, but I know that’s not how I feel anymore. I’m going to do it for Dimitri, and I’m going to do it for his father’s legacy.

I dive into the text, whether I’m being handled and hassled by agents or not.

The type stops, and I write out a reply to underneath and then wait for their response.

Who is this?I ask, my fingers trembling over the keys.

I am someone who is tired of their boss getting away with everything.

My lips pull to one side in confusion. That could be anyone at work!

Taking a leap of faith, I type back, my name is Izzy Bellerose. I’m working with the FBI to take him down, but they need proof of your claim. Just tell me this, please. Who are you?

There’s no response for a long minute, and that’s when Mccoy comes back, agents on hand, and they all look pissed that I’ve again gone against their orders. He flicks a wrist and tells them something, the next minute involving me being kicked to the floor with my hands cuffed behind me. They’re tighter now than before, and I know this is a much more real arrest than the show he put on this morning.

“I can’t have you running roughshod on my investigation!” Mccoy screams as they yank me to a flimsy stand. He looks over the screen once, his eyes narrowing as he replaces me before him once more. I expect him to tell them to throw me in a cell somewhere, but he doesn’t. Instead, he crosses his arms casually and asks, “Who the hell is Gwen?”