Almost the entire week goes by without incident. I continue my work, I make small talk with Denise, I report back to my father and I keep digging through the Berardi file system as much as I can. It's a slow process but that was expected, that's why my father had put me in the Berardi clan in the first place, so that I'll have a long term position within the company to hack away at it slowly but with time.

Dante Berardi is a thing of the past. I don't even see him as I'm going through the halls of the building or up on the roof when I'm on my lunch break. It's good that I don't see him at all because as I've stated, he isn't really important to the Berardi operation. He's his father's puppet, it'd be much more beneficial to get to Giovanni than it would be to get to Dante.

I'm not saying that I'm going to ask Giovanni on a date, that old Italian raisin would probably shoot me before I got through the door, and I'm not going to try to seduce him. I know that it's what my father wants because he thinks that if I give the old man some head under his desk, he'll absentmindedly leave me alone in his office and I can get into his computer, the real gold mine.

I won't do that though. Well, I won't do that until my father explicitly tells me that I have to but it hasn't come to that yet. As long as I'm producing a steady stream of progress, I'm in the clear.

On Thursday, I am sitting at my desk right after my lunch hour is up, finishing up some refactoring on the client database when there's suddenly a giant hand slamming onto my desk. Not in a loud fashion but it's very abrupt and it makes me look up from my computer screen to see Dante towering above me.

I internally groan. Just when I thought that I had gotten rid of him.

"We have a problem," He states and without saying anything else, he stands up straight and starts leaving the room. Denise is smiling at me and when she sees me looking back at her, she winks. As if she thinks that this is Dante's way of hooking up in the janitor's closet or something like we're horny highschoolers. She knows that there's nothing going on between us though. We went out that one last weekend and barely spoke since so if he needs something from me, it's obviously business related.

"Follow me, Miss Boner," Dante calls to me from by the doorway when I just stupidly sit in my seat without any real reaction to his proclamation. Without skipping another beat, I grab my computer bag and stand up from my seat. I ignore Denise grinning at me as I bustle toward Dante to see what it is that is so urgent.

He's walking so fast that it's almost hard to keep up with him despite the fact that I'm not even wearing heels. He's very tall and his legs are long so his strides are about twice as long as my own. He doesn't even look back to see if I'm keeping up with him though, he just leads me all the way down the hallway and then into the room across from his office. It makes me pause at the door for a moment, suspicious as to why I'm here but when I finally turn the corner into the room, I feel relieved that I'm not the only other person in the room.

There are three very disgruntled older men wearing their penguin suits sitting around a table. I don't want to be the first one to speak but I also need to know what's going on and nobody seems keen on updating me. Considering I was just dragged away from my afternoon lull, I would like an explanation.

"What's going on?" I finally ask, inviting myself to sit down at the circular table at the only seat that's left which unfortunately seems to be right beside Dante.

One of the men turn on the overhead projector in the room and after it takes a moment to turn on, it shows a picture of a rat on the projection which is attached to one of the men's laptops. Looking at the URL, I can see that it's supposed to be the homepage of the Berardi website for the casino and hotel but clearly, it's been hacked. And considering back home, we refer to the Berardis as rats, I'm assuming we are the culprits.

I haven't seen something like this done since I was learning how to hack when I was really young and I thought that this shit was funny so I'd start hacking the Berardis all the time with this sort of shit. Actually, it's still funny, I've just matured with my hacking techniques.

"We were hacked," One of the suits explains the obvious to me. "Every second that we're offline, we're losing dozens of customers who can't book their hotel or see our schedule. This is number one priority."

Because I can't help but fuck with them a little, I ask them, "Who would do this?"

"Competitors," Dante supplies quickly. "How long will it take you to fix?"

Assuming that it's somebody from Pantera, I know that I'm the best tech that we have, so I can obviously crack their childish hack. I pull out my laptop to get to work because they don't seem to be planning on letting me get back to my desk. "Not long."

"Get back to work," Dante orders the other men at the table. "You will be notified when the problem is fixed."

Without question, they all get up from the table, turn off the projector, and leave the small meeting room. I'm about to open my mouth to ask if I can just go back to my desk but Dante is already one step ahead of me.

"This is sensitive," He says as I'm logging into the laptop. "People, even who work here, can't know that our system got hacked. Which basically means that you're stuck in this room until you fix this problem and because somebody needs to be updating everybody who needs to know, so am I."

"I can update people on my own," I insist, unable to hide my annoyance from my voice. "You can hop along now, bunny."

"My job is to make things run smoothly," He tells me and I can hear the annoyance from him now as well because of how much he hates me calling him bunny. "And if our website is down, things are not running smoothly. If they got into our website, what else could they have gotten into?"

Once I open up the code behind the hacked website, I realize that this rat picture hack looks familiar because it is literally my hack. This is the code that I wrote when I was little to hack their site way back then. Somebody at Pantera must have deployed it because I don't have the code here with me and I also have no reason to stir up trouble at Berardi right now.

"What does krysy umirayut krovavyy mean?" I ask him when I see the commented out code on the screen that I'd written in there so many years ago, pronouncing the Russian very wrong even though I know how to say it perfectly. I don't speak perfect Russian but I know the many popular Russian phrases said throughout Pantera and this is one of them. Krysy umirayut krovavyy. Rats die bloody.

"I don't know, something in Russian."

"How do you know that it's in Russian?"

"Because the bitch that did this is Russian," He mumbles irritatedly.

"If you know who did this, you should call the cops. Isn't this illegal?" I ask him, playing as dumb as I possibly can but I'm really trying my best to fix the hack. My eleven year old self was pretty smart and it's been a while since I've looked at this code.

"Don't worry about that, are you fixing it?" He asks me. He can see the screen but he clearly isn't very savvy with computers so he still doesn't know exactly what's going on with my screen. I could probably hack their files right in front of him without him even knowing it.

"Yeah, I'm trying," I assure him and then I throw myself a bone. "The person who wrote this is really good. How do you know who it is?"

"Because we know who our competition is and we know who they would order to do this," He explains to me. "She's very good at what she does."

"Which is hacking?" I wonder, trying to hide the smug look on my face after he's complimented me. Not even me as the Elisa that he knows but me as the Vera that he despises. "Why did they choose a rat?"

"Stop with the questions," Dante demands of me.

And so I work in silence with Dante breathing down my neck despite the fact that he has no idea what's going on. Eleven-year-old me is good but thankfully, I am better.

"The website is the only thing affected," I tell him as I'm fixing the website. I already knew that it was only affecting the website because I had designed this hack to just be fun and games, not to cause real unnecessary trouble with the Berardis.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes," I roll my eyes at him like a sassy tween because it's really annoying how he's questioning my ability. "I'm sure. It's like whoever did this just put a blanket over the website."

"So...?"

"So," I finish for him, pushing the 'run' button that will fix the website. I turn the screen toward him so that he can see that the hack is already solved. "You just have to take off the blanket."

"That's it? This usually takes our team at least a day or two to fix," He wonders skeptically.

I shrug at him, trying not to look smug as I shut my laptop. "Guess they weren't very good. Can I go back to my desk now?"

"Can you stop that from happening again?" He asks me. "A firewall or something?"

"I can look into it," I say vaguely because making the Berardi security stronger is definitely not something that my father would appreciate. I also need to figure out who deployed the hack and why they even did it in the first place. Assuming that that's all that he needs right now, I shut my laptop and start to head out of the office.

"Are you busy this weekend?" Dante stops me as I'm getting to the door and it makes me stop walking as I turn around to look at him to see if he's serious. After the week of just not talking at all except for the very professional-like yet awkward run-ins we've had, he's going to ask me that?

"Why do you ask?" I don't answer his question because I want to know why he's asking before I answer him.

"This is a really important issue," He explains. "We need it fixed as soon as possible."

"I'm not working through the weekend," I tell him, feeling a bit embarrassed that I thought that he was about to ask me out on another date or something. I'm even more embarrassed that I felt a little bit excited about it. "Yes, I do have plans." That was a lie but I still refuse to work through the weekend here. That was definitely not part of my contract.

"Fine," He decides. "We'll start with this on Monday then."

"Fine," I repeat his word before I finally leave the room to return to my desk, glad to have finally escaped that very awkward and painful interaction with Dante. Back at my desk, I open my laptop to close down all of the code that I had used to bring the site back so that it doesn't waste my battery but as I'm doing so, I get a notification from the software that I used to hack into Dante's computer last week. It's nothing important, just a reminder for an event he has planned for Saturday night but there's nobody around and I'm curious so I click on the calendar appointment.

Sammi Thompson
7 P.M.
Allegro at the Wynn

That's a really fancy restaurant inside of a really fancy hotel so my first assumption is that it's a date. It's not important to the operation so I close out of it and shut the laptop. I don't need to know about a date that Dante has this weekend, it's none of my business.

We had one date last week and it fell flat which was good because I never even wanted to go on a date with him in the first place. That is not my mission here and I cannot get distracted by him no matter how hard that is for me. He just understands my life more than anybody ever could considering he's been through practically the same stuff. But he bleeds for Berardi and that's enough to repel me.

So it doesn't matter if he has a date this weekend because it has nothing to do with me at all.

"What was that about?" Denise asks me as I'm turning on my desktop monitor.

"The website went down but it was an easy fix." I know that I should just leave it at that but the words are leaving my mouth before my brain has time to stop them. "Hey, are you still talking to that doctor that you met online?"

"Yeah..." She trails off, seemingly confused at the change in topic.

"Does he still have a brother up for a double date?" I keep asking questions, planning up the stupidest plan that I've ever had in my head and I know that it's stupid and childish and that I should spend my time doing much more important things but I can't help but be annoyed as all get out at Dante. And the fact that he's getting to me is also annoying the hell out of me.

"He sure does," Denise confirms with a small smile. "Are you up for it?"

"Yes," I confirm with a nod. "I know a restaurant that I've been wanting to try out."

---

This is an extra update because my new idea survey got over 50 responses. Thank you to everybody who filled out the quick survey, it really is already helping me a lot!

Also let me know what you think about how this story is going! It's starting to get to the good part and I'm just so excited because I really love this story. Like I'm just so proud of it lmao let's chat

Happy reading!