My Stepbrother's Dirty Little Secret novel Chapter 209

Chapter 209

Gianna

“Gianna,” he said softly.

It was the kind of soft that was scarier than shouting.

“Yeah?”

He turned the tablet around and slid it across the desk toward me. His finger pointed to a string of numbers. “This is the encryption key for the main server. You wrote it as 7-B-4-9.”

I squinted at the screen. To my eyes, it looked perfect. “Yeah? That’s what the log said.”

“No,” he hissed, slamming his palm down on the desk. The noise made me jump, and a sharp pain shot through my burned thigh, “The log said 1-8-H-P. You didn’t just get one digit wrong. You got the entire sequence backward. And here” he scrolled again, “You listed the server downtime as three hours. It was eight minutes. You’ve turned a minor glitch into a total system failure.”

He looked up at me then, his brows pulled together in a hard, tight line. He looked exhausted. He looked like he regretted every second I’d been in the room.

He took off his glasses, pinched the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes for a second, “God, I seriously forgot how bad you are at this job just because you’re so good at gagging on my dick,” he muttered. “I guess I stopped looking at your brain the second you started swallowing.”

The words hit me so hard that I took a tiny step back. I suddenly felt sick. My breath caught, getting stuck in my throat. And I was back in that apartment with my fiancé, hearing his laugh bounce off the walls while he looked at me with that same look of pity.

“Don’t worry about it, Gianna,” he’d told me, his hand patronizingly patting my cheek, “You’ve got a body that’ll keep you fed for life. Girls like you don’t need a brain. Just stay pretty and leave the thinking to me.”

I looked at the floor, my vision blurring. I’d shocked myself until I was scarred, I’d stared at the screen until my eyes bled, all to prove I was good enough. And here was Raphael, saying the exact same thing.

He let out a short, dark laugh and leaned back, spreading his knees, and looked at me with a calm expression.

“HR?” he repeated, the word sounding like a joke on his tongue, “Gianna, babe, look around. I signed the checks for the people who wrote the handbook. I don’t follow the rules, I am the rules. If I want to spend the next fifteen minutes with my sister on my lap, there isn’t a person in this building who would dare knock on that door.”

I walked around the desk, my knees knocking together. Every step made the burns on my inner thighs sting as they rubbed. I stopped right in front of him.

He immediately reached out, his large hands grabbing my waist with a grip that left no room for argument. He pulled me forward, hoisting me up until I was straddling his lap.

The angry skin of my burned thighs dragged harshly against the rough material of his dress slacks. It felt like a thousand needles pricking the sores all at once. I flinched, my fingers digging into his shoulders to keep from crying out, but he didn’t let go. He held me there, his thumbs digging into my hips, pinning me to the very heat that was making my skin scream.