My Stepbrother's Dirty Little Secret novel Chapter 374

Chapter 374

Raphael

Three screens glowed in front of me.

Lines of code scrolled endlessly down black backgrounds. Security architecture, adaptive recognition systems, predictive correction patterns, font rendering adjustments and eye-tracking response timing.

I leaned back slightly in my chair, adjusting my glasses higher on the bridge of my nose while another test simulation ran across the left monitor.

FAILED.

My jaw tightened.

“No,” I muttered quietly.

I reached forward immediately, rewriting the response delay. Again. The simulation reran. This time the words stabilized correctly.

I watched the text shift across the screen carefully. I dragged one hand down my face slowly, exhaustion pressing heavily behind my eyes. I honestly couldn’t remember the last time I slept properly.

Probably before she walked into my life like a damn hurricane.

The memory of her crying in the woods last night flashed through my head again.

Páin helps me focus.

My chest tightened instantly. Fuck. I hated that sentence. I stared at the code running across the screen again.

Ever since she told me about her dyslexia, I hadn’t been able to let it go. Most dyslexia tools on the market were garbage. Cheap overlays, bright colors, childish interfaces designed by people who treated intelligent adults like children just because they learned differently.

It pissed me off.

Gianna wasn’t stupid.

Her brain simply processed information differently.

And after watching her work, I was beginning to suspect her brain processed certain things better than most people alive.

Which meant the problem wasn’t her.

The systems around her were just poorly designed. So I built her a new one from scratch. My fingers moved quickly again across the keyboard. The app opened on the center monitor.

BLACK VEIL.

The name sat cleanly across the startup screen.

It was minimalistic, dark interface, no sensory overload.

I clicked run.

Immediately the system activated. A document appeared on screen. Then the app adjusted it automatically in real time. The spacing shifted subtly. The letters stabilized. Specific commonly confused characters separated further apart. Sentence tracking softly highlighted one line at a time without disrupting focus.

I activated the second function.

Voice-sync.

Then the third feature.

“I’m telling you the breach makes no sense,” the guy groaned.

Gianna didn’t even look away from the monitor, “Because you’re staring at the wrong access point,” she muttered quickly, “Look at the timestamps.”

The programmer frowned, “I did.”

“No, you looked at them individually.” She pointed toward the screen, “Look at the pattern repetition.”

The man blinked, “Oh shit.”

A smug little smile tugged at her mouth, “There,” she said simply.

A small grin pulled at my mouth too.

She had no idea how brilliant she actually was.

One of the men noticed me standing there instantly and straightened, “Boss.”

Gianna finally looked up. The second her eyes landed on me, something softer flickered across her face.

I tilted my head once toward the hallway, “Come with me.”

Her eyebrows pulled together slightly, confused, but she stood anyway. I led her through the quieter lower corridors toward my private office. The moment the heavy door shut behind us, the noise outside disappeared completely.

Gianna looked around slowly before crossing her arms, “What’s happening?”

I set the tablet down on my desk, “Happy birthday again, Mess.”

Something warm instantly softened her face, “You already gave me a birthday present,” she said quietly.