Page 161 of Sexting My Best Friend's Brothers
“I don’t need you to stop him,” I say. “I need you to stall. Flood the port with junk data. DDOS the Nebula server. Buy me time.”
“Where are you going?” Ethan asks.
I stand up, easily scooping Tessa into my arms. She feels alarmingly light against my chest.
“I am taking her home.”
“Asher!” Tessa protests, struggling weakly against my hold. “No! You can’t leave. The code… the breach…”
“The code can wait,” I state, looking down at her. “You cannot.”
“Asher, are you absolutely insane?” Ethan snaps, stepping aggressively in front of me. “We have ten minutes before a catastrophic leak. If you leave now, we lose everything.”
I look my older brother dead in the eye. “Ethan. Look at her.”
Ethan looks down, finally seeing the heavy sweat, the pallor, and the way she is curled into my chest like a wounded bird. His jaw furiously works as the CEO mask fully cracks, revealing the terrified brother underneath.
“She’s sick,” Ethan says, his voice rough. “We can call a doctor directly to the office. You need to be on that keyboard.”
“She isn’t just sick,” I say. I don’t know how I know, but the data points are converging into a pattern. “She is in distress. And I’m not keeping her in a high-stress environment while she’s physically collapsing.”
“I’m fine,” Tessa wheezes, even though her head lolls limply against my shoulder. “Put me down, Ash. Please. Save the app.”
“No,” I say.
I turn back to the monitors, lean over to shift Tessa’s weight to one arm, and type a rapid string of commands with my free hand. It’s a vapor lock—a quarantine protocol that completely severs the database from the interface.
To the users, the app will just look like it is loading indefinitely with spinning wheels, lag, and timeouts. It will not look like a crash; it will look like high traffic congestion. It temporarily saves our reputation, but it physically cuts the data flow and instantly stops the leak.
DATA QUARANTINE INITIATED flashes across the terminal in bold green text.
“You lobotomized it,” Owen says, staring blankly at the screen. “The app is a zombie. It’s technically running, but there’s no brain.”
“I bought us an hour,” I say. “The database is entirely air-gapped. The hacker cannot steal what he cannot access.”
“Asher,” Ethan exhales, rubbing a heavy hand down his face. “Sterling is going to flay us alive.”
“Let him,” I say.
I carry her straight out of the server room. We pass the silent, highly confused bullpen where developers are staring blankly at their frozen screens, blow past the reception desk, and walk out into the thick, humid Austin heat.
The world outside is incredibly noisy with honking cars, construction drilling, and shouting pedestrians. But as I gently settle Tessa into the passenger seat of my car and securely buckle her in, the noise completely fades.
She is safe.
I slide into the driver’s seat, my hands violently shaking—not from the hack or the impending threat of bankruptcy, but because for a solid ten seconds back in that room, watching her heave into a trash can, I felt a paralyzing fear that I did not have an algorithm to process.
I start the car.
“Asher?” she whispers, keeping her eyes closed as her head leans back against the leather seat.
“I am here,” I say, gripping the steering wheel.
“Thank you,” she says softly. “For choosing me.”
“It was not a choice,” I tell her, shifting the car into gear. “It was the only logical outcome.”
I drive.
