Page 39 of Played By Design

“Beanbag chairs.” I wiggle with delight. “I love beanbag chairs.”

“Well aware.” Kain’s hand finds the back of my neck, his thumb rubbing the short hairs at my nape. “Does this make you happy, Bunny?”

“Happy? Kain, I’m—” I throw my arms around his shoulders and squeeze. Warmth radiates from his body through his shirt, and the empty wrongness of the house fills back up in an instant. “This is the best day. The best. After Saturday. Which was also the best. But this is the best, too.”

His rumble fills my ear. “Good. Now let me finish changing so I can download the stack I’ll be working on.”

I release him. “Stack? They’re not giving you the whole forum?”

“That’s fifteen years of content.” He shakes his head as he stands. “I’ve only been assigned a small section to consolidate and send back to the team lead.”

“Can I help?”

I scramble to my feet as he takes off his jeans and pulls on a pair of sweats before grabbing a zip-up hoodie.

“I know the forums better than anyone. There was this one thread where a player tried to argue the Sentinel class was broken. They were wrong, and I can show you why⁠—”

Kain’s finger covers my lips. “Come to the basement. You can watch.”

I’m on his heels before he’s taken two steps. “You should have seen the forums back in the day. They were chaos. Absolute chaos. People arguing about class balance without any data, mods deleting threads left and right, and this one guy⁠—”

“We don’t know what part of the forum I’ll be assigned,” Kain interrupts as we step off the stairs and head away from the gym. “It could be farming content.”

“There’s no—” I cut myself off and glare at the back of his head. “Are you testing me right now?”

The basement office is all clean lines and order. A long desk runs along the wall, divided into two workstations. The online setup has a single ultrawide monitor cycling through a login screen, while two dark monitors sit at the offline station on the far end.

That’s where Kain keeps the Blue Note’s records. Every shady job. Every favor owed and IOU collected. He builds our data mines there, cleans the digital money that comes through the group, and handles anything else involving a computer that the rest of us would rather not leave floating around online.

If Lev had wanted to access all of our people’s secrets, he really should have targeted Kain, not Orien. Not that I’ll ever tell him. He’s my friend, but he did start out as a spy, and protecting Kain comes first.

External drives are stacked between the two computers, their indicator lights dormant, cables routed along the wall with a neatness only Kain would take the time to enforce.

Kain drops into his chair and wakes the online monitor. The login field pulses, waiting for his credentials.

I drape myself over his shoulder, my chin propped on the bony ridge of his clavicle, my arms dangling loosely over his chest. His body is warm through his clothes, and the muscles in his back tense and release as he types.

The login portal appears for Lantern Key Games, the logo purple and lime green in the corner. Kain pulls a card from his pocket that contains a long, twelve-digit number. As he references the card to type in his new contractor ID, the timing finally clicks.

Of course, he was gone longer than the interview itself. They wanted him starting today, which meant paperwork, access credentials, and whatever else Lantern Key requires before handing someone access to fifteen years of internal forum data.

The screen shifts to a dashboard. Rows of file directories populate the left side, each one labeled with dates and forum sections.

My pulse jumps. These are the actual forums, but in a way I’ve never experienced before.

Kain opens a drawer and pulls out a new external drive still sealed in its packaging.

The drawer holds several more. The man buys them in bulk.

And obviously Lantern Key would get its very own dedicated drive. The project is important.

He tears open the package, plugs the drive into the online workstation, and waits for the computer to recognize it before selecting a directory and clicking download.

A progress bar appears along the screen’s lower edge, green filling from left to right at a glacial pace. Once the download is complete, Kain will be able to work on the files offline. Much quicker and safer than working on them across wifi.

I read the filenames as they populate. “What’s in there? Moderation requests? Can I see? There was this thread where someone reported me for spamming bug reports, and the mods sided with me because I was right, and I want to find it.”

“Later,” Kain says, his focus on the screen. “Let the transfer finish first.”