I held up a finger. “I’m going to put my phone in the box.”
Dash laughed, balancing the laptop on one palm and snatching my phone with his other hand. “Don’t worry, sweetheart. The only one bugging you is me. Everything in the house is clean.”
I had no idea when he’d had time to check that. He’d probably been sneaking around in the middle of the goddamn night, looking through my shit. It didn’t annoy me as much as it should—Dash didn’t seem to sleep easily, even when he wasn’t hyperfocused on something.
Plus, I trusted him.
Around my home and around my omega.
I sighed. “I don’t appreciate you bugging me. What did you find?”
“Your mom is in mountains of debt. Like, Mount Everest levels of it.”
He beamed like he was delivering news of a lottery win. I grabbed the laptop from him and placed it on the counter before it fell to its death. Nothing on the screen stood out to me. It was a bunch of numbers and acronyms. I knew the basics of the code bookies used, but this wasn’t normal.
“I’m assuming illegal debt, considering this shit is in code?” I asked, trying to tease the information out of him.
The rest came out like a fountain.
“I hacked the Connolly’s accountant,” he said. “I mean, they have a couple for different parts of their illicit business, but I hacked them all. And this one… this one was a gold mine.”
He brushed his finger across the trackpad, clicking on things that made no sense to me.
“Gambling debts. It got me thinking—what would your mother do anything to hide? She would do anything to hide being flat broke. So I discovered that she’s flat fucking broke. See that line right there?”
He jabbed the screen hard enough it shimmered.
“That’s Edith Winston’s debt. All your family’s millions? They’re fucking gone.”
Dash tried to continue, but I stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. “Wait. How are you reading this? I don’t see my mother’s name anywhere.”
Blinking, he clicked to a different tab, where he’d written out line after line after line of words and letters, some of them making absolutely no sense.
“It’s a cipher. I thought it was obvious.”
“Not all of us spent two months learning ciphers and code breaking,” Mercury said with a yawn, coming into the kitchen.
Ambrose was right behind him, equally tired looking. We were all a fucking mess. At least Kiara was getting some good sleep.
“It should be something everyone learns,” Dash defended.
Going straight for the coffee pot, Ambrose ruffled Dash’s blonde hair on the way past. “Why would we need to learn it when we have you?”
“Are you sure you solved it properly? You could have a bit of a confirmation bias,” I said, veering the conversation back on track.
Dash pouted at me. “Well, if you look at this series of numbers, it matches up with this series of letters which coincides with—”
“Actually, forget I asked. I’ll trust your expertise on this one.” The speed he was flipping tabs with was too fast for me to catch up. If I’d truly doubted him, I could have looked at it myself. My knowledge of ciphers was more base level than his, but I’d spent some time learning them to protect sensitive areas of my business. He said he had it right, though, so I wouldn’t check his work.
I had way too much trust in the obsessive playboy alpha.
“Finally. OK, so your mother has been gambling at the Connolly’s underground clubs for years. Since your childhood or possibly before, but the digitized records don’t go back that far.”
I was surprised criminals had digital records at all. The amount of hacks I’d seen while doing my job meant I knew that was risky as fuck. They had to be confident in their cyber security—misplaced confidence, considering a billionaire had gotten into them with a four-week crash course in hacking and eight weeks for code breaking.
“She loses a lot. Every time she goes,” Dash continued. “Occasionally she’ll win back some money toward the debt. See that?”
He jabbed the screen again. I placed my hand over his and held it, because if this laptop broke, we would be wasting precious minutes to get a new one. He glanced down at our fingers, turning his hand over so they were clasped.
