Chapter 58 - Welcome back to the job, I guess.

Gianna ━⊰ ❦ ⊱━ The glass doors of the Orion Vector technologies looked bigger than I remembered. Or maybe it was just the weight of the invisible chains around my ankles. Six months. I had officially sold my soul for half a year, and the devil was waiting for me on the top floor. I stepped into the lobby feeling like a total outsider. I was wearing my college clothes—faded jeans and a black crop top that showed a sliver of skin every time I breathed. My real work clothes were tucked away in the black cloth bag hanging over my shoulder. The elevator ride up was quiet. I watched the numbers glow, my heart doing a nervous little dance against my ribs. When the doors slid open to the executive floor, the smell of expensive floor wax and cold air-conditioning hit me. Everything looked exactly the same, but everything felt different. I wasn't the intern anymore. I was the girl who had quit in a blaze of glory and came crawling back because I had no other choice. I walked toward

Chapter 59 - I'm good enough.

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, clos

Chapter 60 - The fairy tale is over

Raphael ━━ ⛓ ━━ I tried to focus on the screen at the front of the room. One of my lead engineers was droning on about the new firewall, pointing at charts and lines of code that usually would have had my full attention. But my eyes kept sliding to the left. I kept looking through the floor-to-ceiling glass walls toward the corner desk. Gianna was there. She was hunched over, her shoulders pulled in as if she was trying to make herself small enough to disappear. She hadn't moved in ten minutes. She just sat there, staring at a screen that was probably still full of the mistakes I’d just yelled at her for. Something sharp and uncomfortable tugged at my chest. It felt like a physical weight, pressing down every time I saw the way her head hung low. Why am I looking at her? I snapped at myself, forcing my eyes back to the engineer. But then I saw her face again in my mind. Not the face of the girl who had just pushed me away in my office, but the face she’d made when I told Ailee

All Chapters of My Stepbrother's Dirty Little Secret : Chapter 61 - Chapter 63

Chapter 58 - Welcome back to the job, I guess.

Chapter 59 - I'm good enough.

Chapter 60 - The fairy tale is over