My Fake Billionaire Damaged Boyfriend : An Age Gap Romance
My Fake Billionaire Damaged Boyfriend Chapter 16

Izzy

I nearly fall asleep in the front seat of Dimitri's car. He's driving so fast and recklessly that I should stay awake, but it's not enough. Instead, I'm fighting through my heavy eyelids to keep focused while curled into a tight ball in his passenger seat. He's not headed for the Smith tower. Instead, he's going somewhere else, somewhere further away from downtown. It's a questionable move, but I'm not in the interest of asking where we're headed. I just lay back and try to steady my beating heart that fights to stay calm while I'm battling myself on the inside to just stay awake.

Eventually, I don't win that fight, and I slip into a dark world of mild dreams and unrelenting nightmares. They shift back and forth recklessly, forcing me to toss and turn on the cloud where I lay until I can't stand it anymore! My parents' faces flicker through my mind, then Alek's voice, jolting me out of my sleep.

"Ah!"

I sit up, panting and out of breath, my head covered in a fresh sheen of sweat. My limbs are aching, my bones are stiff, and every muscle in my body is twisted and tight. I need a break. I need a minute out of this life to just recollect my thoughts and come back. But for now, I'm distracted. This isn't Dimitri's apartment.

It's a dark room, with darkly painted walls and normal windows covered by darkening shades. The floors are like black oak, the ceiling a modest navy hue that matches the ombre effect of lighter paint colors coming down to the baseboards.

It's a huge room, even bigger than the room he has in the tower, but it's cold. I take the blanket with me as walk out of the bedroom, clinging to the fake fur texture of the comforter that drags behind me like some kind of king's cape. It's a wonderful thought, a rich one, too, but it's short-lived in my optimistic thoughts right now.

There's a typing noise that catches my attention, the sound so quick that it's nearly impossible to be human I hurry to follow the sound, hearing it ring through the endless hallway that's better off as a New York fashion week runway.

Or that of an airplane hangar, my ankles sore when I finally reach the end of the hall near the noise.

I poke my head around the corner of the open door, seeing Dimitri pace in three-step increments. He's glued to the sight of his computer screen, something about the fluttering text and code making him mad. Even with my eyesight a bit blurry after sleeping for what feels like an eternity, I can see my flash drive pokingout of the side of his setup.

"It won't work," I mutter, my croaking voice seeming to wake him out of a deep stupor of thought. "He changed the algorithm. Flooded it with too much code and then ran my flash drive against it."

"He was the one that stole it then," he grunts, watching me carefully while I use the blanket as a shield over my body. "So, he's made it impenetrable then, right?"

"At least from my software, yeah. He said it would take four years for the device to find the backdoor now. I believe him. It took us under an hour before, but I've been running it on my computer all day and it still didn't find anything." "F**k," he says.

I just nod in agreement to that frustrated remark.

"Well, how are we going to get to it now? We have to have some kind of proof to give to the authorities when we hand him off to be arrested at some point. We have no search engine to go off of now."

My body is light with despair. We're never going to be able to solve this problem without the search engine as proof. How can we get to the bottom of how and why Alek is doing this to his customers if we can't even back it up with evidence? Now I just feel stupid for not handling this sooner.

We proved something pretty major already, and we know it to be true, but we have no way of reaching it now.

"Wait," I mutter, my mind shifting to the first and last time we searched through the backdoor. "Did you get any kind of notification when you bought my identity from the search engine before?"

His eyes widen. "The auction. That's right, I bid and won that whole file on your past and your personal details. I haven't even thought to check where that information could be."

"It might lead us inside," I groan, charging forward to the computer.

He pulls out the chair for me, and I fit in perfectly at his desk. There are so many expensive monitors before me that I'm nearly overwhelmed, but I keep focused and carry through the daunting task of finding this entry into the back door.

If we get it in our grasp, maybe we can finally take down Alek Ivica and get past this weird situation in which we find ourselves.

I'm tired of lying about how we're an item when he's made it perfectly clear we are not. I mean, I'm sure Dimitri Wilde is just chomping at the bit to be cut free of my company. I can tell after our encounter in my office that things are still tense. He talked me down from giving up and throwing in the towel due to some frivolous self-loathing.

But he's still a man that lives in a different world than me.

His setup of computers, VPNs, and the mere size of this office alone proves we are not from the same cloth at all. He's from a world of platinum and shimmer. I come from the backroads and a chipping-paint house in Oregon that wasn't even the place I had grown up. It was the place kept from me until it suited the better interest of my parent's passing.

They protected my siblings even in death and put me on the chopping block once more.

So that begs the question still ringing through my ears tonight: Who the hell would want me?

I get lost in code, distracting myself completely while I hurry to get this task done and over with. Dimitri has disappeared from my peripherals, and I don't mind it. He's probably watching from a distance, curious and coking his head like a cute puppy that sees something new. Meanwhile, I'm breaking through his system, through the code, looking for something that will allow me access to the information again. It's only now that I realize the flash drive was plugged into the computer when he bought my identity in the auction. So maybe, just maybe, I can retrace the footsteps in my flash drive software to figure it out once more.

"Here," I say, mostly speaking to myself. I unleash my decoding bug into the whole file, not to find anything, but to spit out what it already knows. To my surprise, and my dismay, it works like a charm. "Hey, it's right here, look at that!"

A warm, firm hand scrolls down my back and causes me to hiss in shock, my heart falling straight into my stomach when I realize Dimitri has been two steps away the whole time. I guess my zoning out was more for my benefit than anything else. He just wanted to watch me work.

"What does this mean?" he asks, pointing to the asterisk that is labeled at the top of my profile to auction. "It looks like a new link. Should you click it?"

I shrug and reply with, "What worse could happen? It's not like it's going to blow up in our faces."

We both exchange a careful look, knowing that's exactly what could happen. But at least not literally. Every time we make headway, something yanks us back down to reality. Treacherous, murky reality. I can't stand the thought of starting over on this task again, so as the cursor hangs over the lit-up asterisk, I inhale a deep, calming breath.

"If this sends us to the start and wipes us out from the beginning, then I'm out."

Dimitri pulls my chair to the side a bit, his eyes widened in shock. "What do you mean, Kitten?"

"I just mean that I can't beat him anymore," I admit. "If this fails, I'm out of ideas and out of my software. It took forever to just get this flash drive put together. I can't possibly make anything better."

His eyes narrow as my voice cracks. "What was that?"

"Nothing," I say, a breezy lie that he doesn't buy for a second. "Fine, okay? You're killing me, Dimitri. It's just that... well, he offered me money to make him a new device like mine, but different." "What do you mean different?"

My throat catches a knot. "He wants my work, but he can't control it well. He wants to be able to tinker with the code that I created. I had specifically put a safeguard on it to prevent this kind of greed. I guess he's not happy about that." "You're not making that for him, Izzy. Not by a long shot."

I swallow hard and attempt to cover my tracks, but I fail miserably. "No, no I w-would never d-do that."

"Izzy, look at me." His strong hand comes to the edge of my chin and he pulls me to look at him, our eyes locked in a tense stare off. "You're not going to make anything for him, right?"

For a moment, I don't say anything.

When I do decide to speak, it's something stupid that I probably should keep to myself.

"He's offering me a lot of money, Dimitri."

"Money? You're giving up on our work for some money?"

"Don't act like this is trivial," I snap. "Money may mean nothing to you, but it's everything to me. I have none, Dimitri. I am in debt up to my eyes and I can't f*****g breathe anymore. I have to do something. I have no other options. If I lose my job with Alek, I'll need something to fall back on. If we turn him in to the police, then it's over for his company. No more money there."

"I can help you, Izzy, but I'm not so sure if I want to with you talking about giving up the purpose of this mission to fund your selfishness."

I sink backwards into my seat with those accusatory words. "Selfishness? Really now? Well, fine. Here is my selfishness."

I yank the flash drive out of the system; the screen goes black in a fluttering malfunction before coming back into view in nothing but light green code on a black screen. Dimitri looks shell-shocked at first, but it doesn't matter anymore. I'm not going to play the good guy just to be called the bad guy for having needs.

My life is nothing without my job, and not having one isn't going to pay the bills for my new apartment.

I don't make it out the door, though. Dimitri's hands clasp onto my hips and spin me around suddenly, the sensation damning. I seal my lips, expecting a kiss, but instead, I get something much more intense than a simple peck on the mouth.

His hand strolls up my wrist, along the inside of my bicep, before finding the edge of my shoulder. It tickles me a little, and I snicker to myself, recoiling away in an untamable laugh. He doesn't smile, his fingertips stroking across my throat before settling on the base of my neck, the webbing between his thumb and his index finger pushing against my neck softly.

"What are you doing?"

He doesn't break his intensity, not even a little bit. "I'm looking at you, Kitten."

"Why? What is there to look at? I'm nothing to you. I'm a poor orphan from Oregon, Dimitri. Everything in this office of yours is worth more money than I'll ever make in my life, and you're mad at me for noticing that?"

"I'm not mad because of your circumstance."

"Then why are you holding my neck like this?"

"Because I don't think you understand how much it turns me on when you want to argue and storm away from me. You're so damn bold, and unbelievably reckless, that it drives me up a wall when you think you get to walk away from me angrily."

I feel his hand tighten on my throat, not in a warning of a threat, but in a promise of pleasure.

"What do you want to do, then?" I ask, watching fires ignite in his eyes.

His gaze narrows as he replies, "I want to have you first, and then set you straight second."

"Good luck on either of those."

"I don't need luck," he says, leaning forward with his lips brushing mine. "I need you to be with me. I will pay off whatever is holding you back, and then some. But you're going to know how I feel when we're done here tonight."