Hacking Darkness: A Reverse Harem Romance (Dark Codes Book 1) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter One

  Hacking Darkness

  Dark Codes Book One

  Marissa Farrar

  Copyright © 2017 Marissa Farrar

  Warwick House Press

  All rights reserved.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Unraveling Darkness | Chapter One

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Chapter One

  I slipped the wedge of cash into the back pocket of my jeans and tried to ignore the twist of guilt in my gut.

  The number two hundred sat suspended in front of me, a glaring amount, taking up too much space in my vision.

  The young man in the cheap suit, with whom I’d just met, gave me a final nod to say we were done. I turned from him and hurried toward the door, eager to let myself out onto the street and away from the rundown bar where we’d met. Though the place had been all but empty mid-morning, the stink of the previous night’s spilled booze clung to the insides of my nostrils.

  It wasn’t until I stepped out onto the sidewalk and took a gulp of fresh air that I allowed myself to think about what I’d done.

  Dad would have wanted you to do this, Darcy, I told myself. He wouldn’t have wanted you to struggle if you had the opportunity to do something about it.

  But despite my internal reassurances, I knew I was lying to myself. Yes, he would have wanted me to earn my own money, but he would also have wanted me to have made my inheritance last a little longer.

  It wasn’t as though all the money was gone. I had the house he’d left me, and despite having passed the age of eighteen a couple of years ago, I continued to allow my Aunt Sarah to live there. I no longer needed her to look after me, of course, but I didn’t have the heart to throw her out. I’d put her through the wringer as a teenager—all the usual rebellious stuff—drinking, boys, sneaking out at night. I’d thrown back at her that she wasn’t my real parent more times than I could count. In the end, the words had lost their sharpened edge, and Aunt Sarah had simply agreed with me. She wasn’t my parent. No one was.

  Most people came out of their teenage years with some kind of direction and with lessons learned. I was still floundering. The shame of what my father had done hung around my neck like an anchor I felt everyone could see. It was the reason I never got close enough to anyone to make friends, knowing it was a conversation that would eventually come around. Yet that shame hadn’t stopped me today, though the weight of the anchor now dragged me down so far I felt like I just wanted to melt into the sidewalk and vanish.

  I stuffed my hands into the pockets of my jeans and hurried along the streets of downtown Washington to grab a bus back to the district where my house was located. One of the buses pulled up, and I climbed on, tapping my pre-paid card to the farebox. There was nowhere to sit, so I hung from a rail and tried to keep my balance as the bus pulled away again.

  Thoughts ran through my head, giving me no peace, questioning every decision.

  I hadn’t gone to college, though I’d graduated high school with honors. I could see my teachers’ frustration when I refused to take my studies any further, my Aunt Sarah’s frustration, too. I understood why—they had dreams of me being some big shining star—but after what had happened, the last thing I wanted was any limelight on me. I’d said I wanted to work, that I needed to work now I had no one else to support me. I was thrown promises of scholarships, but I didn’t want them. Problem was, I couldn’t make a job last either. I could never see the point, except for the money, and at first, I’d had plenty of that.

  Right up until I didn’t.

  I reached home and let myself in through the back door. This was my house, but still, I felt like that same teenager sneaking in after a night out. The door opened onto the kitchen, which was also at the rear of the building. I headed straight to the large oak table and pulled the wedge of cash from my back pocket and dropped it onto the beaten and scarred wood. I was glad to have the money away from me. I hadn’t done anything wrong, I told myself again. I’d just been resourceful. My dad would have appreciated that.

  “Where did you get that kind of money from, Darcy?”

  My aunt’s voice from the door which led onto the hallway made me jump.

  “Jesus, Aunt Sarah.” I put my hand to my chest. “You scared the shit out of me. Why are you lurking around like that?”

  “Where’d you get the money?” she asked again, her lips drawn into a thin line.

  “That’s none of your business.” And it wasn’t. She was living in my house, and I was an adult now. Where my money came from was none of her concern.

  “It’s not drugs again, is it?”

  I rolled my eyes. “I smoked a little pot about half a lifetime ago. Do you really need to bring that up every time you think I’m up to no good?”

  “Well, if you won’t tell me the truth about anything, what am I supposed to think?”

  “You don’t need to think anything. I’m none of your business anymore, remember?”

  Her tone hardened. “You might be an adult now, but you’re still my family, Darcy, and while we’re living under the same roof, what you do is my business.”

  “You know the solution to that. This is my house, and no one is forcing you to keep living here.”

  “Why do you have to be such an ungrateful little—”

  She cut herself off before she could finish her sentence, so I filled in the words for her.

  “Bitch? Cow? Tramp? You can say it. It wouldn’t be anything you haven’t said before.”

  My anger had taken hold, and already I knew I’d regret the words later, yet I seemed powerless to stop them.

  But Aunt Sarah softened, and she ran a hand across her short, gray hair, shaking her head slightly and glancing away. “I’m sorry, Darcy. I just worry about you. You’ve never been—”

  “Normal?” I supplied again

  “I was going to say happy.”

&nbs
p; My heart cracked a little, and my shoulders slumped. “I don’t think I know how.”

  “But you were happy,” she said, “before your father died.”

  “Was I? I’m not sure I remember anymore.”

  But that was a lie. Maybe I hadn’t been completely happy—I’d always had this feeling I was different, like everyone else knew a secret I wasn’t let in on. The feeling was easily explained away by my missing mother, but at least when my dad had been alive, he’d made me feel, perhaps not happy, but he did at least make me feel safe.

  I tugged a hand through the tangles of my blonde hair. My jeans had holes in the knees, and there was some kind of stain on the front of the long sleeved t-shirt I wore. Like everything else in my life, my appearance wasn’t something I gave much thought to. “You could be pretty, if you tried,” my aunt had told me more than once. But what was the point in being pretty? To get a guy? I could get a man if I wanted, regardless of whether I was seen to be pretty or not. In fact, I thought most of the men I’d dated had been perfectly happy that I wasn’t some airhead who needed to check her makeup every five minutes. They’d been happy to share a can of beer, and sometimes a smoke, and know that I didn’t give a shit if they bothered to call the next day.

  My aunt crossed the room and slid onto one of the wooden chairs at the table. She reached out and fingered the folded wedge of notes and sighed. “It’s not as though I’ve forgotten what day it is, Darcy.”

  The fight went out of me, and I sank to the chair opposite, my elbows on the table, my head in my hands.

  “Shit.”

  I hadn’t forgotten either. Of course I hadn’t.

  Six years had passed since the shooting. The date swept past me, to my left, and vanished behind me, as my past tended to do. My father, Michael Sullivan, had been an FBI agent. He’d been killed because of that job. No, not killed. Murdered. Murdered because of something he’d taken—a memory stick containing classified information. People claimed he’d betrayed his country by removing the memory stick from where it was supposed to have been kept under lock and key. Of course, what was actually on there was never revealed, and the memory stick had apparently vanished, though I believed the men who’d killed him had taken it. I’d been interviewed over and over again by the same agents my father had worked for, the same ones who said he’d betrayed his country, asked over and over if I knew what he’d done with the stick, or if I’d seen someone take it. But I’d been fourteen years old and I’d sat on the floor with my dad cradled in my lap as he’d bled out onto the rug we’d bought at a garage sale the previous year. I remembered the iron tang of his blood in the air, and the fear I’d seen in his eyes at the realization he was going to die. I’d never seen that before, my dad, scared. He was always the tough one. I knew nothing about the memory stick or the man who had shot him.

  It had been the whole reason I’d met with the reporter earlier that day. He’d contacted me, not the other way around. It wasn’t as though I’d gone looking for him. I’d let out the curse word because I knew I was going to tell Aunt Sarah the truth, and she wasn’t going to be happy.

  “I got the money from a reporter. He paid me to do a ‘tell-all exclusive’ on the anniversary of Dad’s death.”

  Her eyebrows—mostly drawn on with a pencil—lifted. “And you agreed to it?”

  I gestured at the cash on the table. “It was good money, and it wasn’t as though I said anything I haven’t already told people. Not really.”

  She leaned forward, taking me in with her serious blue eyes, a couple of shades lighter than my own. “You told the police, Darcy. Other FBI agents. You hadn’t told the press.” She scrubbed her hand over her face, smearing her mascara into tiny black flakes in the creases beneath her eyes. “What sort of things did he ask?”

  I wrinkled my nose. “Just the usual.”

  “Which was?” she prompted.

  I sighed and put my hand to my head, tugging at the strands of my hair in a nervous habit I’d never quite managed to break. “He wanted the personal details.”

  “About how he died? Surely everyone knows that?”

  I shook my head and glanced down again, heat rushing to my cheeks. “About how it felt to watch your dad die when you’re only fourteen. What he said to me as he lay dying in my arms.” My throat closed over with a painful lump as I spoke. It had been six years, and yet it all felt so fresh.

  “What did you say?”

  “How it had all been a blur. That he’d been confused. Just mumbling a heap of numbers to me, over and over. Nothing enlightening. Nothing heartfelt for me to take as comfort.”

  My main memory from that moment had been how the same thought had repeated in my head.

  Don’t die, don’t die, don’t die, don’t die ...

  My aunt continued. “Did he ask about ... the other thing?”

  I nodded. “Of course, but what do I know? I was a kid when it happened. Even if Dad did break the law by removing classified information, it wasn’t as though he ever confided in me. Why would he have? And yes, maybe he did do something wrong, but nothing came of it, that we’re aware of. The memory stick vanished, most likely taken by the same people who shot him, though there’s no way of proving anything. It’s not as though the killers or the memory stick were ever found.”

  “That we know of,” she added.

  I nodded. “True.”

  Glancing back to the wedge of notes on the kitchen table, my insides flipped with guilt again.

  Had I done the right thing?

  Chapter Two

  The newspaper article went out a couple of days later.

  I didn’t want to read it. I didn’t even want to think about it. Each time the thought pushed unwillingly into my mind, a horrible darkness twisted inside me, and I wished I could take it back. It didn’t matter how I dressed it up or tried to justify it to myself, I’d exploited my father’s murder for cash.

  The money still sat, untouched, on the kitchen table, but I’d need to use some of it soon. There were bills to pay, and though Aunt Sarah contributed everything she could, she only worked part time cleaning, and it wasn’t enough to run a house of this size. The possibility I’d have to sell it loomed in my future, but that was something else I was trying not to think about. While some people might want to be rid of the place where they’d watched their father die, I felt like it was my final link to him. It was the place I’d grown up. Maybe letting go of the house would also mean letting go of my childhood, and perhaps I simply wasn’t ready to grow up yet, forever trapped in that fateful night when I’d lost my only parent.

  Aunt Sarah had left for her cleaning job before I’d even woken up, so I sat at the kitchen table, using my tablet to half-heartedly scroll for jobs. I should go back to school and learn something worthwhile. I was smart enough, but my work-ethic was down the toilet. I struggled to see the point in anything.

  The shrill ring of the doorbell made me sit up. I checked the wall clock. It wasn’t even eight a.m. yet. I saw the hours in blocks running from right to left, and the total lack of structure in my day stood out sharply to me.

  The doorbell rang again. Who would be visiting me this early?

  Quickly, I dragged my fingers through my hair and scrubbed at any smears of mascara from beneath my eyes, trying to make myself look presentable. I’d tugged on yesterday’s jeans when I’d gotten out of bed, and wore a sleeveless top, though I’d neglected my bra. It wasn’t as though I’d been expecting company.

  I would have to do.

  The bell rang for the third time, urgency in the sound now. I hurried from the kitchen and through the hallway. Through the decorative glass panel in the front door, I saw the outline of men in suits.

  My heart sank. Shit. Who was this now?

  Keeping one arm folded across my bra-less breasts, I cracked open the front door and peered out.

  My heart stopped in my chest. I knew these men, or at least knew one of them. Lyle Hollan had been the closest thing to a partner
to my father at the agency when he’d been alive. I’d known him well as a young girl, and he’d been to our house on numerous occasions to have cookouts or watch football. I’d even received the occasional birthday and Christmas present from him as I’d been growing up. He’d been at my father’s funeral, but had fallen off the radar not long after. I hadn’t thought about Lyle Hollan in years, but figured him showing up on my doorstep, today of all days, wasn’t going to be a good thing.

  Glancing down, I spotted the newspaper I’d sold my story to a couple of days earlier held in the agent’s hand.

  I was in trouble.

  Briefly, I debated slamming the door shut again and making a run for the back. I didn’t want to talk to these men, especially as I knew what it would be about. Lyle Hollan would warn me off speaking to the press. He would berate me for telling the whole world about the moments of my father’s death and say I was a terrible person to do such a thing. He’d be right, too.

  I couldn’t run. I had to face them, though it was the last thing I wanted to do, and so I opened the door fully.

  “Hello, Darcy.” Agent Hollan was a short, bulky man, with hair cut so close to his head, it was almost shorn. His light blue eyes studied me intently, lines fanning from the corners. His brow was drawn down in a frown, though I got the impression that was just his normal expression rather than him being particularly annoyed in that moment. The suit he wore stank of money, and I was reminded once more of the cash still sitting on my kitchen table, the number two hundred flashing up in front of me like a neon sign.

  “Agent Hollan,” I said. “I mean Mr. Hollan. Lyle.”

  I didn’t know what I was supposed to call him.

  He gave a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes then gestured to the younger, taller man beside him. “This is Agent Bayne.”

  From his lack of contact for the last six years, and his air of formality, I could tell this wasn’t a social call. “How can I help you?”

  “You had an interview published in the Washington Express today. Is that correct?”

  My lips twisted. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking—”