Hacked For Love & The Dom's Songbird Read online

  Hacked For Love & The Dom's Songbird

  Michelle Love

  Celeste Fall

  Contents

  Copyright and Disclaimer

  Free Gift

  Hacked For Love

  The Dom's Songbird

  No Promises

  The Billionaire’s Rockstar

  The Billionaire’s Rules

  The Billionaire’s Game

  Copyright and Disclaimer

  About the author

  Copyright and Disclaimer

  ©Copyright 2018 by Michelle Love & Celeste Fall - All rights Reserved

  In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights are reserved.

  Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher.

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  Went to the toy store for my kid, came home with a woman for me… Something inside of me began to smolder for her that hot afternoon. Once I had her within my walls, I couldn’t think about anything other than getting my hands on her, using her body to quench the fire that had grown inside me. Taking her in every way imaginable and making her beg for more, were my devious plans. She’d become my hot little muse, making nightly visits to her master’s bedroom to lend me some of her sexual magic. But would our little secret be the only thing that could separate us…

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  Hacked For Love

  A Billionaire Romance

  Brilliant, reclusive young hacker Robin Locke just pulled off the score of the century. She has successfully hacked the Bitcoin wallets of multiple billionaires and left electronic “breadcrumbs” for each of the three men to find, implicating each other’s IT departments for the theft. Armed with almost a billion dollars in stolen funds, she’s poised to change the lives of fifty thousand desperate Americans through anonymous donations.

  Unfortunately for Robin, one of the three billionaires—and the only one not connected to a crime family—has seen A Fistful of Dollars and knows this gambit when he sees it. Drake Steele, Bitcoin billionaire turned successful industrialist, is determined to find the hacker who stole from him, and not only get back his money, but get a very angry mafioso off his back. But when he finally tracks her down, he ends up with an unexpected dilemma.

  Chapter 1

  Robin

  I can’t sleep again. There’s too much crying outside. And it’s kids this time, which makes it that much worse.

  I glance up from my wall-length computer desk over to the window where the noise is trickling through. The drama across the alley started two hours ago and just keeps going. I’m not mad at the miserable family making the racket; they can’t help it.

  I’m mad at the one who made them miserable.

  This bastard Tom Link is just like my uncle. Those poor tenants.

  After learning about all the slumlords in this neighborhood, I decided to do something about it. I’ve started buying up the buildings around here, fixing them up and making sure the rent’s fair, the hot water runs, and the lights don’t flicker every time someone runs a space heater. I hire a long-term tenant to be the building manager, and over time a shitty place becomes a decent one.

  But I haven’t gotten to that one next door yet. The owner wants too much for the building; I have to find a way to make him desperate enough to knock the price down. I do not want him walking away with a small fortune when he should be dragged off in chains.

  It won’t be tough—like most guys with pockets as deep as his, Thomas Link must have skeletons in his closet. And I know I can yank the door wide open. All I need is something juicy enough—outstanding warrants, tax evasion.

  My fingers start dancing over the keyboard again as I glower at my screen. Around me, my dim apartment is warm and snug; double windows, extra insulation, and a hydronic heating system were just a few of the improvements I made to this building.

  I still remember how it feels to sleep in a cardboard box. Now when I crank up the temperature to seventy-five degrees, I feel like I’m overindulging.

  But this is what everyone deserves. And I’ve been trying to make sure that everyone has it—on the dime of those who are so ridiculously rich that they’ll never miss it. Every year, I get a little further along in making this dark, crumbling corner of South Park, Seattle a better place to live.

  I’ll find something to break Link, and then go in and fix that building, too.

  If Tom Link’s public face is this nasty, chances are he is five times worse in private. Get the right information to the right people, and he’ll be begging for ready cash to defend himself in court. I smile frostily at my screen as I type.

  Link refuses to spend a cent to upgrade the building infrastructure, even when ordered to by the city. Right now, their “free heat,” an ancient set of radiators that I can usually hear banging away from my bedroom, isn’t working.

  Which means a whole building full of tenants are now huddled around space heaters, wrapped up in blankets, trying to tough out this epic cold snap. And some of them are going hungry, too. That prick. He must know—he just doesn’t care.

  I will never in my life understand people who just don’t care.

  And that’s why I’m going to punish him—and steal some of his resources to start fixing this problem. Book them all into hotels? Buy them all down comforters and low-wattage heaters? I’ll come up with something; I always do.

  When I was a little girl and Mom and Dad were still alive, they would have the driver take us through the worst neighborhoods back in D.C. and Baltimore. They did this to show me the struggles of poor people and to show me how to reach out a hand to help. It taught me gratitude for what I had and sympathy for those with nothing.

  And then I had nothing, not even my parents, and I started sympathizing with poorer people even more. More than that—thanks to what my remaining “family” did, I started hating wealthy predators and the damage they do to the world.

  A family out there is going without dinner. The father is angry and apologetic. The mother weeps in shame.

  I’ll send them something. But how do I figure out which apartment they’re in?

  It’s January now—deep winter. After the holidays, the food banks around here run dry for a while, and everyone’s already behind on their bills. So, little kids all over town end up going hungry, and their parents are blamed for not being richer.

  To hell with it. Everyone around here could use some help.

  I order pizza, wings, juice, and hot coffee for the whole building on the landlord’s account. Then I make myself tea and sit down to brainstorm about what else I can do for them before I manage to buy the place.

  Compassion is a heavy burden—but I would rather bear it than be a complete piece of shit like Link.

  Half an hour after I put in the huge order, I go to the window to wait and listen. Eventually, I hear surprised exclamations, and the crying dries up. Meanwhile, every light in the building is now on. A peek down the alley shows at least two delivery cars parked at its mouth.

  The misery is gone, replaced by a contented silenc
e as little tummies are filled. For a while after that, even in the middle of this bleak-ass winter, I actually feel all right.

  It’s one of the rules I live by. If you want the world to be a better place, go out and do something about it. If the law won’t let you, figure out a way. Break the law—rob from the rich, save a life. Save fifty.

  Whenever I help someone using money some rich guy won’t miss, I know I’m on the right track, because afterward, I can sleep. In the morning, the world seems less crappy for a while, and I can live with myself better, too.

  Money alone could never do that for me. My parents understood that, and so do I.

  The loneliness? Well, that’s another thing. I’ve spent a lot of time in isolation, even after I was off the streets. There’s something about being a street kid that makes it hard to connect with people again when the opportunity comes back.

  That’s me, now. I watch over people. I don’t make friends with them.

  I hear talking and laughter over across the alley now. Someone’s faintly playing classic rock. A kid giggles.

  I let out a soft sigh of relief and sit back in my desk chair, which creaks a little stiffly. I still don’t feel the least bit sleepy, and I find my eyes drifting over to a folder at the top of my computer desktop.

  I’ve still got that cold feeling in the pit of my stomach that tells me I’m still a little upset, and that even if I could sleep, I won’t rest. I’ll spend the rest of the night reliving the winter I spent on the streets of Baltimore with the organ music from my parents’ double funeral still echoing in my head.

  The folder is labeled “A Fistful of Bitcoin,” referencing one of my favorite movies, and the currency involved in the heist. The plan within will be the biggest, most daring, and most life-saving operation that I have ever come up with…if I actually go through with it.

  I have a database of twenty thousand people in the greater Seattle area whose lives could be completely turned around with a windfall of just fifty thousand dollars. Medical bills, college debt, back mortgages, credit cards, fines, homelessness—each one of them is struggling with something. I can help them all—as long as I’m willing to risk making some truly dangerous enemies.

  If I go through with it, it will all start with a massive Bitcoin heist against three very deserving targets. Bitcoin. I chose this because it’s the currency I’ve started doing all my transactions with, so I know the ins and outs of the system—and because most of my targets do not even know if they own a lot of it.

  As for the one target who does know…his security is good, but it’s not as good as he thinks it is.

  There are eight “traditional” billionaires in the greater Seattle area: famous, well-known captains of industry. There are three Bitcoin billionaires who made their fortunes recently by investing in Bitcoin cryptocurrency right before its enormous rise in value. Two of these men could probably buy up most of the rest, but only because they each run a piece of the local underworld.

  Every last one of them—like my uncle, like Link, like so many others—is an unethical, lying, cash-grubbing piece of work. Between them, they have bought their way out of so many criminal charges and massive fines that I hate thinking about it. Even Drake Steele, one of the Bitcoin billionaires, and a guy heavily into funding local small businesses, has a history of doing large scale money laundering for a certain someone starting a decade back.

  Drake is the second target I picked for my heist. He is one of three men presumed to be criminal, each likely to have a territorial beef with the others, and each likely to be led to suspect one another for the cryptocurrency theft I’m making off with. While they’re bickering, I can make sure their money gets quietly sent where it will do the most good. The whole plan relies on them blaming each other for the theft.

  Each one has decent security on their Bitcoin wallets and other online repositories. Steele’s security has given me some problems, but I’ve dipped into them for unnoticeable amounts multiple times. This is just a bigger bite—and just like the Man with No Name, I’ll leave the bad guys blaming each other for the trouble I cause. Maybe they’ll even kill each other off.

  Cyber hacks like this are my specialty: the slow, subtle drain of resources; the big, showy hit to the wallet that someone else gets blamed for. I could be a billionaire myself by now, if I was selfish enough to keep that money.

  But that’s not me. My wealth redistribution is a straight up public service—and often in amounts that billionaires would still consider negligible.

  They’re not my only targets, either. Plenty of embezzlers have found their stolen funds vanishing out from under them, while a local grandma gets a new roof.

  I sigh through my nose and open the dossier on Steele. Drake Steele, youngest of the three by decades, has a mysterious background and no known relatives. He prefers to fund incubators instead of pay taxes—which is a lot better than not paying at all.

  Also, hot. Disgustingly, distractingly hot.

  I switch to his photo folder and drink in his images again. This is the man I’m contemplating relieving of fifty thousand Bitcoin—which translates to hundreds of millions of dollars.

  I don’t know anything about intimacy with men, but I know to be wary of ones that I can’t look away from. I could stare at Drake Steele for minutes at a stretch as I wonder what he looks like under that nice suit—just from a picture. That kind of magnetism alarms me.

  I have to make sure that we never actually meet.

  Still, looking at a man like that makes me want to dream a little. Tall and muscular, with the sharp, noble features of a Roman statue, pale skin, wavy mahogany-colored hair that reaches his jawline, and ice-gray eyes. What a waste.

  I catch myself yawning, and I sigh in relief, getting up from my desk and stretching. Maybe I’m relaxed enough now from the night’s successes to get an actual nap in.

  I prefer to sleep through sunrise. There’s something uniquely depressing about facing the dawn alone, even if I have done it since I was ten.

  I’m still pulling together the last details on this project. I have time to decide whether to actually go through with it. A slow and steady draining of their wallets would be safer, but I’m torn.

  There are so many people in this town who need help, and they need it soon.

  I’ll sleep on it, I think as I strip off my sweater and wander to bed in my yoga pants and a black tank top. I pull my hair off my shoulders and tie it up with a plain elastic band before clambering into bed.

  Strangely, the last thing in my head before I doze off is Steele’s beautiful face and cold eyes. I want to ask him when he stopped caring about people, but as I drop off, I remind myself again of the rules I’ve set.

  We must never meet.

  Chapter 2

  Drake

  I should know by now never to go through the news feeds during breakfast. It always shows the most depressing shit. And this morning, as I sit in my breakfast nook in one corner of my penthouse, is no exception.

  My bagel with lox, cream cheese, and purple tomatoes sits there untouched as I stare gloomily at the touchscreen in front of me. It rests in a plain black stand partway across the table. Wary of getting crumbs on it, I use an extra-long stylus to flick through article after article describes disasters, crime, government corruption, and people near and far being fucked over.

  I stop at one in particular and let out a heavy sigh before forcing myself to choke down some orange juice as I skim over the article. Every time I read about this goddamn fire in South Park the situation gets more screwed up.

  The tragedy hit the news on an icy night three days ago. There’s a whole little list of headlines, which outline the story pretty well by themselves:

  Electrical Fire in South Park Leaves Three Dead, Scores Homeless

  South Park Fire Casualties Now at Five

  Electrical System Overloaded After Tenants Forced to Use Space Heaters

  Landlord Questioned Over Unheated Building

 
Fire Marshall Discovers Disconnected Sprinkler System, Fire Hoses

  Self-Described “Frugal” South Park Slumlord Hit with Multiple Violations

  South Park Slumlord May Face Wrongful Death Lawsuits, Lawyers Up

  The list isn’t even done yet, and I already have a headache. I turn the screen away from me to concentrate on my breakfast, cutting my eyes toward the view outside as I scoop up my loaded bagel and bite into it like a burger. The burst of flavor on my tongue wakes me a little from my doldrums, and I grunt in satisfaction, giving a little nod.

  The world’s misery can wait until I have a full stomach and a focused mind.

  The view outside reminds me of the Northeast or maybe even back home: white rooftops, evergreens crowned with snow dotting bleak hills full of bare broadleafs, plows beeping as they push the mess down on the street into piles at the side of the road. Now and again, I hear the screech-honk-crunch of a fender bender as wheels slide out of control on patches of ice.

  This winter has been brutal. After two strangely mild early Februaries in a row, we’re now breaking records in the other direction.

  Which is why everyone had their electric heaters blasting in that apartment building. No radiators. Just trying to stay warm in some antiquated shit-heap with an electrical system that probably hasn’t been upgraded since the fifties.

  I wince and force myself to bite down on my bagel again, chewing angrily. I can’t afford to get this caught up in other people’s problems. My family used to mock me for being too soft-hearted.

  And they had a point—unplanned, emotional decisions cause nothing but trouble. I have my own ways of working for the greater good, and they don’t involve swooping in to rescue every desperate person I run across. If they have a plan for pulling themselves out of poverty, then I’ll help them in a second, but I’m no hero.