Under the Heiress' Facade

Hera stayed at the Everett residence for two nights and only returned to Skyview Heights on the weekend.

Bernard was not there, so she took the time to sort out the photos she took on Monday.

The camera was already delivered from Lumiville. She plugged it into the computer and looked through the photos. She realized that Bernard had also taken a lot of photos of her.

One of them was a side profile photo of her sitting at the desk while Tiramisu was standing on it. Its head was tilted up, and they were nose to nose with each other. She liked it a lot, so she sent it to her phone to use it as her WhatsApp profile picture.

Then, she chose ten private photos of Bernard and cropped his face out. Then, she logged onto her anonymous WhatsApp account to send the photos to Grandmaster of Astral Nova: "These are the photos you wanted. Please review them. When will you deliver the gurdyroot?"

On the other side of the screen, Bernard was sitting in Shuttle Venture's CEO's office. It was rare that he would review the company's emails himself.

Shuttle Ventures was one of the smaller companies under Killian Corporation. Two years ago, when he retired from the army, Chad assigned him to work in this company.

In those two years, one could count the number of times he physically went to the office on two hands. Usually, he would hand over his work to the vice president, Harold Greer. Only when Killian Corporation sent people over to audit the company would he be present.

At this time, his phone on the table lit up with notifications. He had new messages from WhatsApp. Bernard used his computer to change accounts and saw the ten photos.

These were all his private photos. No matter how bad the ratio was, his head had been cropped out awkwardly.

Bernard was speechless. All of a sudden, he felt doubtful about Hera's sense of aesthetics.

Even so, he politely replied: "These photos are not bad."

He thought about it for a while then sent her the timing and location: "2:00 pm at Room 808, level four, Imperial Hotel."

Not long after he sent the message, the computer notified him that there was a hacking attempt.

Bernard's slender eyes narrowed. Someone actually broke through his firewall! This was interesting. It had been a while since he had met a worthy opponent.

His fingers interlocked and balled into fists as he relaxed the joints. He tilted his neck left and right. Then, his fingers landed on the keyboard, furiously tapping away.

On the other side, Hera stared at the codes flitting across the screen. Suddenly, her typing stopped.

She had just broken through the other person's firewall, but her hacking attempt was halted.

Then, an urgent notification popped out on the screen, notifying her that her firewall had suffered a breach and there was a virus attack. The other party even retaliated.

Hera squinted slightly before her fingers flew across the keyboard again, stopping the invader's attack.

The two of them took turns attacking and defending. After several rounds, neither of them succeeded in taking down each other's system.

It had been a long time since Hera met such a strong opponent. The last person whom she acknowledged to be a really strong opponent was Mr. S. Now, she was even more curious about this Grandmaster of Astral Nova.

In the beginning, she felt doubtful about this deal and wanted to figure out this person's identity. Because they had agreed to the deal too easily, Hera suspected that they knew about her true identity.

When she recalled their interactions, she found the biggest point of suspicion. Although she changed her voice at Astral Nova, one could still tell whether her voice was male or female.

On WhatsApp, she wrongly sent over Bernard's photos, but the other person didn't say anything about it. They even gladly accepted the photos.

The gender difference was so obvious that any normal person would find it weird, but they didn't. This was the crux of the issue.

Hera never would have thought that the other person was also a hacker.