Nine years ago, Kyle had had his reasons—very private, personal reasons—for dropping out of his PhD program and joining Rhodes Corporation, but the reason he’d stayed at the company for so long was because of the work experience. In his industry, there was no better man to learn from than Grey Rhodes—the billion-dollar empire he’d built from the ground up was concrete proof of that.

That being said, it wasn’t all smooth sailing. His father may have been CEO of the company, but Kyle was in charge of network security and insisted on autonomy: he ran his department the way he wanted. True, every now and then he and his father butted heads and stepped on each other’s toes…well, actually, that happened a lot. But they were professionals, and they worked through it the same way any other CEO and executive VP would work through their issues. His father respected his opinions and had come to see Kyle as his right-hand man.

The problem was, Kyle didn’t want to be the right-hand man anymore. He was good, he was ready, and he was driven. But at Rhodes Corporation, there could only be one man at the top. And that spot was taken.

He had ideas. Plans for the future that likely did not match up with those of his father. And the time to put those plans into motion was quickly coming.

That evening, he and Daniela had argued over her comment for almost an hour. In the end, however, Kyle had tried to make amends. She had flown into Chicago to surprise him, after all. He didn’t want to spend the entire night fighting, especially since they wouldn’t see each other for a couple weeks.

“I’ll tell you what,” he’d said, putting his arms around her and pulling her closer. “I’ll pick up a bottle of champagne on my way home from dinner. We can have a private celebration when I get back.”

“Aw, babe, you tempt me,” she’d said, kissing his cheek affectionately. “But I feel like…what’s the expression? Living it up tonight. I think I’ll give Janelle a call. She’s in Chicago for a shoot with Macy’s. You remember Janelle, don’t you? You met in New York that night we had drinks at the Boom Boom Room…” her voice trailed off as she strolled into his bathroom, toting her enormous makeup bag.

That night, Daniela didn’t get back to Kyle’s place until five a.m., only a half hour before he normally woke up to go for his daily run. She let herself into his place with the key he’d given her and passed out cold on his bed, on top of the sheets and snoring, with her Christian Louboutins still on. Kyle didn’t bother to wake her, and she was gone, having left for L.A., by the time he came home from work.

That was probably the second sign of trouble.

He didn’t hear from Daniela for the next four days. At first, he assumed she was busy with the music video shoot, but when she didn’t return any of his calls or text messages, he began to get worried. He knew she sometimes partied hard with her friends, and he’d begun to have nightmare visions of her becoming one of those tragic tales reported on Access Hollywood, the supermodel who drank too much and died when she slipped in a hotel bathroom and dropped her five-ton makeup case on her head.

On the fourth night of her trip, he finally got a response.

Via Twitter.

@KyleRhodes Sorry not going 2 work out 4 us. Going 2 chill in LA with someone I met. I think U R sweet but U talk too much about computers.

Kyle had to give her credit; it took skill—plus no heart and a serious abuse of the English language—to break up with someone in fewer than 140 characters. She didn’t even have the decency to send him a private message; nope, she’d just tweeted that sucker for anyone and everyone on Twitter to see. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Twenty minutes later, Daniela posted another tweet, this time with a link to a video of her making out with movie star Scott Casey in a hot tub.

That sucked.

Kyle felt like he’d been punched in the gut when he saw the video. He knew they’d had their problems, but what Daniela had done was just so…heartless. Particularly since she’d managed to make him look like a complete and utter fool. He could just see the tabloids:

STEAMY SAUNA SCANDAL!!!


Supermodel Cheats on Billionaire Heir

He worked in computers, he knew what would happen—the video would go viral within minutes. Between the wet supermodel in her skimpy bikini, the movie star, and the fact that the damn thing was even cinematically pleasing with the sweeping views of the Hollywood Hills in the background—everyone was going to see it.

Not on his watch.

Kyle grabbed the bottle of Scotch from the bar he kept in his home office and slammed a shot. And four more after that for good measure. One thought kept ringing through his head.

Fuck Daniela.

He may not have been a movie star, or the CEO of a billion-dollar corporation, or on the cover of Time and Newsweek, but he was not some also-ran. He was Kyle Rhodes, and he was a tech god. His specialty was network security, for chrissakes—he could simply hack into Twitter and delete Daniela’s tweets and the video from the site, and no one would ever be the wiser.

And he might have gotten away with the whole thing if only he’d stopped there.

But somewhere along the way, as he sat at his computer with his glass in hand, intoxicated and furious, staring at that tweet—that stupid it-was-fun-while-it-lasted-but-fuck-you of a tweet—he had a moment of Scotch-induced clarity. He realized that the true problem lay with social media itself, the perpetuation of a world in which people had become so wholly unsocial that they believed 140-character breakups were acceptable.

So he took down the whole site.

Actually, it wasn’t all that difficult. For him, anyway. All he needed was one clever computer virus and about fifty thousand unknowingly infected computers, and he was good to go.

Take that, tweeple.

After he crashed the site, he decided to cut loose. He threw his laptop, his passport, and a change of clothes into a backpack, hopped on a red-eye flight to Tijuana, and proceeded to get shit-faced drunk on cheap tequila for the next two days.

“Why Tijuana?” Jordan had asked him during the brouhaha that followed his arrest.

“It seemed like the kind of place a person could go without being asked any questions,” he’d explained with a shrug.

And indeed, it was that. In Tijuana, no one knew, or cared, who he was. He wasn’t a guy who’d been cheated on by his supermodel ex-girlfriend. He wasn’t an heir, a tech geek, a businessman, a son, or a brother. He was no one, and he loved all forty-eight hours of the anonymity—being the son of a billionaire had deprived him of that freedom long ago.

On the second night of his trip, Kyle had been sitting at the bar he’d made his home for the last two days, nursing what he had decided would be his last shot of the night. He’d never been on a bender before and, like most men, had found it to be an effective way to deal with his problems. But sooner or later, he had to get back to the real world.

The bartender, Esteban, shot Kyle a sideways look as he cleaned some glasses. “You think they’re going to catch this guy?” he asked in a heavy Mexican accent.

Kyle blinked in surprise. That was more words than Esteban had uttered to him in two days. He momentarily debated whether this query violated his no-questions policy, then ultimately found it to be acceptable. After all, it wasn’t like they were talking about him.

“What guy?” he asked.

“This tweeder terrorist,” Esteban said.

Kyle waved his glass in front of him. “No clue what a tweeder is, or how you terrorize one, but it sounds like a hell of a story, amigo.”

“Oh, you’re a funny guy, eh?” Esteban pointed to a television mounted to the wall behind Kyle. “Twee-ter, pendejo.”

Out of curiosity, Kyle looked over at the television and saw a Mexican news program. His four years of high school Spanish was little help; the female reporter was speaking too fast for him to understand what she was saying. But three words written in bold letters across the bottom of the television screen needed no translation.

El Twitter Terrorista

Kyle choked on his tequila.

Oh…shit.

He stared at the television screen with growing frustration as he tried to understand what the reporter was saying. It was tough, particularly given the fact that he was about six sheets to the wind, but he did manage to catch the words policia and FBI.

His stomach churned, and he barely made it out of the bar before he bent over and threw up seven shots of tequila, impaling his forehead on a heretofore unseen cactus in the process.

That sobered him up right quick.

In a panic, he made his way back to the cheap posada that had rented him a room on a cash, no-ID-required basis, and called the one person he could count on when shit-face drunk in Tijuana, bleeding from his forehead, and wanted by the FBI.

“Jordo, I fucked up,” he said as soon as she answered the phone.

Likely hearing the anxiety in his voice, she’d gotten right to the heart of the matter. “Can you fix it?”

Kyle knew he had to—ASAP. So as soon as he hung up the phone, he fired up his laptop and stopped the botnet’s denial of service attack.

There was only one problem: this time the FBI was waiting for him.

And they had computer geeks, too.

The next morning, sobered and chagrined, Kyle loaded up his backpack and took a taxi to the Tijuana airport. There was a moment before boarding, as he handed over his ticket to the Aeromexico flight attendant, when he thought, I don’t have to go back. But running wasn’t the answer. He figured a man needed to own up to those moments in life when he acted like a complete dickhead, come what may.