The Revenge (The Insiders Trilogy #3)(48)

Crappity crap crap. Looks like the plan worked.

“—ley!”

“What?” I yelled, out of reflex, jerking at Matt’s sudden shout in my ear.

But he wasn’t in my ear. He was standing a normal distance away and he had been trying to get my attention .

I flushed. I was always flushing. “What? Sorry.”

He was fighting a grin, but one of his eyebrows was arched up. He nodded to Quinn. “Now’s your time. Say your piece to her, to the woman who tried to have you killed.”

At his words, a new buzz went through the hallway. The press got excited. That sound bite was going to be played on repeat over the next few weeks.

I stifled my groan but looked at Quinn. I made eye contact with her, and the hatred that I expected to feel …

It wasn’t there.

It wasn’t there!

Why wasn’t it there?

A burning was in my chest instead, and it was spreading. Growing. It was filling up my throat, tunneling down into my stomach.

No. I didn’t feel hate for her anymore.

I smiled at her instead, and a few people in the crowd gasped, as if a smile was worse.

Quinn frowned, but she was waiting.

Everyone was waiting.

“I know the government cares what you tried to do to me, but right now, I don’t care about me. I care about Seraphina and Curtis. They’re the real victims here.”

Quinn blanched. A sheen came over her eyes, making them glisten. I wanted to believe those were unshed tears, but knowing her, dust might’ve been thrown in her eyes.

“Stop hurting them. Do what’s right, for them.”

Then, turning, grabbing Matt’s arm, I pushed him out of the building. He resisted, but I dug in. We were done. Show was over. And after a slight pushing match, he yielded. He led the rest of the way. Fitz was ahead of us, Drake right behind us, and the car pulled up.

Once we stepped outside, a guy was coming at us fast. Really fast .

It was Tony.

He bypassed us, and I knew that was the instant he handed the phone off to Matt. But it was so fast, so smooth, so good that I never saw it. I wouldn’t see it until we were back at the house and Matt came to my room. He knocked, came inside, and brandished the phone.

There was a wicked grin on his face, and he tossed the phone on the bed. “Do your thing.”

Right.

Now it was my turn.





TWENTY-SEVEN

Bailey


Quinn’s phone was a joke. It was like she didn’t realize who she had been married to, who she tried to have kidnapped, and whose son came out of her birth canal. Seriously. Not a clue. I hacked into her phone within thirty seconds. She used the most generic password ever. 0000. She needed to update to the one that uses her thumbprint instead. That would’ve been more of a challenge, but okay then.

I was in. And I was snooping. Well, first I turned off the locater so it couldn’t be tracked. When we came up with this plan, the intention was to get in the phone, clone it, upload some spyware, and hand it back. That all got usurped because I pushed Matt out the doors. So yeah, that was my bad, but we could still do this.

I think.

Maybe not.

Probably not.

Crap.

She was going to get a new phone, and we’d have to do it all over again.

So maybe I didn’t need to worry about spyware, but for some reason I was still uploading it. I was in the middle of it, when suddenly the phone lit up. It was an unknown number, and then it suddenly stopped.

The phone froze in place.

Then lit up.

Then not. The screen went black.

Lit up again.

And—what was happening?

It was being downloaded.

Holy crap. Holy crap!

She was getting it cloned remotely.

My spyware was half downloaded.

I lunged off the bed, grabbed a cord, and plugged it into my computer. From there, I tried to get into the basic coding for the phone itself. The phone was ancient and Quinn was a moron for not updating it in years, but I could work with that code.

Whoever or whatever program was uploading the data, it was doing it fast. Quinn must’ve gone right to a phone store, and they were good. I had disconnected it from Wi-Fi, too, so they were using a different connection. I wanted to know what they were using, but I could analyze everything later. First, I pulled up my spyware and finished the code.

Once it was done, I looked over.

The phone was still being cloned.

Then, another flash on the screen.

The screen went black, and I waited, holding my breath.

It came back up, and I whooshed a whole breath of relief. Quinn’s new phone had my program on there, so I turned to my computer and disconnected from her old phone. I pulled up a new screen, searched, clicked on my program, and sat back.

I had a live feed into her phone, and she was going through it, or someone else was—fast, too. They were searching to see what was changed.

They could find my program if they looked hard enough, but I was hoping that when they saw nothing added or deleted or changed, they would think nothing happened.

One app was opened. Two. Three. They went through fifteen of her apps before the screen stopped.

The text messages were pulled up.

She was texting someone.

Who was she texting?

A number came up. She typed: