Page 60 of Claimed By My Billionaire Ex

She chuckled and trotted off toward the master bedroom.

It took another hour before I finished the footage of the black tie charity. There wasn't much else to look at in the week leading up to the masquerade ball. Jessie and his wife were living their normal day-to-day lives, and watching them felt a bit like peering into something I shouldn't be privy to.Either way, based on our contract and my NDA, Jessie knew I was bound to secrecy.

However, a day before the masquerade ball, a visitor appeared. Senator Carter. I paused the footage and double checked the list of guests Jessie had given me. He'd listed every guest for the big events, but also guests who'd stopped by on specific days.

Carter had appeared on the list in previous weeks—even outside of big events—but Jessie hadn't listed this visit. The footage was still moving in fast forward, but even then, I could tell that this wasn't a welcomed drop in.

Senator Carter stumbled in through the front door, his hands raised in the air. Jessie walked up to where he was standing and started trying to shove him into the back hall.

This wasn't part of what I'd been requested to do, but I couldn't help myself. I already knew that Carter and Jessie were involved in this video they feared was stolen, but I didn't know the depth of it.

Sliding on my headphones, I rewinded the video and played it in regular motion right to the point where Carter stumbled inside.

"We need to talk!" Carter shouted, his voice slurring. Carter liked to drink—that was no secret—but this was something else all together. He was wasted.

Jessie grabbed his shoulders, shoving him into the back hall. "Keep it down."

I glanced at the footage in the top corner, where the camera pointed at the back hall as Jessie and Carter appeared there. "I told you to keep it together," Jessie said. "We're going to figure this out."

Carter blinked. "You're going to do this? You're going to let them blackmail us? They filmed us, man. They filmed us."

"Yeah," Jessie hissed. "And we're going to pay them off, get all the copies of the video, and then we won't have to worry about this again."

"You're not going to go after them?" Carter asked. "That's bullshit! We need to go after them!"

"We need to keep them quiet first," Jessie said.

"Wait," Carter mumbled. "So you know who that bitch is working with? She said she had a partner, man."

"Yeah," Jessie growled. "I think it's a friend of hers. I did some digging. She's no prostitute. Her name is Helen Caldwell. She used to work at a bank with a guy named Quinn Zinger, a man whose been very vocal about my political positions. Written multiple op-eds about me. All slander. Hands down, I'd put him as the mastermind behind this. He's a hacker."

My heart skipped. This was the man Jessie had said he suspected hacking the footage the night of the ball, the hacker he'd mentioned. Except Jessie had said Quinn had never been at his house, which meant someone else had.

This could be a working theory. If that was the case, and this Quinn guy was behind it and working with Helen, then that meant they intended to blackmail Jessie for the copy of the first video. And then Quinn intended to hire someone else to hack into the system to get a separate copy of the video.

It did make sense. I listened as Jessie continued, "So we'll deal with the woman first. I'm going to pay her off before the masquerade ball. And then we'll track where the money goes. And if it ends up at Quinn's, we'll know he's involved.”

Jesus. It would have helped if Jessie had filled me in up to this point. I suspected the money had already reached Quinn since Jessie had made it clear he suspected him to be behind all this.

But then who had come into the house and made another copy of the video?

I fast forwarded to the night of the masquerade ball and took my time scouring every face, every camera angle, identifying every person on the list. It was nearly two AM, and I was getting close to pulling my hair out. None of this made any sense. Everyone was beyond vetted, and I'd kept track of everyone in all the angles.

I fast forward to the section of video that had gone black on the second floor, outside his office. It was definitely connected to this. That would have been the only time the suspect would have been able to copy the video.

Rubbing my face with my hands, I took a long swig of water and decided to restart the video to about fifteen minutes before the blackout. I paused the video and pressed the space bar one second a time to see where everyone moved.

Everyone was in the main room, except for two people in the bottom corner.

Me and Olive.

As I kept pressing the spacebar to move it forward slowly, Olive and I disappeared into a side hall toward the kitchen. Sliding across my desk, I focused on the camera in the kitchen. It only showed half the space, from the edge of the spiral staircase and the outside door behind it and across the room to the fridge.

I pressed play and watched the argument unfold between Olive and me. It was the disagreement we'd had about her using a fake name, Mallory. Biting my nails, I hit fast forward. Where was I going with this?

As I left the kitchen, I caught just the edge of Olive's dress as she disappeared up the spiral staircase. I checked the camera in the hall on the second floor. It was two minutes to the blackout. Moving it in slow motion, I waited, and half a second before the cameras went off, a light to a room in the right flicked on, and then everything went black.

This didn't mean anything. Yet, I needed to clear every person, every possibility. Pulling up the blueprints to Jessie's house, I realized that the light in the door outside the hall was a second floor food cupboard, with a spiral staircase that connected to the living room.

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