Page 85 of Never Again

“Because I knew that you adored me,” she admitted with a heartfelt sigh as she turned her attention to Tristan and held out her hand in silent demand.

Nodding slowly, Quinn said, “I’m going to spank you.”

“Probably,” Bailey said, not really sounding all that concerned as she cleared her throat and gave her hand a pointed look when Tristan only continued standing there, frowning down at her only to curse when she said, “Phone.”

“What are you looking for?” Tristan asked as he pulled his phone out of his pocket and handed it to Bailey.

She placed the iPad on her lap so that she could take the phone and began looking through it. “To see if the virus on his iPad made its way to your phone,” Bailey explained.

“What virus?” Quinn asked as he shared a look with Tristan.

“The one that I’m pretty sure that I accidentally downloaded a few weeks ago when I helped myself to your iPad at your grandfather’s old cabin,” Bailey murmured absently as she finished what she was doing and sighed. “You might want to turn that off for now and find a way to tell your men to do the same,” she said while Quinn sat there thinking about exactly what that meant, their clients, files, security, fucking everything.

“That explains how they were able to get around our security at Haven Technologies,” Tristan said, sighing heavily as he quickly sent a text message before turning off his cellphone.

“Probably,” Bailey murmured absently.

“I’m going to need you to explain what’s going on, Bailey,” Quinn said as he gently cupped her face in his hand and pulled her attention back to him and-

“It’s not Kelly.”

CHAPTER50

“We’ll get to Kelly in a moment,” Tristan said as he gestured towards the iPad, “Tell me what’s going on.”

“Since the text messages didn’t start until a minute after Quinn left the room, I knew that there had to be a triggering event that set it off,” Bailey began, only to realize that she should probably break this down a little more when she saw the matching frowns on their faces.

Licking her lips, Bailey decided to approach this the way that she did whenever she had to explain something to Nathan. “In order to pull this off, whoever sent the texts had to make sure that Quinn wasn’t in the room, otherwise it would have been clear that he wasn’t the one sending them. That meant that they had to come up with a way to know that he wasn’t in the room but that I was.”

“And how did they do that?” Tristan asked while Quinn sat there quietly, looking lost in thought as he absently ran his fingertips over her knee.

“That’s what I wanted to know, so I started with the settings, looking to see which apps had access to things like the microphone, camera, Bluetooth, and GPS, knowing that one of them was being used to trigger the text messages,” Bailey explained, watching as Quinn absently nodded along with Tristan.

Thankful that she hadn’t lost them yet, Bailey continued. “The app had to know that Quinn left the room, which meant that either someone had to be listening, watching, or receiving a signal from another device.”

“Which means that Quinn leaving the room was the triggering event, letting them know to send the messages,” Tristan correctly guessed.

Gesturing to the iPad, Bailey said, “The messenger app had access to everything except for the Bluetooth and GPS, which normally would have led me to believe that whoever was behind this was at least listening, but-”

“They would have known that Quinn was otherwise occupied when they decided to send that text from him,” Tristan drawled as Bailey decided that she would be avoiding making eye contact with the large man for the rest of this conversation.

“Exactly,” Bailey said, clearing her throat as she continued, “which means that video and the microphone are out.”

“You said the messenger app didn’t have access to the Bluetooth or GPS,” Tristan reminded her, sounding confused while Quinn sat there, looking lost in thought as he continued absently running his fingertips over her knee, making her wonder what he was thinking.

“Which didn’t make sense, so I went back to the app and tried to figure out what I was missing. I checked the settings and went through everything again and found an app that looked off. After a quick check, I realized that there were actuallytwomessenger apps on the iPad. The one that came with the iPad had been deleted from the home screen and replaced with a fake app designed to look and work like the real thing, but this app is connected to the GPS,” Bailey explained, gesturing between the iPad and Quinn’s phone. “It’s using the coordinates from his phone to track his movement so that-”

“It knew when he was leaving the room,” Tristan murmured, sounding thoughtful as he glanced back down at the devices on his desk before his curious gaze found her. “How did they know that you were still in the room?”

“Because there were two parts to this triggering event, Quinn’s phone moving away was the catalyst that put the app on alert and when I accessed the iPad, it activated the program and sent the messages,” Bailey explained, once again unable to help but notice that Quinn still hadn’t said anything.

“Why did you mention Kelly?” Tristan asked as his gaze flickered to Quinn as the man that was really starting to make her nervous just sat there, absently running his fingertips over her thigh.

“Because whoever sent the texts was trying to make it look like Kelly was behind it,” Bailey said, knowing without a doubt that Kelly had nothing to do with this.

“We know that it’s Kelly, Bailey,” Tristan said as he gestured to the file on the desk behind him. “We have bank records, emails, dates that match the attacks, an extensive criminal record, and this morning, your staff was able to trace an attempt to break into Haven Technologies’ server and attempted to download your files while simultaneously uploading a program to destroy everything.”

“On her work laptop?” Bailey asked, trying to wrap her mind around what he’d just said.

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