He carried her to the bed, dropping her on the mattress. He was just about to strip his boxers off when something caught his eye.
Glancing back toward the desk, his heart practically stopped. “Fuck.”
Selene tensed. “What?”
He leapt across the room and slapped the tablet facedown on the desk, then quickly shut his laptop. Selene jerked up, his tension clearly spreading to her, but her voice was calm as she asked again, “What’s wrong?”
“The camera turned on.”
“Perhaps you accidentally hit a button when you stood up?”
Oscar shook his head. “Not my computer. I have tape over it.” Most hackers, whether white or black hat, blacked out their cameras—aka, put a piece of electrician’s tape over it—or custom built computers without a camera. This was his travel laptop, and though he’d customized it, he hadn’t bothered to mess with the screen, except to black out the camera.
He’d done the same with the tablet he’d brought in order to test his theory, but the tape had been on the glass.
The glass he’d removed.
“Fuck,” he snarled. “It shouldn’t even be possible to…I mean, the functionality beyond the internal storage is all disabled.”
Selene rose, not bothering with the sheet this time. “The tablet—you’re saying it was the tablet’s camera?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe your test triggered something that turned on the camera. Perhaps your test activated a program or application that needed the camera.”
Damn, she was smart. And sexy. And sexy because she was smart.
“Possibly,” Oscar said slowly.
“But unlikely?”
“A malfunction or unanticipated hardware activation is the simplest explanation.”
“But we are not in a simple situation. The law of parsimony may not apply.”
He’d google that later. “The worst-case option is that Luca had some sort of backdoor alert in his system that I haven’t found yet.”
“Which would…allow him to turn on the camera remotely?”
“Possibly. I basically recreated his tablet, so…” Oscar closed his eyes, hoping it would make his brain work faster. He needed to be thinking worst-case scenario. Not that he didn’t always think that way. “Yes. He could have.”
Now Selene looked worried, and he felt like an almighty asshole. Goddammit, he always ended up feeling like an asshole with women, and the fact that a psycho bomb maker may have just seen the start of their sexy times was a very good reason for her to hate him.
“How do we know?” Her question was still calm, even if her expression was pinched with worry.
Oscar scrubbed his face. “I’m going to open the laptop. There’s a physical barrier on the camera. Hopefully the program captured the hardware toggle.”
Selene stepped to the side, out of range of the camera, and picked up her phone.
Oscar sat, then slowly opened his laptop. The window of the analysis program was still up, the program running. He scanned through the lines of code captured from the tablet via the hardwire connection.
There it was. A remote code access. Somehow Luca had found the replica of his own hard drive, used a backdoor access, and then, since the tablet was connected to the hard drive, he’d been able to turn on the camera. Without the glass, the image was probably out of focus, but he would have seen something.
He kept scanning, his heart in his throat. Oscar was good, but to manage this, Luca must have had concealed backdoors and traces on his tablet unlike anything Oscar had ever seen before.
“Fuck this fucking fuck,” Oscar snarled, enraged at his own incompetence.
Selene lifted her phone to her ear.
“Who are you calling?” Oscar snapped. He winced internally. He shouldn’t yell at her. She wasn’t the fucking dipshit in his room. He was.
Selene, however, was unfazed by his anger. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but we need help, Oscar.” She paused, clearly listening to whomever had answered. “Hello, Mr. Stewart, I need to speak to the Grand Master.”
Chapter One
“We don’t need to involve them,” Oscar snapped at Selene for the third or fourth time.
Selene merely arched a brow, not even bothering to look up from her phone. Ten minutes ago, she’d called the Trinity Masters. They’d rushed to dress and were now simply waiting. Well, she was waiting, perched in the desk chair, legs elegantly crossed. He was pacing while berating himself for being a moron, with the occasional terse comment to Selene, which made him berate himself more because he knew he shouldn’t be snapping at her.
She was unconcerned by his anger and, apparently, by the implications of what had just happened. If Luca had seen them, it was Selene who was at risk. Luca had met Langston, which meant Oscar’s face wasn’t exactly a major surprise, but now he might be able to identify Selene.
Never mind the violation of privacy she must be feeling.
He stopped pacing, took a deep breath, and turned to her. “I’m sorry.”
Now she looked up. “For?”
“I fucked up.”
Her cool, almost remote expression softened and she rose. “Mistakes were made, but it was hardly enough of a miscalculation to be a fuck-up.”
His lips quirked. “You have a quantifiable definition of fucked up?”
“A gradient scale from oops to the advent of agriculture.”
Oscar snorted in amused surprise. “The far end of that spectrum is the advent of agriculture?”
“Arguably one of homo sapiens’ greatest mistakes.”
Oscar hooked a hand around her waist and tugged her body against his, his anger melting away. “Says the nuclear physicist.”
He lowered his face to hers, and just before their lips met, there was a knock at the door.
Selene smiled and slid out of his arms even as he snarled silently.
She opened the door, and Sebastian, Franco, and the Grand Master walked in.
The hotel room, which had seemed palatial, now felt crowded. The Grand Master wasn’t particularly tall or imposing, but she carried an authority that made her presence fill the room. She wore a cape-like jacket with a hood pulled up. Langston had told him that members of the cult weren’t supposed to know who the Grand Master was. He and his brothers had seen her without the hood, thanks to the extraordinary circumstances during which they’d met when her husband, Franco, had been shot.
Selene inclined her head. “Grand Master.”
“Dr. Tanaka.” Though her face was somewhat shadowed by the hood, the light from the lamp on the desk allowed them to see her features, making the hood more of a pro-forma gesture. As she looked at Selene, the Grand Master’s lips quirked. “You were here with Mr. Hayden?”
“Yes.” Selene paused. “Having sex.” She looked at Oscar out of the corner of her eye, and he resisted the urge to make a face at her. Something about Selene made him want to kid around with her, laugh even. What the fuck was that about?
Oscar rubbed the spot between his eyebrows as Franco snickered. Luckily his complexion meant a blush wouldn’t show.
“What happened?” the Grand Master asked, turning to him.