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