sure sounded real.
McMann stood and motioned toward the couches. “Sit, Andre. Would you care for an espresso? Some water, perhaps? No? Then why don’t we chat for a moment. And Dean, you can come out too. I think you should also be involved in this conversation.”
Dre
DEAN SLUNK OUT of the toilet looking utterly defeated while McMann watched, wearing a smug smile I wanted to smack off his face.
“Did you really think that Scooby-Doo shit was going to work?”
“I’m sorry,” Dean said to me.
I leaned against him and rubbed the back of his hand with mine. “It’s not your fault.”
“Your phones, please.” McMann held out a black bag. There was nothing we could do but drop our phones in. After we did, McMann sealed the bag shut. “This bag will prevent any signals from getting in or out, allowing us to speak privately.”
“I’ve got nothing to say to you,” I said. “Well, okay, that’s not true. I’ve got a lot to say, but—”
“Enough.” McMann wore a toothy grin and looked so damned proud of himself. He was only missing a mustache to twirl. “Your ridiculous plan was doomed from the start.”
“We almost had you,” I said, trying to sound more confident than I felt.
“Did you?” McMann reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. “I still have this. That man in the hallway? Your friend. Mindy Maguire, right? She was supposed to lift my phone from my pocket and return it to your greenroom, where your other friend, the one with the foreign name, was going to attempt to hack it and expose me to the world. Isn’t that right?”
Dean pulled off the gray wig, dropped it to the ground beside him, and unzipped his coveralls. With the makeup Mel had used to age him, he really did look like an investment banker now. Fine, yes, I was a little turned on.
“We’re so screwed,” I said.
“You can’t do anything to us,” Dean said to McMann. “Tamal and Mindy know where we are. If we don’t return soon, they will tell my parents.”
“And I can’t wait for that to happen,” McMann said. “I can see the headlines now. Children of presidential hopefuls attempt theft of Jackson McMann’s property. Foiled by their own hubris.” He tossed the phone onto the desk beside him.
“Don’t you feel even a little bad about screwing with our lives? How big a dick do you have to be to leak the private pics and conversations of a couple of teens in love to the press?”
Dean’s head spun toward me so fast it just about twisted off. “Wait, we’re in love?”
I hadn’t thought about the words as I’d been saying them, but as soon as I realized what I’d said, my mouth went dry and I briefly forgot about McMann. “I mean, I don’t know. It’s probably too soon for that.”
“Probably,” Dean said.
“But if I was starting to fall, would that be so bad?”
“Who will catch us if we’re both falling?”
McMann snapped his fingers in the air. The crack forced me back to the present, where we were being held captive by a megalomaniacal dickhead.
“What?” I said. “We’re kind of having a moment here.”
McMann was sneering and, honestly, it was killing the vibe in the room. “I don’t care about either of you or your ill-fated relationship. It was simply a means to an end. Imagine my surprise when I caught Andre trying to take a picture of my room during the debate and saw that he was a Promethean user.
“I was hoping to find information I could use against your father, Andre, but I found your conversations with Dean instead.”
My mouth fell open. “You didn’t need to hack my phone because you had access to my Promethean account!”
Dean shook his head. “But I thought it was supposed to be secure. Encrypted so that no one but the sender and recipient could access the messages.”
“How did you even figure out my username?”
McMann shrugged while wearing an evil grin. He looked like a supervillain in that moment, and he probably would’ve thought that was a compliment. “I cross-referenced every Promethean username in our database against your known social media accounts until I found a match. You also used DreOfTheDead when you linked your Nintendo account.”
“Betrayed by my Switch!”
“And with Dean’s username, I was able to use an exploit in that pitifully old phone he carries around that allowed me to gain access to his call logs, GPS, camera, microphone. I knew everywhere he had been.”
I smacked my forehead. “That’s