Chapter Fifty-Five The Breach #2
"I would love to." He stood up in one smooth motion, taking her with him as she clung to his shoulders.
She squealed with laughter as he reached back, caught her legs, and wrapped them around his waist like she weighed nothing.
Then he gave her a piggyback ride to the island where she had left her laptop.
He turned and set her on the counter, then pulled one of his huge, reinforced stools over and sat.
He opened her computer and typed in her PIN.
"It’s in my documents. A folder called Storms and Shadows. There’s an outline of the whole series, and then Dark Mist is the first novel." Evie leaned over and grabbed another piece of gibanica. "I was working on it for the rest of the afternoon." She grinned and leaned closer. "Don’t tell Tommy."
"Mali?a." He shook his head with a quiet laugh. "Did you get your work done?"
"Of course."
"Then why would I tell Tommy?" He reached out and tapped her nose. "Now hush and let me read."
Evie rolled her eyes and ate her gibanica while he scrolled. When he was finished, he looked up at her with a huge smile.
"I cannot wait to read the entire thing. My Evie is going to be famous."
“I don’t know about famous, but I will get to add Published Author to my resume.” She smiled at him as he stood up and closed her laptop. He lifted her down off the island and led her back over to the sofa and queued up the Trolls movie.
Thorn smiled as she cuddled into his side, pulling her hair from its bun and running his fingers through it. “So, what happened that made you decide to end things with Alex tonight?”
Evie rolled her eyes, leaning forward to pick her glass of sljivovica up off the coffee table and taking a long sip. “He’s been a pill for like two months and finally decides to tell me why when I got home this evening.” She looked up at Thorn, her earlier annoyance at Alex coming back.
“Apparently, “someone” told him I’ve been spending a lot of time with Aaron.” She took another drink. “Of course, that particular someone has been trying to sit on Alex’s dick for years, but why would she lie, right?”
Thorn raised his eyebrows, looking amused by her drunken rant. “Why indeed?”
“But what really did it was, get this, he’s been spying on me using the security system.
” Evie flopped back on the couch. “Dumbass walk right into my trap.” She grinned smugly.
“I asked him what his surveillance told him, and he said, “Nothing, but I don’t have access to the cameras…” And then he realized I trapped him.
” She snatched her hand in the air, making a fist like she had caught something, and giggling madly. “Idiot.”
Thorn
Thorn kept his amused smile in place as Evie gloated about tricking Alex into admitting he used the security cameras in the tower to spy on her, but inside, he was seething with rage and a hint of apprehension.
The fact that he had been spying on Evie using the cameras in the Tower was bad enough.
It would have ended his career with Sloane Security Services and gotten him blacklisted from ever working security again.
However, from the sounds of things, he’d try to gain access to the cameras on the Sloane Consulting floors as well and given the nature of what they did up there, if he’d actually managed to, it could have been catastrophic.
The other potential problem, the major one that made Thorn’s stomach curl with fear, was that Sloane Security Services provided security systems and monitoring services to a number of businesses across New York City, and some of those were businesses Evie frequently visited.
If Alex was tracking her phone, he would know when she was in those businesses and could bring up the feeds, which would be a significant violation of the contracts and open them to potential lawsuits.
For a brief moment, Thorn fantasized about going down to Evie’s apartment and employing one or two of the many ways he knew to make someone disappear, but Evie’s voice broke through his thoughts.
“So, I gave him his thirty-day notice and came up here.” She smiled proudly. “And he’s gonna be lucky if Tommy doesn’t fire him immediately when he finds out he was using the cameras to spy on me.”
“Yes, he will be lucky,” Thorn murmured, knowing Alex would be fired and removed from the building within an hour of telling Tommy what he had done.
He tucked her hair behind her ear, smiling at her.
“I am happy that you are so happy, it’s good to see.
” He turned on the movie and settled in to watch it, trying to ignore the way his stomach was flipping with nerves.
Forty-five minutes later, he eased Evie off him and gently lay her down on the couch, tucking a cushion under her head and covering her with the blanket. He figured she was too drunk to wake up while he went to talk to Tommy, but he restarted the movie just in case and went down to the penthouse.
Knocking lightly on the bedroom door, he only had to wait a minute before Tommy stepped out, tying up his robe.
“We have a major problem.”
Chapter Fifty-Five: The Breach
Tommy listened as Thorn repeated what Evie had told him, his face going white. This was bad. It could be terrible, but right now, he was holding onto the hope that it was just bad. Taking a deep breath, he made a mental checklist of what he had to do.
The first step was revoking Alex’s access to everything, so he sent Thorn down to the Security Services Admin floor to do that and to get in touch with Vanessa and Harvey to inform them of the breach.
Tommy knew Vanessa was home with pneumonia, but he also knew she wouldn’t appreciate being left out of the loop.
Next, he needed to find out where Alex was. He couldn’t remove him from the apartment until the thirty-day notice ran out, since he’d signed a lease with Evie and she was the legal owner, but he could restrict his movements in the rest of the Tower.
Tommy hoped that having to be escorted in and out of the building, like a criminal, by security guards he used to supervise would humiliate Alex enough to leave quickly. But just in case it didn’t, he also had a backup plan.
Since he’d been watching Evie on the security cameras, Tommy was hoping she could get a temporary restraining order for stalking, so the NYPD would remove him.
He just wasn’t sure how that would work if Alex had been accessing client camera feeds to spy on her.
Some clients might see it as Tommy doing everything he could to have the perpetrator prosecuted, which would help him, but others wouldn’t like the publicity.
Hell, Tommy wasn’t sure he wanted it aired in public either.
Still, there was something to be said for transparency.
“HELIX,” he called as he walked back into the bedroom to get dressed. “Where’s Alex?”
“Mr. Turner is passed out on Evie’s living room floor,” she informed him, a slight hint of disdain in her voice. “He went out for a few hours and stumbled back in about twenty minutes ago.”
“He is still alive, right?” Tommy grumbled as he pulled on a sweater and slacks, waking up Nissa, who sat up in bed, pushing her hair off her face.
“I believe so,” the AI replied. “He occasionally lets out a grunting sound.”
“Keep an eye on him, and if he stops grunting, let me know,” Tommy told her.
He crossed the room to Nissa, sitting beside her and brushing his fingers over her cheek.
“Evie broke up with Alex earlier this evening. Apparently, he thought she was cheating on him with Aaron and started spying on her through the security cameras.” He explained the situation quickly.
“She’s passed out in Thorn’s apartment if you want to go up and sit with her, but she should be fine sleeping it off there. ”
“She got drunk? Is she okay?” Nissa raised an eyebrow and tossed the blankets off, ready to go up to her, making Tommy chuckle softly.
“It was a happy drunk, and you know how much she loves Serbian brandy and wine.”
Nissa blew out a relieved sigh. “She does become a lush when she gets into the Serbian alcohol.” She studied Tommy. “Can I do anything to help?”
“Thorn is revoking Alex’s access as we speak and will notify Vanessa and Harvey.
Evie and Aaron are now considered compromised, so they’ll have to be debriefed by Harvey, who’ll decide whether they need a protective detail until Alex is gone.
” The corners of his mouth tightened. “We’re going to have to suspend her and Aaron with pay until we do a complete audit of their computers. ”
Seeing Nissa’s dismayed expression, he nodded.
“I know. I know he was stalking her, but he thought she was cheating with Aaron. Until I can make sure Alex never got into anything, we can’t put Aaron in the field; his information might be compromised.
But since we’re already down a contractor, I’ll do his audit first.”
**********
Tommy spent the rest of the night working out what Alex had accessed.
He started with Evie’s phone but didn’t find anything on it, which wasn’t surprising; Evie was notoriously careful about granting access to her phone, even changing her PIN every two or three months.
He found evidence that Alex had attempted to gain access to the Consulting floor’s security cameras over a dozen times and had been tracking Evie’s car.
He sent Thorn down to find the tracker, and he returned twenty minutes later, laying it on the desk.
“It is an OBD-II tracking module.” He explained as Tommy picked up the small device and looked it over. “I use them a lot, so it was the first thing I looked for. You plug it into the OBD-II port, it logs the GPS data and transmits it over the cellular network.”