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Chapter 13

Q uinn fought the urge to pick up his phone and text Shane yet again. Shane said he was on his way back to the office. He could freaking wait patiently. When Shane announced that he had to run some errands shortly after they arrived and then he was meeting his dad for a last-minute lunch, Quinn had to admit that he was glad to have some time alone in the office. He enjoyed the thorough shower he’d shared with Shane, then the best night of sleep he’d had in years. He’d awakened to a blowjob. From there, it was a rush to get into work at a respectable time, but it was all done smoothly with no drama.

And that was the problem.

It all felt too easy. It was too easy to have their lives slide into each other, blending in so many little ways. But this was temporary. A bit of fun and laughs before Quinn’s gig with Merleau was over. And then it was back to his normal life over at Ward Security without Shane Stephens.

He needed to start remembering that.

Alone in the office, he could work on getting into Brenda Spring’s hidden email address as well as looking through all the results of the algorithms he’d been running behind the scenes over the past couple of days. His encounter with his mom had taken him away from work when he was usually just hitting his stride for the day.

And the digging finally paid off. Huge .

Without thinking, he picked up his phone and used the biometric to get past the security to double-check how long it had been since Shane had said that he was returning. He was dying to share the info that he’d gotten. They finally had a solid lead on who the hacker was as well as why the mayor was a target. They had been looking in the wrong area when it came to the protestors. This was definitely personal and now he had proof.

Before he could shoot off another text, or worse…hack the GPS in Shane’s phone and track his ass down, the outer door to the office opened. A few seconds later, he heard Shane’s voice as he greeted Ethan in the break room. Quinn put his phone down and pulled up the notes he’d made on the emails that he uncovered.

Shane walked through the door to his office, his eyes immediately going to Quinn who turned in his chair to face him. An eager grin spread across his lips that Quinn was sure he’d never get tired of seeing.

“Sorry it took me so long. Dad and I hadn’t met for lunch in a while. Just wanted to take the time to catch up a bit.”

Quinn nodded. He couldn’t begrudge Shane time with his dad, not after what he went through with his mom. Fuck, Quinn would give anything to have just one more day with his mom, the mom he grew up with, the mom before the accident. He loved her still, but the trauma she suffered, the pain she still suffered, killed him a little each time he saw her.

Walking around to his chair, Shane slid off his jacket and hung it on the back. The air had started out crisp that morning with frost already threatening to coat the grass and car windows. It was supposed to warm up as the day wore on, but Quinn hadn’t stepped away from his computer since he’d arrived.

“I got into the email account that Rose Lonneman gave us the other day.”

Shane shot him a grim look. “Hacked it, you mean?”

“What hacking? She used her kids’ names as her password. It took me two minutes. That’s not hacking. That’s called smart guessing.”

Shane rolled his eyes as he walked back around to the front of his desk. “Fine. What did you find?”

“Not much. A lot of the usual correspondence that you’d expect. Some generic family holiday planning emails with her mom and sister. A few emails with other friends like Rose. Lots of spam and coupons. Nothing really unusual.”

“Uh-huh.” Shane sat on the edge of his desk and wagged his fingers at Quinn. “Come on. Give me the rest. You wouldn’t have been texting me like a fiend if you just found coupons and notes from her mom. What do you have for me?”

Quinn lounged in his chair, trying so hard to look cool and collected, but he had a feeling that Shane wasn’t buying it for a second. “A secret email account.”

One eyebrow went up, but that was Shane’s only reaction. “Another email address? How did you find it?”

“She used the email address that Rose gave us as a backup account in case she got locked out of the secret account.”

“Did you get into it?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“We got it,” Quinn said and then laughed. “This has to be what the hacker was looking for. There aren’t a lot of emails saved in the inbox, but there are years and years of emails in the sent folder. No one remembers to clean that shit out. But Brenda Spring was having an affair with another woman.”

“Oh.” Shane sat up a little straighter. “That would look bad for his reelection chances, I guess. There are enough people out there who wouldn’t look too positively on the fact that he was cuckolded…by a woman.” He paused and frowned before looking at Quinn. “But his wife died roughly a year ago. He still looks like the doting father and grieving husband. The hacker has got to know that he’d probably lose only a few points. He’s got a solid lead in the polls; has for the past few months.”

“Not after it’s revealed that he physically and verbally abused his wife for years,” Quinn added.

“What?” Shane jumped to his feet and walked straight to Quinn’s computer, staring at the emails as if they would suddenly confess all their details.

“I’m still reading through all the emails—and there are years of them—but I’ve run across several threads where she admits that they argued and he beat her. He broke her nose at least once and nearly strangled her another time. The woman she was in love with was furious and begged her to leave him, threatening even to tell the cops, but Brenda wouldn’t leave. The mayor threatened to tell the world that she was a sexual deviant and she’d never be able to see her kids. She was terrified of him—sure he was going to kill her someday, but she was more afraid of losing her kids so she stayed with this fucking bastard.”

“Can you be sure that Brenda Spring actually wrote these emails?”

“With about eighty-nine percent certainty right now.” Quinn turned back to his computer and started switching through several screens. “I pulled some of the emails she sent from her regular personal account, like those to her mother and other friends, and compiled them to study sentence structures and word selection. I’ve run them against a few of the more disturbing emails in the secret account. They are about an eighty-nine percent match, but I’m running more comparison to see if we can get a match in the nineties, but I say we can be pretty damn certain.”

“Do we have a name?”

Quinn shook his head. “Not that I’ve found. They referred to each other as ‘my love’ or ‘dearest.’”

“That sucks. Of course, we can rule out her lover as the hacker,” Shane mumbled. He paced away from Quinn’s computer but didn’t go far, wandering aimlessly through what little open area there was, lost in thought.

“Why?”

“Well, if the hacker is the lover and she’s looking to expose his wife’s secret affair, then she’s already got all the emails. She could just send them all off to the press and sit back to wait for the fallout. Is there any way we can delete or protect the emails from the lover’s side as well? That way the hacker can’t get to them from Brenda’s account or her lover’s?”

Quinn’s mouth fell open. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing from Shane. It didn’t make any fucking sense. It was like he was ignoring everything that he’d told Shane. Or at least, it was like he was ignoring all the important parts so that he could do everything he could…to protect the mayor.

“Are you shitting me?” Quinn asked softly.

“No. We can protect this account from our end, but the hacker?—”

“Screw the hacker. I say we release these emails to the media ourselves. Let’s fry the fucking mayor.”

Shane stumbled back a step and stared at Quinn in horror. Quinn’s heart gave an uncomfortable lurch in his chest. He’d been so sure that Shane would do the right thing. It had to be that Shane didn’t understand the full depth of what the man had done. He hadn’t read dozens of painful emails where Brenda detailed the lengths she had to go to in order to hide her bruises and other injuries from her kids and the entire city. That this woman who was constantly in the public eye was screaming out on the inside for help, but no one knew but that one person who loved her. Shane didn’t understand how she was trapped in his loveless, controlling marriage. The only things that Brenda Spring wanted were her kids and the woman she’d obviously loved for years.

Gerald Spring needed to pay.

“We were hired by the mayor to protect him. We swore to protect his privacy. We are not helping the hacker.” Shane said each sentence slowly and clearly as if Quinn was the one who had lost his mind.

“You’ve been hired by a criminal. He beat his wife! He threatened her. You want that man to be mayor of our city? You want that man to keep his kids? How do we know he’s not going to start beating them now that she’s not there to stand between him and the kids? Or maybe he has already?”

“We don’t have any proof.”

“Those emails are damn good proof that he’s a lying sack of shit who hurt his wife. You can’t possibly want to stand by that.”

“I’m honor-bound by the confidentiality agreement I signed with my client. The same agreement that you signed when you first stepped in this office!” Shane pointed out, lifting his voice for the first time.

“Fuck that contract!”

“I can’t just say fuck it. Spring could sue and I would lose my license, possibly even go to jail. It would destroy the agency. Ethan and I would lose everything. Hollis would be out of a job.” Quinn started to turn away from Shane, but Shane grabbed his shoulder. “This is the real world. I’m not Rowe. I don’t have friends with deep pockets who can get me out of trouble when I cross the line. I’ve got to follow the rules or lose everything and ruin a hell of a lot of lives in the process.”

Quinn knocked Shane’s hand away and stood up. His stomach churned and a part of him wanted to curl up into a ball. He didn’t like confrontation. He didn’t do shouting and arguing. He didn’t do people if he could help it.

But he became a hacker because he believed he could help. He was ecstatic to join Ward Security because he was helping with his skills. Rowe didn’t ask too many questions on the how and that worked for him.

Somewhere along the way, he’d come to believe that Shane was the same. That he was a good guy out there trying to help.

“How can you do nothing?” Quinn demanded, his voice barely lifting over a whisper.

“I’m not saying that we do nothing.” Shane took several steps back, giving Quinn space as he dropped his hands down to his sides. “I’m just saying that we have to follow the rules. Revealing his personal information when we’ve agreed to keep it confidential is illegal. We have to tread carefully for now. Stick to the case that we’ve been assigned to.”

This can’t be real.

The thought kept repeating in his head. He’d been so sure of Shane. The man was so straight and narrow. He felt like the type to fight for the little guy. That was everything that Hollis Banner stood for. Would Hollis have come to work for a guy who would look the other way when a bastard was clearly guilty of domestic abuse?

A crushing weight was pressing down on his ribs and it was becoming hard to breathe. He needed to get out of there, get away from Shane. He needed to think. He couldn’t be wrong about this. Gerald Spring was a bad man. He beat and tormented his wife, threatened to keep her from her kids.

Spinning toward the desk, he grabbed his phone and keys. “I have to get out of here. Promised my mom I’d stop by to see her,” he mumbled.

“Quinn…”

“Read the emails,” he continued without even looking at Shane. He couldn’t look at him. Not without falling apart. Not without begging him to stand up and do the right thing for Brenda Spring. She deserved more than to have this horrible secret stay hidden. She deserved justice.

He made it as far as the door before Shane’s voice stopped him. “You can’t tell your boss about what you’ve read. You swore that you would keep everything about this case confidential.”

Quinn’s fist tightened around the doorknob and he clenched his teeth. One last dig. Shane didn’t trust him. That was fine. He had one too.

“Don’t bother trying to delete the emails if you find them too damaging for your client. I’ve already uploaded them to the cloud. I was afraid the hacker or someone else might sneak in and tamper with them.”

“Quinn—”

He didn’t wait to hear the rest. He hurried out of the office, slamming the door behind him. He had to think. How the hell could he have been so wrong about Shane?