The Revenge by Tijan

“Stop hurting them. Do what’s right, for them.”

Then, turning, grabbing Matt’s arm, I pushed him out of the building. He resisted, but I dug in. We were done. Show was over. And after a slight pushing match, he yielded. He led the rest of the way. Fitz was ahead of us, Drake right behind us, and the car pulled up.

Once we stepped outside, a guy was coming at us fast. Really fast.

It was Tony.

He bypassed us, and I knew that was the instant he handed the phone off to Matt. But it was so fast, so smooth, so good that I never saw it. I wouldn’t see it until we were back at the house and Matt came to my room. He knocked, came inside, and brandished the phone.

There was a wicked grin on his face, and he tossed the phone on the bed. “Do your thing.”

Right.

Now it was my turn.





TWENTY-SEVEN

Bailey


Quinn’s phone was a joke. It was like she didn’t realize who she had been married to, who she tried to have kidnapped, and whose son came out of her birth canal. Seriously. Not a clue. I hacked into her phone within thirty seconds. She used the most generic password ever. 0000. She needed to update to the one that uses her thumbprint instead. That would’ve been more of a challenge, but okay then.

I was in. And I was snooping. Well, first I turned off the locater so it couldn’t be tracked. When we came up with this plan, the intention was to get in the phone, clone it, upload some spyware, and hand it back. That all got usurped because I pushed Matt out the doors. So yeah, that was my bad, but we could still do this.

I think.

Maybe not.

Probably not.

Crap.

She was going to get a new phone, and we’d have to do it all over again.

So maybe I didn’t need to worry about spyware, but for some reason I was still uploading it. I was in the middle of it, when suddenly the phone lit up. It was an unknown number, and then it suddenly stopped.

The phone froze in place.

Then lit up.

Then not. The screen went black.

Lit up again.

And—what was happening?

It was being downloaded.

Holy crap. Holy crap!

She was getting it cloned remotely.

My spyware was half downloaded.

I lunged off the bed, grabbed a cord, and plugged it into my computer. From there, I tried to get into the basic coding for the phone itself. The phone was ancient and Quinn was a moron for not updating it in years, but I could work with that code.

Whoever or whatever program was uploading the data, it was doing it fast. Quinn must’ve gone right to a phone store, and they were good. I had disconnected it from Wi-Fi, too, so they were using a different connection. I wanted to know what they were using, but I could analyze everything later. First, I pulled up my spyware and finished the code.

Once it was done, I looked over.

The phone was still being cloned.

Then, another flash on the screen.

The screen went black, and I waited, holding my breath.

It came back up, and I whooshed a whole breath of relief. Quinn’s new phone had my program on there, so I turned to my computer and disconnected from her old phone. I pulled up a new screen, searched, clicked on my program, and sat back.

I had a live feed into her phone, and she was going through it, or someone else was—fast, too. They were searching to see what was changed.

They could find my program if they looked hard enough, but I was hoping that when they saw nothing added or deleted or changed, they would think nothing happened.

One app was opened. Two. Three. They went through fifteen of her apps before the screen stopped.

The text messages were pulled up.

She was texting someone.

Who was she texting?

A number came up. She typed:

Quinn: I got my new phone. You can send the virus to the old one.

Quinn: Good try, Bailey. Better luck next time. *middle finger emoji*

Oh. Yeah. Hadn’t thought that through, but made sense she’d figure it out.

Her old phone’s screen lit up again, and there it was. I saw the virus being uploaded. Whoever was on the other end hit the final button and the phone went dead. RIP Quinn’s old phone, because that sucker was dunzo.

I already had everything backed up on an external drive.

Matt and I would have to have a ceremony later to send off Quinn’s phone, but until then, I opened another window and pulled up my program again. This time, I clicked on the ghost program and let it go. Anything new she did on her phone would be downloaded here, and that would be sent to the same external hard drive that I had set up with her old phone’s data. Minimizing that window, I pulled up her old data and started going through it.

A hard knock came first, before the door was shoved open. “Yo!” Matt strolled in, a bag of chips in hand, and he popped a bunch in his mouth. “What’s happening, hot stuff?”

I wrinkled my nose. “Don’t quote pickup lines to your sister.”

He blinked at me, blankly.

He didn’t know.

“That quote is a pickup line from a movie.”

A slow grin on his face. He laughed, putting more chips in his mouth. “It’s like second nature to me. I don’t even think about them anymore.” He turned to the computer and nudged my shoulder. “What have you learned?”

“That she got in touch with someone who knows phones, right away. They cloned her old phone remotely and then killed it.”