I regarded her. “You stole data off of my phone.”
“I didn’t!”
“The pictures,” I snarled at her.
Karen was breathing rapidly. “I was the perfect woman for you,” she insisted. “Meg threw you by the wayside. I was here for you, supporting you, and what did she do? Humiliate you in front of the town. I did this for you, to get rid of her.”
“What you did is illegal,” I snapped. “It comes with jail time.”
“No!” she begged. “I’ll give you the data back. I can’t. I’ll be disbarred. I’m supposed to take an in-house lawyer position!”
“Too late.”
“Please,” she said, grasping for my jacket. “I’ll do anything.”
I looked down at her. My brothers Josh and Eric, who had followed in my footsteps and become lawyers, appeared in the campaign office doorway.
“While what you did is unforgivable, our family does prefer to settle things quietly,” I said after listening to her plead. “You turn over everything to us—all your electronics, all your passwords, all your accounts, and sign an NDA and allow us to delete all data, we can forget this whole thing ever happened. Of course, we expect you to be out of town as soon as we have control over your electronics.”
She nodded.
“Oh, and Karen,” I said as she started crying. “If I find any piece of that information you stole from me online, in any way, shape, or form, I will make sure that you go to prison for a long time.”
She handed me her phone, laptop, and tablet. My brothers led her out to collect her electronics from her apartment.
I slumped in my chair.
“I can’t fucking believe you,” Garrett said.
“I didn’t do anything,” I reminded him through gritted teeth.
“You were careless,” Blade offered, opening Karen’s laptop.
“We don’t even know that Karen stole the photos from my phone,” I argued. “She and Meg lived in the same building; maybe she took them from her phone.”
“You better hope that’s the case,” Blade said, “and that you can prove it.” He typed in Karen’s password and hooked the phone up to another laptop.
“I’ll process this data and see where it all came from,” he said. “It will take me a while. Also, I’m adding her bank accounts to the monitoring system I developed, just to make sure that she didn’t sell anything.”
My phone rang.
“It’s Crawford.”
“Holy shit!” I put the phone on speaker. My brothers all crowded around. “Where are you?”
There was the sound of yelling in the background.
“Crawford?” I said.
“Just wanted to give you a heads-up,” Crawford said, voice slightly staticky through the line, “that we just raided the last of the smaller compounds. There is no sign of Dad. Right now we have everything locked down, but I need Blade to log in and access their systems here.”
“Our sisters?” I asked urgently.
“No sign of them,” Crawford said, “but we’re going after the next compound soon. I expect they are at the main compound. I hope they’re at the main compound.”
“Just plug in the USB stick I gave you,” Blade said, typing on his laptop. Weston sat behind his own computer to log into whatever device he and Blade had given to Crawford.
“Already did. You have access?” Remy asked.
