Melted: A MaxTul AU story

Fifty-Four: Swapping Partners

Author's Note: You may want to reread chapter 53 if you are reading this when it is first published (June 7, 2021). It isn't substantially changed, but I always reread the previous paragraph when drafting the next one, and I noticed that I had published a draft version of chapter 53 which was missing the first paragraph and also has some other items missing. The substance of chapter is the same, but final version makes more sense and sets up Plustor's presence more clearly.

**

"You did what?" Prin was outraged.

The three men were sitting in a conference room in the hospital. Max had asked one of the nurses if there was a room where they could meet to discuss some business, and one of the staff had led them to it. Max had just told the other two men that he had told Ann to leave the device where it was.

He had already talked to her and the other team members about what to do if they found tracking devices or any new spyware. They were supposed to report it first and then wait. Both he and Tik agreed that removing listening and tracking devices weren't always the best move, especially if they wanted the person to have control of the situation. Prin had been in on that conversation, but he clearly forgot this since the person targeted this time was Ann.

"How can you put her in danger like that?" He stared in anger at Max. Tul looked at Prin with worry, but Max was completely nonplussed.

"Tell Ann that, Prin," he said, looking at his phone to pull something up. "She is the one who contacted me and told me she was leaving it. She knew she has been followed for a bit and was actually worried that she had led whoever was following her to Tul last night. That's the reason why she contacted me."

"What?" This time it was both Prin and Tul reacting.

Max slid his phone over to Prin who could see from the message from Ann that Max was telling the truth.

"Yes. She thinks someone saw her on the terrace with you, Tul, last night, but she didn't think about it again until she checked her car before going home. She stayed to finish some work even after we left. Her niece is spending the night at a friend's house, so she was using the opportunity to work extra hours. When she went to her car, she checked and saw the device. It was new. It hadn't been there when she came to work in the morning. It made her think of the shadowed figure on the terrace she had noticed earlier."

Both Tul and Prin sat back thinking about the new details.

"What do you think this is about, Max?" Tul asked. He noticed that Max glanced at Prin first before speaking. Prin didn't notice. He was busy imagining someone putting a tracking device on Ann's car.

"I have some suspicions, but I'm going to wait some more to see how things play out. No one has approached Ann or her niece. The people watching your team seem to be doing just that watching."

What Max didn't tell the two men in front of him was that he had already had a meeting with Ann and Pongpat about the spying. The two of them had asked to talk to him while he was already at the company over the last three days. They wanted to talk about their concerns about the security of the onsite lab and their product samples. The meeting with Sinjai Hongtai was in fourteen business days, and they were anxious. Things were going smoothly, but if any of those samples were compromised, the deal would be over.

Max decided not to go into that here. Instead he said, "We agreed not to remove such devices for the same reason we are still letting Plustor think that Tul has given up on looking for his mother—the less the enemy knows about what we know the better. Even Ann said she'd rather some random person was following her than following us, and she doesn't even know what is going on here."