He pulls back reluctantly. “I have to go, but we’ll talk later. We can talk all night tomorrow if you want.”
Tomorrow. Beau’s “day.”
Beau is tense and anxious, and I can’t help but want to ease his worry.
“If that’s what you’re into,” I joke, weakly, and he grins crookedly.
“You going to head up to bed now?”
Hesitating for only a moment, I say, “I’ll go upstairs.”
Relief touches his smile. Giving me one last kiss, he leaves me alone, just like the others.
A small while later, my eyes drift to the carnage at the table. To my lovely, terrible rage. Then, quiet as the mouse they believe I am, I creep out of the dining room and up the stairs.
Enough is enough. I need answers. I need the full truth if I’m going to stay. For my own sake, I can’t accept anything less.
Beau doesn’t see me as well as he thinks.
Chapter 24
Dominic
SURVIVAL TIP #146
People are your biggest weakness.
None more than yourself.
T his is the last damn thing we need. Multiple screens take up two walls of the surveillance room—it took us months to adapt the room from Jasper’s study. The server power and capacity needed to store a week’s worth of footage from thirty-seven cameras is no joke. Fortunately for us, between Jaykob’s previous work as a mechanic, the military tech that was sitting around for the taking, and our extensive Ranger comms and equipment training, we managed to rig it up.
In the large, center screen, four men, armed to their pits, creep through the forest. The camera tracks their movement steadily until they move out of range. They have the same rangy, tanned look of the men we tangled with the other day. That in itself wouldn’t be enough, but . . .
“Play it again.”
Jasper taps a few buttons, and the men creep forward again.
“There.” The figures pause. “Right hand. Tattoo. The others had the same mark, like a coiled snake.”
Grim understanding lines my men’s faces and something inside me settles, just a fraction. This isn’t the place for the petty squabbles we’ve been descending into lately. This shit is a problem. A big one. And they’ll face it like soldiers.
Beau is taking longer than I’d like, but I trust him to deal with the girl. Despite his crush, he’ll follow orders. He’s smarter than me. He’s always been smarter than me.
He won’t make the same mistake I did.
“How did we miss this?” Lucky asks seriously, studying the screen. “We have cameras all through these woods. They’re still meant to be five days south, right? How are they now a day and a half north of us? Could they be leftovers from the ones we scattered when Eden was with us?”
“I didn’t miss this,” Jasper replies with a hint of snap to his tone. “They didn’t come from the south. That encampment is still there—I’ve been watching the cameras around them the most. None of the motion cameras were set off until now. I don’t know how they could make it around the woods near us without being caught by our sensors. Not unless they knew where they were.”
It’s only knowing him as well as I do that I can see the worry in the tightness of his jaw. The slight defensiveness. He’s been distracted these last few days. We all have.
And there’s only one reason why.
Lucky turns to regard Jasper, with surprising evenness for him, maybe even a hint of chill. He doesn’t even blush. “I didn’t say you missed anything. I’m just wondering how they did it. Are we going to suddenly have more guys crawling up our ass?”
Jasper’s eyes narrow, but I speak up before he can cut into Lucky. This is not the fucking time. Soldiers. We’re meant to be soldiers.
“He’s right,” I say seriously, funneling my irritation into the problem, the solution. One of us needs to keep our head. “Pull up the motion cameras—we have two more in the north region. Then pull up four of the closest static cameras on screens four to seven.”
Thin lipped, Jasper nods once and bends over the keyboard. The screens around us flicker to life. The two other motion cameras peer into silent greenery. Leaves flicker in the light breeze, but that’s not enough to set off the sensors.
Of the four static cameras, only one screen shows an image.
The cameras need a decent amount of maintenance—about half our trips are just to keep them functioning and free of wildlife—so it’s not that unusual for one to go down every now and then.
But not three.
At least they’re set up to record remotely, so we should still have the data up until the point they broke down. Or were cut off.
Jaykob grunts a curse and tension bunches Jasper’s shoulders. “They were up this morning. I only paused long enough for one game of chess. One. But I was still catching up on footage from the night before.”
Frustration ticks over me, but I force it down, reminding myself that he wasn’t trained for this. He’s only one man and we have over thirty cameras in operation. There’s no way he can monitor them all twenty-four seven—his focus was on the main threat to the south, and even keeping up with that seems to have run him down to exhaustion. Damn it, I wish he’d spoken up sooner.
“Go back three days,” I order.
A moment later, all screens show an image. It takes some fiddling, but we manage to pinpoint when the cameras cut out.
First the northernmost, then the other two, each one progressively closer to Bristlebrook. There are no shots of any of the men, the cameras simply cut out, but in the footage from the second camera, just before it shuts off, there are four tall shadows cast against the small patch of grass.
These men are coming from the north. Not the south. Four men, connected with the group that had chased Eden. Connected with the men Beau and I buried two days later.
But how do they know about our cameras?
“Pull up the southern cameras.”
Beau enters the room without knocking and no one flinches. There’s no way anyone can get in this room without the code— getting past the wall panel in the bookcase is tricky enough. I raise a brow, and he gives me a small nod, though the cool distance in his eyes has something stinging my gut. Our argument the other day still isn’t sitting right with me.
But he’s asking too much.
I cut my eyes back to the center screen as it changes to a view of a small stream. At the rightmost side of the frame, just in view, is the edge of a large camp. Two men are visible, facing away from the stream and into the woods, talking and laughing raucously. I can make out the snake tattoo on the rightmost man’s hand where he’s turned toward the camera. There’s no sound, but I would lay money that there are more of them in that camp.
“I’ve been monitoring this group since we last spoke. They haven’t moved. They seem to spend most of their time in their camp, but every now and then they duck out like this,” Jasper says.
“Could they be leaving the camp without this camera catching them?” Beau asks, peering at the screen with a slight frown.
“They could,” Jasper admits. “However, the cameras on five and seven would likely catch them if they were to move toward Bristlebrook. And one of the cameras on two, four, or six would likely catch them if they were to move north. There has been no sign of any activity on any of these cameras. It’s impossible to know for sure, of course, but we placed them carefully.