Ellie came by at seven with a copy ofA Wizard of Earthseashe'd promised Lily, the paperback still tagged with a library hold slip. She planned to drop it off and drive home. Knox took one look at Bruiser's report and told everyone in the building to stay put. Bruiser's intel put the Bloodstone scoutsmoving tonight, a shift in their pattern. Knox trusted Bruiser's gut because Bruiser's gut had earned that.
So Ellie stayed. She put Lily to bed in the reinforced room upstairs, sat on the cot beside her and read to her until Lily fell asleep. I stood in the doorway watching the two of them and said nothing.
I can track her through the building. The cedar-vanilla of her scent cuts through the clubhouse air, through the leather and motor oil and the collective musk of orc and minotaur that fills every surface of this place. I pick her up the way I've picked her up for months now, at distances that shouldn't make sense. She's still upstairs. Her scent reads settled and warm, the softness she carries near Lily.
Knox looks up from Bruiser's report. "The records at your house."
"Home office. Filing cabinet, the backup drives, hardcopies of every financial document this club has generated since I took the patch. Tax filings, bank records, the real books." I push my glasses up. "If someone wanted to know how this club operates, my house is the place to start."
"We move them tomorrow."
"Should have moved them a month ago."
Knox holds my eyes. He doesn't argue because I'm right and we both know it.
I stare at the table, and think about Ellie's heartbeat upstairs, the way her pulse sits calm enough that I know she's close to sleep, curled on the cot beside my daughter in a building full of armed orcs.
At one-thirty, Bruiser pulls his headset off.
"Movement."
Knox stands. Every brother in the room orients toward Bruiser's station.
"Not here." Bruiser turns the laptop. The motion-triggered camera feed from my property fills the screen. Two figures, dark clothing, moving through the backyard. "They're at your house."
The security system triggers on my phone. Fifteen seconds of silence and then the kitchen window alarm, the back door sensor, the hallway motion detector firing in sequence. They're inside. They're in my house, walking through the rooms where I cook my daughter's meals and help her with homework and fall asleep in the reading chair.
Bruiser tracks them on the cameras. Two scouts. They go through the home office first. Drawers pulled open, files scattered, the backup drives ripped from the desk. Then the hallway. Then Lily's room.
I watch a stranger open my daughter's bedroom door on a grainy feed and my vision narrows to a point.
On the hallway camera, one of them shakes a spray can. Black paint across the wall in long strokes. The letters come clear even on the grainy feed:YOU CANNOT HIDE FOREVER. WE WILL COME IN FORCE.
Inside Lily's room, the second scout strips her bed. Pulls books off the shelves. Opens every drawer and dumps it. Her stuffed rabbit, the one Maren made before Lily arrived, lands facedown on the carpet. Then he tapes a print to her bedroom door. The resolution is too low to see it but I know what a surveillance photograph looks like.
They know where my daughter goes to school and they know what she looks like.
Then they move to my bedroom. The bed I shared with Maren. The nightstand where her photograph sits in a frame Lily picked out three years ago. The drawer where the wedding ring has sat since the day I took it off and couldn't put it back on.
On the feed, a scout picks up the frame. He looks at it. Then he smashes it against the wall. The frame shatters across the carpet.
I'm on my feet. The chair hits the floor behind me. Knox says my name and I don't really hear it because the only sound in my head is glass breaking on a four-inch screen.
My keys are in my hand. I'm through the front door of the clubhouse before anyone moves.
"Colt!" Knox's voice carries across the lot. "COLT!"
I'm on my bike with the engine running.
Behind me, Knox is already giving orders. I can hear him through the door I left open: "Finn, Bruiser—stay with the women and children. Nobody in or out. Rex, Garrett—move."
The gravel sprays behind me and I pull onto the access road doing sixty in the dark.
I make the drive in nine minutes. Should take fifteen. My hands are steady on the handlebars and my teeth are locked together and I don't think about what I'm going to do when I get there.
The back door hangs open. Glass from the kitchen window crunches under my boots. I can smell them—two orcs, clan markers in their scent, the sharp tang of adrenaline and the acrid burn of spray paint.
They're still inside.
