I clocked Ronan watching her from across the room.
I clocked her not minding.
And I kept my mouth shut and ate, and let the three of them go on thinking I hadn't seen a thing.
20
RONAN
I found it at half eleven at night, and I almost didn't.
The house had gone quiet an hour before. Sienna up first, Tiernan not long after, Cormac behind his own door doing whatever Cormac does at that hour. I was in the study chasing the thread Tiernan had pulled that afternoon, trying to trace where the laundered money went after the transactions stopped. That was what I meant to be doing.
What caught me was the security log.
Cormac runs a sweep every evening without fail. The perimeter, the gates, the cameras, the check that's been this family's practice since before I was old enough to understand why. I pulled it up out of habit, meaning to glance at it and move on.
I didn't move on.
Camera four. The northeast corner, where the old stone wall meets the newer iron fencing we put in years ago. Eleven forty-seven, two nights back. A shadow the motion sensor had flagged and auto-cleared as probable wildlife. Fox or deer, the algorithm decided, going by the movement.
The algorithm was wrong.
I pulled the raw footage, ran it through Cormac's enhancement, and watched it three times before I was certain.
A person.
Standing at the northeast wall in the dark. Not moving. Facing the house. Four minutes and thirty-two seconds. Then gone.
Not a fox. Not a deer. Someone who knew where our cameras were. Who knew how to stand at the edge of a blind spot. Who knew exactly how long they could hold there before the stillness stopped reading as wildlife and started reading as a man.
Someone watching the house.
Someone who knew we had her.
I sat with the footage paused on the shape at the wall and breathed through the specific cold of a man who'd spent his life preparing for a thing and had it arrive anyway.
Then I went to get Cormac.
He was in his room, awake, reading. He took one look at my face, set the book down, and stood without being asked.
"Show me," he said.
I showed him. He watched it twice, saying nothing, his attention on the screen with the focused quality that meant he was working it rather than reacting to it. Weighing rather than feeling.
"Height, build," he said. "Experienced. They know the camera placement."
"Yes."
"Which means they've had eyes on this property before. Not just now. Before she arrived."
"Yes."
"They've been watching. Waiting to see if we found her." A beat. "And now they know we have."
The fire had burned low. Outside the window the Dunraven night was the same as ever and completely changed. The samedark. The same sea. But with something in it now that hadn't been there before, the plain fact of someone out there who knew.
"We need to tell her," I said.
