Page 149 of What We Become

The new system has six exterior cameras, thermal detection, motion sensors, and enough redundancies to monitor a small military installation. Odin’s people installed the whole thing while we were at the cabin, and I checked every line of code when we got home because trusting someone else’s security work feels like letting a stranger choose my porn password.

Everything is working.

That’s the problem.

I pull the footage from six thirty, when Holden left, and run all six cameras side by side. His car backs out of the driveway. The garage closes. The house sits in the soft morning light with nothing moving except the trees and one determined bird attempting to murder its reflection in the front window.

At seven fourteen, Micah leaves through the garage. Eleven eleven, Knox walks Sage out, and they leave in his truck.

Then nothing.

No delivery van. No person walking up the drive. No movement beside the house. Nobody approaches the front door, the back door, or the garage.

I increase the playback speed.

The house remains stubbornly empty.

“What do the door sensors say?” Holden asks.

“Nothing opened while Eli was in the shower. Front door, back door, and garage all stayed sealed.”

“Windows?”

“Same. No movement.”

“How is that possible?” Sage asks.

“It isn’t.”

Her mouth tightens. “Very comforting.”

“I’m working on my bedside manner.”

“Work faster.”

I glance at her, and she gives me a little smirk. If it’s even possible, I love her even more for it.

Going back to the tablet, I scrub through the footage again, this time watching the raw file information instead of the pictures. No missing frames. No obvious loops. No timestamp jumps. The files are intact and irritatingly pristine.

It looks like nobody came near the house.

But someone still changed the flowers.

Holden lifts a print from the rim of the vase and studies it beneath the kitchen light.

“Partial,” he says. “Too small to run cleanly, and it could belong to any of us.”

“Bag it anyway.”

He gives me a pointed look. “I know how evidence works.”

“Yeah. And I know how cop buddy dramas work. It’s all about the banter.”

He glares at me, then slides the vase across now that he’s finished with it. I lift one of the flowers by the stem. The cut is sharp and diagonal, every stalk trimmed to the same length. There are no ragged edges, leaves, or dirt. Whoever handled these knew how to prepare an arrangement.

“Professional,” I say.

“You can tell that from the stems?” Eli asks.