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“Very well,” he conceded with a sigh. “I’ll have someone bring it up.”
Ethan leaned back in his chair, his eyes never straying from Grayson. The tension in the room was palpable, every tick of the grandfather clock echoing through the vast sitting room like a drumbeat. Rachel couldn’t help but notice the opulence surrounding them—the gold-framed paintings, the crystal decanters, the thick Persian rugs—and she wondered how many secrets lay hidden within these gilded walls.
Grayson just glared right back at her as if he were issuing a challenge, refusing to be intimidated.
Rachel didn’t really care.
She’d stared down grizzly bears before.
She’d hunted thousand-pound monsters.
Eventually, every predator had a crack—a weakness to exploit.
She just had to find it. And the security footage might be the best lead they had.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
“Here we are,” a young assistant announced as he entered the sitting room where the three of them waited in cold, stony silence. The assistant was holding a laptop. He placed it on the coffee table before them, and Rachel couldn’t help but notice the tremble in his hands. “The footage is organized by date and time.”
“Thank you,” Rachel murmured, opening the screen.
She could feel Jefferson watching her. Could feel Ethan shifting side to side behind her where he paced on the Persian rug.
She focused on the screen, though, refusing distraction.
“Login details?” she muttered.
Jefferson just said, “Pass123.”
“Nice,” Ethan replied.
Rachel just entered the information, her fingers flying across the keyboard as she navigated through the footage files.
“Start with the days leading up to the discovery of the bodies,” Ethan suggested, his focus locked on the screen.
Rachel nodded, her eyes scanning the files. She found the ones she needed and clicked on the first video. The footage was grainy, but she could make out the gate in the darkness.
“Nothing,” Rachel said. She tapped the arrow keys, cycling through the footage.
Both of them could feel their unwilling host growing more and more irritated with them.
But Rachel didn’t look in Grayson’s direction, preferring to keep her eyes glued to the screen.
“Wait,” Ethan whispered suddenly, freezing a frame on the screen. “Go back a few seconds.”
Rachel complied, rewinding the footage to reveal a figure approaching one of the entrances. As they watched, the shadowy form slipped into the darkness beyond the camera’s reach, vanishing into the night.
“Who is that?” Rachel asked, her pulse quickening.
“Hard to say,” Ethan admitted, his brow furrowed in concentration.
They paused the footage, trying to make out the figure moving in the dark.
Grayson leaned in, frowning. “That’s odd,” he said.
“What?”
“The time. No one should have been onsite at two a.m.”
