Page 185 of The Darkest Chase

We don’t have time, I’d snarled. Don’t you understand? They’re going to figure out they’ve been made, and you know what happens next. Everything goes underground. We might not get another lead for years. We have to move now, before it all goes to waste.

I’ll try, Micah. That’s all I can promise you. I’ll make something happen if I can.

I almost wonder if Arrendell money hasn’t bought off the DEA.

Just enough for them to throw the investigation and muddy the waters. It’s entirely possible, but it’s just as likely that this is how things are. All because some fucks behind a desk needed to cross their T’s.

Bureaucratic red tape. A criminal’s best friend.

It’s one of the frustrating things about working with the law.

You fucking know what someone’s doing, but until you get ironclad proof that will hold up in court and also preserve the chain of evidence without a single flaw, everything you know is useless.

Anyone you arrest will wind up back on the street in under twenty-four hours, now well-informed on your efforts so they can just hide that much better.

Also, well aware of who they should target to keep their secrets.

Which is why I’m creeping through the woods in the middle of the night again—only this time I’ve got a backpack full of surveillance equipment. I had to drive to Raleigh to get a few missing pieces, partly because Redhaven’s small shops don’t stock that kind of thing, and partly because I didn’t want it getting back to anyone in town.

I have to make this work.

I have to do this.

I have to make something happen, no matter how much the paper pushers at the DEA sleep.

Because if I don’t get Xavier behind bars?

There’s no telling what he’ll do if he figures out Talia took that camera from his desk.

I have to protect her, even if I can’t shield her heart.

They’re still at the last site I staked out. I’ve settled into a small hunting blind I built earlier today, building up brush to mask the blinking lights from the camera and audio devices.

Right now, it’s only the Jacobins, and nothing I’m capturing is any good.

They’re eerily silent, the patriarch and matriarch absent, though their well-oiled machine needs no communication to swing into motion.

The DEA’s not going to come down here for a thirty-second clip of some hillfolk making moonshine. They’re going to tell me I’m crazy.

And maybe I am.

I’m doubting like I never have.

After screwing everything up with Talia, indulging my selfish whims and then breaking her just because I couldn’t resist her, I don’t know who the fuck I am anymore.

I don’t know if this was worth it.

If this is even anything at all, when maybe I’ve been wrong this whole time, chasing down farmers in overalls for a few jars of two hundred proof rotgut that I’d swear is the cocaine that killed my brother.

No. I put the groundwork in.

Years of investigation, cornering every low-level drug mule I could find, pressing them for intel, cutting deals until someone finally pointed me to the tip of the spear and I convinced my department there was something worth pursuing.

Something that would justify a multi-year undercover surveillance op. The evidence is there.

I’m not psycho.

I’m just waiting for my moment.

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