Page 31 of Black Hearts

10

Celeste

Raisinga pair of binoculars Alex bought for me last week, I scanned the horizon and then lowered them to the Circle mansion grounds in the distance.

I was tucked in a little nook Alex had helped me fashion on a long-dead fallen tree covered by thick bushes speckled with snowflakes. My ass fit perfectly on a chunky branch that stuck through the bushes from the log, and if I tucked my legs up, I vanished right back into the leaves.

I was dressed in dark stretch jeans, a thick olive green jacket with a hood, matching beanie, and a scarf loosely wrapped around the bottom of my face. Alex said that was what usually gave people away when they were trying to hide—the flash of skin from not covering their faces up, which immediately drew the eye. But like this, I was essentially invisible, even if someone came all the way out here to the back fence.

From my spot, I had a clear view of the back of the mansion, provided I used the binoculars which allowed me to see things clearly from half a mile away. I was behind the back fence of the property—electric, of course—well away from the house and its snowy surrounds, but the land sloped downward from here quite a bit. Not at a drastic angle, just a little drop, but it was enough for me to be able to sit here in my nook with a perfect view of the grounds and house so I could spy like a secret agent.

That was how I kept myself calm during our daily stakeout sessions. I pretended it was just an exciting adventure; all part of an over-the-top thriller movie I was starring in. No real consequences.

But then I’d notice someone arrive at the mansion, and the excitement would vanish. Even though I couldn’t see the front of the house from here, I could see the driveway in the distance and therefore any cars meandering down it, bringing in various guys for a few hours at a time. When that happened, I’d go hurtling right back to reality, heart thudding painfully, and that painful prickle of nerve pain would return to my shoulders and spine.

This was no fictional thriller movie. This was real.

Kids and teens were being abused in that house right now, right as I sat here all warm and safe and cozy. The unfairness and cruelty of it made me feel nauseated. Adults were being abused, too, seeing as the ex-sex slaves were forced to work as maids once they were ‘too old’.

I wanted to run down there with guns blazing, literally, so Alex and I could get rid of all the guards along with whichever Circle members were visiting at the time. But I knew we couldn’t. Aside from the risk, we needed to wait until every single member and guard was present at the mansion.

If we killed just a few of them now, the rest would get spooked and never come back here. They’d blow this place up and find a new den of iniquity, and we’d be back at square one, trying to hunt them down with nothing to go on.

And so, as much as it pained me, we had to wait until the time was right.

I lowered the binoculars and made a note about the morning guard shift changing time on the little pad I kept with me in my bushy alcove. A chill wind was blowing through the area now. I shivered and pulled my hood farther over my head. Even though we were approaching the end of November and almost everything was swathed in snow, it had actually been pretty warm earlier. The sun had been out, glinting on the featureless carpet of white, and I’d been pretty damn cozy and comfy in my little nook.

Now I just wanted to go home and have a hot shower. Not that I could go home—Alex and I were still staying in a series of crappy cash motels, hiding out from the real world.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up a second later. Behind me, on the nature reserve that the property backed onto, someone was approaching. I knew because I’d put several sticks all around the area behind me so that I’d hear the crunching of footfall nearby.

Alex had given me a gun to use for protection when he was off surveilling other areas. That should make me feel safer, but the thought of anyone finding me out here still filled me with dread. There would be questions, a lot of them, and I wasn’t prepared to answer them right now.

“Celeste? You okay?”

I poked my head out to see Alex standing in front of the dense thicket behind me. I breathed a deep sigh of relief. “God, you almost gave me a heart attack,” I said. “I thought we were staying out here longer, so I figured you were just some random hiker or something. I was trying to think of a way to explain exactly why I’m hiding in a bush with all this spy gear.” I flashed him a rueful grin.

He extended a hand to help me out the back of my nook, then kissed me on the forehead. His lips were warm and tender. “Sorry, beautiful. Didn’t mean to scare you. But it’s getting colder, and I think we have everything we can get anyway. Figured we’d head back into the city and start picking up the rest of what we need.”

“Have you taken down the cameras?”

He nodded. “Got them all. Don’t worry, no one spotted me.”

We’d been staking the place out for a week now. As well as doing our own spying and note-taking from our hiding spots in the distance, Alex had set up small, high-res cameras around the perimeter that could zoom in and record all activity at the mansion. Obviously it only showed us what went on outside, just like our binoculars, but it allowed us to discover important details that we wouldn’t otherwise know.

For example, the footage from four days ago showed us how heavily the place was rigged with alarms. A bird had accidentally flown into an upper story window at dawn, and an alarm was immediately triggered, sending guards into a panic as they frantically assessed the situation. The bird was okay, just dazed (it flew off a few minutes later), but we figured from that footage that every single window had some sort of sensor on them. If anything touched them, it would trigger the alarm and therefore the guards. We probably wouldn’t have known that without the cameras.

“Are you ready to go?” Alex asked, brushing some snowy leaves off the left shoulder of my jacket. “Or did you want to stay and watch for longer?”

I shook my head. “No, I think you’re right. We’ve got things sorted. As much as we can, anyway.”

In our stakeout period, we’d amassed a lot of information on the mansion and its expansive surrounds. The old-fashioned red-brick building was probably around fifty thousand square feet, and the property looked to be about a hundred acres.

Beyond the electric fence surrounding the perimeter, it was bounded by thick forest from a nature reserve, affording the place a lot of privacy. There were also large clumps of trees throughout the land itself. They could come in handy as hiding places when we eventually sneaked in.

On the front side of the land, there was a long driveway lined with forest-green arborvitae. The driveway widened near the mansion, circling around the large fountain, and there was a place for parking just beyond that to the right of the house, with enough space to fit at least fifty cars.

At the back of the mansion, there was a greenhouse attached to part of it (we already knew that from Dr. Fitzgibbons, but it was still useful to know exactly where it was). The greenhouse had an outside door at the back of it, and behind that there was a large walled garden. Past that was the slope heading up the back of the property, and I assumed the parts without trees were covered with lush grass when it wasn’t snowing.

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