Page 59 of Guarded from Treachery

At first, all I see is a glint of light as the moonlight hits it, a smooth, shiny surface instead of painted wood.

Then I look closer.

And my stomach turns to lead. Nausea rises in my throat.

It’s a camera.

Tucked into a crack in the molding along the ceiling, just across from the queen-sized bed.

My instinct is to rip it out, fling it away, an instinctive denial of what I’m seeing.

A camera. Aimed at the bed. Where Isla slept.

A camera in the bedroom. Where she changed. Where she wouldn’t have thought twice of walking around naked.

Fuck.

Rage bubbles up but I tamp it down.

My molars nearly shatter from holding in my howl of anger.

My Isla. Watched without her knowledge. At her most vulnerable.

Fuck.

But I can’t lose it. I never let my emotions control me in the Army or with my work for Blade and Arrow, and I’m not starting now. So I take a deep breath to steady myself and continue searching the room, bracing myself for what I might find.

Less than a minute later, I’ve found two more cameras. One in the molding across the room, pointed at the dresser. And a second in the bathroom, with a full view of the shower.

It’s a struggle to keep from punching something. Letting out this fury somehow.

But that’s not why I’m here. I need to figure out how these cameras connect to everything else—the pregnancy and the attempted abductions. I need to know who else is behind this, because it can’t be just Remington, considering he’s dead.

Before I set to work hacking into the camera feeds—they weren’t a part of the main security system network, which means they’re running on a separate one—I send a quick message to Dante and Erik.

Found cameras in here. Three in her old bedroom. Trying to access the feeds now.

Several seconds later, my phone vibrates silently with Dante’s response.

Nothing in the main house yet. Still looking.

Once I close the messaging app, I open my phone’s browser and get to work. It’s a pretty easy job, which is fortunate because I can do it without much thought. While half my brain is focused on accessing the local network the cameras are linked to, the other half is occupied by all the terrible things I may find.

In my work for Blade and Arrow, I’ve seen plenty of things on my computer I wish I hadn’t. Violence. Revenge porn. Lucy’s terrible captivity.

But this is Isla. The woman I’m half in love with already. And if I have to watch someone hurting her, touching her…

No. Focus.

As I get closer to breaking into the network, I force all the extraneous thoughts out. I take the awful thoughts ricocheting in my head and shove them down deep to be dealt with later.

And then, as I stand in the corner of the bedroom, out of the moonlight and shrouded by shadows, I find what I’m looking for.

Or at least, what I know Ineedto find.

A folder full of files. Videos. Hundreds of them.

Dating back from before Isla moved in until a few weeks before she left. As I scan through the dates, I realize the last one was the day before Remington’s heart attack.

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