Page 35 of Elven Prince

“Look,” Rick chimed in. “It’s all right here in front of us—”

“Notallof it!” Maxwell snapped.

“Yeah, well, this is all we’ve got, okay? See? Here’s the footage. Shot of Archie getting up into the truck this morning. He left at 10:32 a.m. Everything was fine. Then we’ve got nothing for almost an hour. No movement, no signal interference messing with the feed. Cameras two, three, and five all caught the same thing. A whole lot of nothing.

“Then here, at 11:18 a.m., there’s the truck pulling back into the garage. Parked just like it’s supposed to be parked. Brand-new delivery inside. No ambush. No struggle. Look.”

The wild clacking of fingers flying across a keyboard filled the room just as Rebecca reached the open doorway.

Rick rolled sideways in his office chair to make room, pointing at all three large monitors on the desk in front of him. “Camera two has a clear view of the vehicle, yeah? The engine dies, the lights cut off, the door opens, and nothing. See for yourself. You want me to rewind it? Every other feed shows the same thing.”

The blackhorn stabbed the keyboard rhythmically with one finger while the angles of surveillance footage inside the garage switched from one to the next. “All of them show a clear view of the semi inside the garageandthat open door. Nothing. As in the door opens, and there isn’t even anyoneinside—”

“Then someone fucked with the footage,” Maxwell snarled.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought too at first,” Rick added. “But look. All the time stamps line up. There’s no discrepancy in any of them, down to the millisecond. Okay, we’ve got shadows moving with the light over the course of the morning. Right there, a few leaves blow in. Then here come Knox and Titus in the Honda.

“This is all real time, boss. Nobody touched the cameras. I verified and authenticated the footage from every single one.”

“I double-checked his work.” Whit swiveled away from his workstation to face Maxwell. “Twice.”

“So…” One of their newest members—Adam, if Rebecca remembered correctly—stuck a finger in the air and glanced around the room. “We call that triple-checking then, right?”

Maxwell’s low growl overpowered the constant background hum of the office’s private servers and tech equipment keeping all the compound’s systems running smoothly. Except for this little hiccup.

Whit stared at the new guy with wide eyes, as if he didn’t dare offer more of a warning than that.

Rick also stared at the dwarf, but he also chanced an agonizingly slow shake of his head to hopefully get the message across.

The new guy remained dangerously oblivious.

“What?” He spread his arms. “I mean, that’s what we call it, right? If you double-checked his work once, that’s a double-check, but if you did it twice, it’s—”

A feral roar burst out of Maxwell, the sound more wolf than man as he crossed the office in two impossibly long strides. He moved in a blur, sweeping his arm across the top of Adam’s temporary workstation and sending all the supplies flying across the room as if they’d been launched from a cannon.

A ceramic mug shattered against the wall first, followed by the clatter of half a dozen pens, a stapler that left a massive dent in the plaster before clanging to the floor, scattered paper clips, a computer mouse breaking into four different pieces on impact, and a stack of loose papers—all of which fluttered lazily to the floor like a slow, whimsical footnote to the shifter’s violent outburst.

Adam stared at his destroyed office supplies, his mouth hanging open.

“I don’t care if you’ve picked apart the footage frame by frame a hundred times over!” Maxwell fumed. “I didn’t come here so you could spoon-feed me superstitious bullshit!”

“Boss,” Whit cut in, “I couldn’t make this up. Whatever happened, it happened off camera, yeah? Off base, even. It had to be somewhere else.”

“You think I’m an idiot?” Maxwell bellowed. “Do I look like an idiot to you?”

No one said a word.

“Because I wouldhaveto be an idiot to believe anything you’ve just told me. The rest of you seem to think it’s a perfectly acceptable answer. You’re telling me the supply vehicle just droveitselfback into the garage, parkeditself, and cutitsownengine with Archie already locked up in the trailer in a pool of his own fucking blood!”

“That’s unlikely to be the only explanation here, boss,” Whit muttered.

Maxwell whirled on him. “I swear to every skinned pelt across this world, Castle, if you tell me the sonofabitch who infiltrated this compound and attacked one of our own is fuckinginvisible, I will rip you apart, limb by limb!”

“Fuck me…” Rick whispered and slowly swiveled his chair to face his workstation again.

“Somebody better tell me what the fuck actually happened!” the shifter roared.

Rebecca had seen enough. More than she cared to, really.

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