Page 77 of Taken Off Camera
Sebastian’s lips thin with determination. “We will. And this time, we’ll do it together.”
Saint scoffs as he shoves away from the table, his boots scuffing on the plush carpet as he begins to pace. “You should have let me handle things my way. That’s what always gets the job done. Why are we relying on this billionaire softy?”
Sebastian remains still, his scarred face impassive. “Barging into private residences without evidence would have tipped him off and landed you in jail.”
“Better than letting him continue to spy on Micah,” Saint shoots back, raking a hand through his hair in frustration. “While you played at securing Micah’s apartment, this creep was recording everything.”
I wrap my arms around myself, cold despite the study’s comfortable temperature. My skin crawls at the thought of Travis watching me, not through a screen where I controlled what was visible, but through hidden cameras capturing moments I thought were mine alone.
“I’ve had bots combing through the internet,”Sebastian explains, his apparent calm only serving to irritate Saint further. “Searching for any sign of footage being uploaded or shared. Nothing’s surfaced yet.”
“That’s supposed to be comforting?” Saint stops his pacing to glare at Sebastian. “He’s keeping it for his private collection, which is somehow worse.”
Gabriel turns to Sebastian. “If we search the street cameras, we might be able to find this creep going into Micah’s building to set up the cameras, and track his whereabouts there.”
Sebastian shakes his head. “It was over two weeks ago. Most of those cameras don’t keep the footage past seventy-two hours.”
I register their voices from a distance as my mind flashes to the night after Sebastian disappeared, when I sobbed into his abandoned T-shirt. Had Travis watched that? Had he taken pleasure in my pain?
“Was this my fault?” My shoulders hunch. “If I wasn’t camming?—”
“No,” Sebastian cuts me off. “You’ve done nothing wrong. Some people just can’t keep fantasy and reality separate in their heads.”
“I have footage,” Saint announces, pulling me from my spiraling thoughts. He reaches into hisbackpack and extracts his laptop, setting it on the table with a thud.
Sebastian’s eyebrows rise. “You have what?”
“Footage,” Saint repeats, booting up the computer. “From the hallway camera outside of Micah’s apartment.” He glares at Sebastian. “Where theonlycameras should be that aren’t ones he set up himself.”
“Stop it,” I tell my best friend. “After the first package, I felt better knowing Sebastian could check in on me inside my apartment. He had my permission.”
“Never should’ve moved out,” Saint grumbles, not taking his focus off his screen. “With how many creeps keep sniffing around you, leaving you alone was the wrong move.”
“No, it wasn’t,” I argue. “We needed our own spaces.”
Being roommates with an Alpha I didn’t want to mate with had been tricky, and forcing Saint to find somewhere else to sleep for almost a week out of every month was too much once we could afford separate apartments.
Saint ignores our old argument and turns the screen so we can all see. “I store everything in the cloud, sixty-day retention.”
He navigates through folders organized by date and clicks on the one from the day of the Blue Note Lounge. The footage shows the hallway outside my apartment from a long angle, the camera hidden in the fire alarm at the far end.
“Fast-forwarding.” Saint taps the keyboard, and the timestamp blurs as hours vanish in seconds until he slows the playback.
“There,” he says. “That’s you leaving.”
Onscreen, I appear, locking my door and adjusting my bag on my shoulder before heading down the hall. The timestamp in the corner readseleven o’clock.
Saint presses fast forward again, but only at double time. “Now let’s see when that creep appears.”
Thirteen minutes later, another figure enters the frame, this one in a maintenance uniform, his head lowered. Their cap hides most of their face as they approach my door and pull a key from their pocket.
“That’s not your building manager,” Saint says, slowing to normal speed again. “That guy’s about three hundred pounds and bald.”
My heart hammers as the impostor unlocks my door with what appears to be a regular door key and slips inside. The timestamp shows eleven thirteen in the morning. He must have headed up as soon as hewas sure I wasn’t just running to the Quick Shop across the street.
“Now we wait,” Sebastian says, his body tense beside me.
The footage continues, Saint fast-forwarding again until the timestamp reads just after noon. The door opens, and the maintenance person emerges, still with his head down. But as they turn to lock the door behind them, the camera catches their face.
