He pulls the Mercer image into a side panel on his screen and clicks through a few options. A progress bar opens up, and a grid of thumbnails loads, the computer running through faces, and then one of them lights up.
“Ah,” Jake says in a low, sing-song voice. “There you are.”
He clicks open the clip. It shows the table in the clubhouse boardroom. Billy is in frame, talking and gesturing. Two men in cuts stand off to the side against the wall. The door opens and a figure in a suit walks in, clearly Mercer. It’s the same posture, the same careful economy of movement.
“I didn’t go tothismeeting,” I hear myself say.
I stare at the screen, at Billy’s body language, deferential in a way I don’t know how to articulate. Something about how wide he smiles, how attentive he is.
Jake drags the clip into theAdrian_Mercerfolder and labels it with the timestamp. Then he opens his spreadsheet and adds a new tab, labelledMercer.
Across the top he types: Timestamp, Camera, Location, Names. Underneath that he fills it out with the information from the clip.
He clicks back to the hangar reel and scrubs forward a few seconds. Billy laughs at something, then Mercer turns his head slightly, scanning the room, facing the camera directly for a moment.
Jake captures another still and saves it.
“Okay,” he says, closing the file. “Now we keep going.”
We view clip after clip, face after face. Sometimes I can’t name someone, but I can name theshapeof the meeting—who Billy was trying to impress, when he got performative, when he got quiet. Jake marks those too.
On day two, Jake pulls up ledger entries and invoice lines.
“Education fund,” Jake reads aloud, eyebrows lifting. “Vet outreach. Community ride.”
“Education fund means payroll,” I say. “Payoffs. Sometimes weapons. Vet outreach is drugs, moving product through ‘medical supply.’ Community ride is a meeting with outsiders. People who don’t wear cuts.”
Jake nods once, and his fingers fly. He builds a glossary on a second screen, a living translation layer only I can provide.
By the end of day two, Jake can take one ledger entry, match it to an email header, match that to a timestamp, and then match the timestamp to a clip of someone in the hangar. Silas wanted a library, and Jake is turning it into a weapon.
Day three is where I almost break.
Jake pulls out a drive and shows me the label:MAX.
His voice is careful. Respectful. “This one is yours,” he says. “I don’t touch it unless you tell me to.”
My throat goes so dry it hurts. I just nod so that I don’t cough.
Jake keeps his gaze on mine. “I can wipe it, or you can keep it,” he says. “I can set you up to watch it privately if you want. Whatever you want.”
I swallow. “What’s in it?” I hear myself ask.
Jake shakes his head. “I don’t know. I didn’t open it.”
Silas, the creep, the watcher. Of course he saved what Billy did to me. Of course he saved what Billy made me do.
My hands go cold.
There’s a knock at the door, and Wyatt opens it holding two coffees. He looks at me, then at Jake, and frowns.
“You good?” he asks.
I take a breath. “Um…not really. But we’ve got it.”
His eyes hold mine for a beat. “If you need anything from me you’ll let me know?”
I press my lips together and nod, and he ducks back out, giving me one last meaningful look before he closes the door.
