My hands curl into fists without me meaning to. I hate her being there. I hate that I can’t see what she’s seeing. Can’t hear what she hears. Can’t smell the danger when it creeps close. Natalie says she knows how to move in that place, how to make herself small, invisible when she needs to. I believe her. She had ten fucking years of living with those assholes.
Doesn’t mean I’m okay with it.
Zen finally spins his chair around to face us. “I’ve been digging nonstop.”
“And?” I ask.
He grimaces. “And the Elliot brothers are clean. Too clean.”
That makes my stomach drop.
“Bank accounts are boring. No sudden withdrawals. No travel. No burner phones tied directly to them. No pings outside their usual locations. We got the footage of Jeremiah lurking outside your apartment, but no indication he tampered with Rick’s bike.”
“So he didn’t do it,” Tank says.
Zen snorts. “I didn’t say that.”
Siege’s voice is calm, measured. “What are you saying?”
“It’s like we thought, they didn’t do it themselves,” Zen replies. “No way. From what Natalie described, these guys don’t get their hands dirty. They lean on people. Convince. Manipulate. Pay. Threaten. That kind of thing doesn’t leave a clean digital trail.”
Rider rubs a hand over his beard. “Middlemen.”
“Exactly,” Zen says. “And middlemen are harder to trace unless you know where to look.”
My jaw tightens. “So what are we missing?”
Zen swivels back to his screens, taps a few keys, then looks over his shoulder at me. “Access.”
I don’t like the way he says it.
“Access to what?” Siege asks.
“David or Jeremiah’s PCs,” Zen answers. “Either their personal computers, or maybe the church office systems. External drives. Anything they think is safe because it’s local.”
My chest tightens immediately. “That puts her in more danger.”
Zen winces. “I know.”
“No,” I growl. “You don’t fucking know. You know it intellectually. I know it in my fuckin’ bones.”
The room goes quiet.
I take a breath, force my hands open. “She’s already walking a razor’s edge just being in that house. If she goes snooping on their computers—”
“She doesn’t have to be obvious,” Zen cuts in gently. “And I wouldn’t need much. Even ten minutes alone with a machine could give me something. Metadata. File remnants. Logs they didn’t think to wipe. Nobody’s that perfect.”
“Some people are careful,” Rider says.
“Careful isn’t flawless,” Zen shoots back. “Nobody deletes everything. Not long-term. Not without slipping.”
Siege watches me closely. “Bear.”
I look at him.
“You knew this wasn’t gonna be clean,” he says. “You knew she might have to take risks.”
“Yeah,” I snap. “Doesn’t mean I gotta like it.”
