I pulled up the camera. Outside, there was a hidden camera that captured images when movement was detected in front of the house. Most of the time it was a deer or a neighbor walking by, but clear as day, there was an image of someone standing at our front door.
My stomach dropped.
It managed to capture a few images. He obviously stood there messing with the lock for a while, but he’d turned just enough for my camera to get the faintest glimpse of him. I tried to zoom in. I could get a bit closer, but eventually he just turned into a generic, highly pixelated white guy.
“What’s wrong?” Joon whispered to me. That’s when I realized my grip on his hand had become tight.
“We need to go home,” I said. “Tell Indi, now.”
The look of worry on his face matched mine. He leaned into them, whispering a bit too loudly. There was a huff from another audience member from behind us, but I didn’t give a shit. I hopped up, knowing the other two would follow, and started down the stairs two at a time.
The light from the lobby was blinding after the dark of the theater.
“What’s wrong?” Indi asked, matching my quick pace to the car.
“I don’t know,” I said. “The security system said that someone came through the front door.”
“Fuck,” they said, walking even faster now. “I’ll try to call Cam.”
“I’ll try Eva,” Joon added.
They each took out their phones and started dialing. We made it to the car, where each of them hung up without a word.
“Voicemail,” the two said in almost perfect unison.
“Keep trying,” I said.
I threw the car in reverse and skated out of the spot before speeding away.
I didn’t know what was going on, but I could only hope it was nothing.
The shed wasin worse shape than I'd originally thought, a fair bit of dust and debris tracked in by my pack mates collecting on the floor and along the lower shelves of the carefully labelled storage racks. But, as much as it grossed me out—I'd had to double up on sets of gloves just to be able to stand wiping everything down—it was also sort of a relief.
It wasn't helpful of me to be irritable with Eva while she was going through something traumatic. Especially if she was actually pregnant and her hormones were changing.
But I couldn't fucking take it anymore. The constant barrage of emotions from the omega was like a choke chain demanding my action, and I wasn't used to the constant drag of need.
Maybe if we were bonded and I could understand what the fuck her problem was with me, specifically. I was getting desperate for any hint as to what it was I was actually supposed to be doing when it came to Eva, given my assumptions didn't seem to be working out for me the way I planned.
I thought she'd be really pleased that I'd gone to try and salvage her computer. Or that I'd managed to get a few of her things from her place that weren't damaged. Didn't she notice that I'd put a couple of her mugs into the cupboard alongside Marcus' obsessively modern white dishware? He was going to hate seeing the mismatched novelties every day, but I was fairly certain it would make our omega smile, so it seemed a necessary evil.
The shop vacuum was so loud that it nearly covered my music entirely as it sucked up the dirt I'd swept into a pile in the middle of the room, moving onto the vacated spider webs I'd found in the rafters.
If they'd still been occupied, I happily would've left them alone. Arachnids, though not one of my favourite sub-species, had an important role to play in the ecosystem of the garage, like eating those bastard silverfish that kept getting into Marcus' camping gear.
When everything was adequately debris-free, I turned off the vacuum, the heavy vibrato of the opera recording I'd thrown on to help me regulate flooding the space again, forcing a rare smile to my face.
I'd just started my next task: organizing Marcus' seeding equipment for his herbs—god, he really was the only one of us who went outside, wasn't he?— when something that didn't sound like the climax of Serenata do Adeus pierced through the relative calm that I'd managed to cobble together from the safety of the shed.
Assuming that the guys had come home early and started Eva, I didn't think much of it... Until I noticed the sunlight still peeking through the window on the far side of the shed.
Even if they'd skipped the panel, and there was a fat chance of that with it being Indigo's favorite movie and Marcus' favorite director, they shouldn't have been home until after dark.
I turned to my phone, pressing the screen in an effort to cut the music. Of course, with two pairs of rubber gloves, my phone did nothing, sitting there like I was a ghost.
"Helpful," I muttered, the sound, obviously a scream this time, making my ears prick.
The trouble with living with a bunch of people with kinks that usually involved screaming was that it was hard to tell what was for pleasure and what was for fun.
