Luca LaRiccia doesn't send subtle messages. He sends bodies or invoices, depending on whether you're worth collecting from or just worth erasing. If he suspected I killed his son, I'd already be in a warehouse with a blowtorch aimed at my kneecaps while he waited for me to confess.
Unless he's not after me.
Unless he's afterher.
The witness.
The girl who saw me put a bullet in Rico's skull and lived to tell about it because I couldn't pull the trigger a second time.
Instantly, I'm spiraling. Thoughts turn in to theories, turn into nightmares…
Then I remember the trail cam.
The cheap motion-activated wildlife camera I installed in the woods after Emmaleen's first day here—the day I handed her my Aventador and watched her panic through the dash cameras. The day she pissed in my woods and I had no footage of it because I hadn't anticipated needing coverage that far off the perimeter.
The day that started this whole game between us.
I pause, staring at the dark screen in front of me.
Is it still a game?
Was it ever?
She signed the Doctrine. She kneels. She calls me King. She lets Jino train her body, and me break her mind, and she comes back every single time asking for more, writing seventy-three-page poems in terza rima about how much she wants my darkness.
That's not a game. That's?—
I shove the thought away.
Not now. Not when someone was in my house, and she's missing, and every system I built to protect her is offline.
Later.
If thereisa later.
The trail cam runs on AA batteries, records to a local SD card, connects to nothing. No network. No Wi-Fi. No cloud backup. Just motion, timestamp, save. Analog redundancy in a digital world, which makes it exactly the kind of thing a professional hacker would miss.
I grab my phone and head outside.
The woods are silent except for wind moving through bare branches. I navigate by memory and phone light, cutting through underbrush until I reach the oak tree where I mounted the camera at chest height, angled toward the driveway in front of the house.
Still there.
I yank it free from the strap, check the indicator light. Green. Active.
Back inside, I pull the SD card from the camera's side slot and load it into the laptop's reader. The file directory populates—dozens of clips labeled by date and time.
I scroll to tonight.
7:57 PM.
8:01 PM.
I click the first one.
The video loads. Grainy infrared footage, trees rendered in ghostly white-green. A car enters the frame from the driveway.
The vehicle that pulls up to my gates looks like something a high schooler would abandon in a Target parking lot after the transmission died.
