“Okay,” she said, voice steady. He wouldn’t have known she was nervous if she didn’t stall there, unmoving.
He and Reese waited.
At last, she stood and circled the table to hover at David’s shoulder. Reese slid into the chair on David’s other side. David wanted to pull them closer, suspecting this was going to be harder than they realized, but for now, he gave them their space and hit play.
A door appeared, oddly elongated because of the angle, but clear enough that David could tell Reese hadn’t gone cheap on his cameras. There was snow piled on either side, and a hint of movement, a shadow, moving at the bottom edge of the frame.
Mati gripped his shoulder. “God, I was on the other side of that door. I walked through the front hall to get to the kitchen.”
Reese was no longer paying attention to the video, watching Mati instead.
David hit pause. Fuck giving them space. “Come here.”
He pushed his chair back and she slipped into his lap. He anchored her to his chest with an arm around her waist and leaned his shoulder against Reese’s when he scooted closer.
David, at least, felt much better.
Mati blew out a deep breath and nodded. “Okay. Go ahead.”
David hit play again. The shadows on screen shifted and a man in a ski mask stepped into view, holding what looked like a cell phone in front of his chest.
Reese curled a hand around David’s knee.
The man on the screen waved the phone around like it was some kind of magic wand.
“What the fuck?” David muttered with a half laugh that cut off when, a second later, the man opened the door like it was nothing. He disappeared into the house, followed closely by a taller, thinner man who shut the door behind them.
The screen went dark, then split into two feeds. One half showed Mati in a brightly lit kitchen, and the other showed the two men gesticulating at each other in what appeared to be the front hall.
“These cameras have sound, right?” David asked.
“They do,” Reese confirmed, squeezing David’s knee as on-screen Mati peeked through the door.
“Fuck,”David whispered, pulling her closer. Her heart pounded against his arm. They’d told him what had happened, but it was hard to watch her bolt up the back stairs and hide in a bedroom while the stockier man began his search. For her? It was hard to tell.
Meanwhile, the other man went down the hall and through a door. The screen flashed and showed a large, dark wood paneled room.
“Where is that?” David asked, pointing.
“My office,” Reese replied. He shook his head when the man on the screen began searching for something. He started by tilting the paintings away from the wall. “This guy has no clue.”
“What makes you say that?” David asked.
Mati answered. “He never even looks in the direction of the safe. He has no idea where it is.” She gestured at the screen when the man switched to digging through Reese’s desk drawers. “And all of the files are in cabinets in my office. All he’s going to find in there are some pens, a pack of gum, and a bottle of lube.”
“Excuse you. That’shand lotion,” Reese said.
“Hand lotion I’ve never once seen you use,” she muttered under her breath, her eyes still on the screen. “But that you run out of every few months.”
Reese opened his mouth, presumably to protest, but closed it again without saying a word, his cheeks mottled red.
A voice boomed from David’s tinny laptop speakers, chaos breaking out in all three frames of the split screen. Mati jumped and Reese’s fingers dug bruises into David’s thigh. He clenched his teeth and told his pounding heart to knock it off, but it was impossible as he watched Mati run down the stairs, almost wiping out at the bottom. The stocky man burst into the kitchen and through to the front hall, chasing her in the direction of Reese’s office while his partner waved his arms frantically, apparently trying to tell him to stop.
The howl of pain when the panic room door closed on Mati’s pursuer’s arm was satisfying. The way he cradled that arm to his chest as they fled the house wasn’t bad either.
The screen went blank. David realized he was crushing Mati and eased his grip.
Reese took Mati’s hand. “Are you okay?”
