* * *
“Oh my fucking christ,” I say as I walk into the room––my headquarters––and see all of the images splashed across the back wall. There must be over one hundred of them.
“See?” Stefan says as he stands beside me with his arms crossed over his chest. “I told you not to bring her.”
I walk closer to the wall, looking at each of the images in turn, feeling my blood boil hotter with each and every one.
“Who the fuck sent these?” I ask, my teeth gritted as I struggle to contain my fury.
“We don’t know,” Stefan says, and I whirl around, shocked that he hasn’t found whoever is responsible yet.
“You don’t know?” I say with a raised eyebrow. “How the fuck do you not know?”
“The pictures were already in here when I arrived this morning, already stuck to the wall,” he informs me.
“I beg your pardon?” I say, even more fucking shocked.
“Yeah, Nate, this is either the work of someone we know or someone that has inside knowledge of how to get in here.”
“Have you checked the fucking cameras?” I question. There are cameras in every room here, except for one room at the back of the house, hidden behind a wall that is filled with bookshelves, or so it would seem. Most of the bookshelves are real, but there is a portion of them that are just models to hide a cleverly constructed door to a room that no one wants to go in if they are my enemy. It’s where the magic happens, and I look forward to taking whoever did this in there and teaching them a valuable fucking lesson before I kill them.
“They were all turned off for thirty minutes, allowing whoever did this time to get in unseen, put the pictures on the wall and then fuck off without so much as a trace of whoever did this,” he says, looking and sounding grim.
“Who was in charge of the cameras?” I ask, because I leave the organising of shift work up to Stefan. I have more important things to deal with than working out a rota for a fucking camera system, or so I thought.
Stefan pins me with narrowed eyes, and I know what name he is going to say before he speaks.
“Jessica,” I say for him, and he nods slowly. “Fuck,” I yell as I run my hands through my hair in frustration. “And where is she now?”
“We don’t know,” Stefan says, looking grimmer than before.
“We don’t fucking know,” I grumble as I turn back to the pictures and accept the fact that I have a goddamn snake in my crew.
I have never hit a woman, and I never intended to, but seeing these pictures makes me want to grab her by the neck and choke her until I see the life seep away. Makes me sound like an asshole, but Jessica has betrayed me, and she has betrayed my wife.
The images in front of me are of Kat. Some of us together, but mostly just pictures of her, out and about, at the house, in the garden, getting into her car, food shopping, the list goes on. Someone is following her, watching her, and I don’t fucking like it one little bit.
It took me a long fucking time to trust Jessica, but eventually she proved herself and I thought that having a woman on my team would make some situations easier to handle. Guess I was fucking wrong because it looks like this bitch bided her time to come after me and be a goddamn threat.
A threat to my wife, to her privacy.
A threat to us and to what we might become.
A threat doesn’t bother me, I’m used to them, but it bothers me that these pictures are of Kat with a clear intention behind them.
She’s going to go off when I tell her, because I have to tell her, she needs to know, and I need to get the fuck home because I’ve left her by herself, and clearly, she isn’t safe.
“Do some digging,” I say to Stefan as I turn and make my way from the room.
“Already on it, boss,” I hear him say as I go into the hallway and head for the front door, the words on the post-it note in the middle of all the pictures at the forefront of my mind.
Clocks ticking, asshole.
Enjoy your time with her because you never know when it might be taken away.
Chapter Twelve
Kat
