Chapter Twenty-Four Zephyr
Jax walks into the house and drops his keys on the counter. “Her dad put up more cameras.”
The words hang in the air between us. I’m sitting on the couch with my laptop open, working on a paper that’s due tomorrow, but I close it now and look up at him.
“Where?”
“Back corner of the house. Side yard. Higher angle on the driveway approach.” He rattles them off like he’s reading from a blueprint. “Professional grade. Motion sensors. Night vision.”
I lean back against the cushions and process that. Her dad’s not just being paranoid anymore. He’s building a surveillance system. Gathering footage. Evidence, maybe.
I look at Jax. He’s standing in the kitchen with his arms crossed, jaw tight. He knows what I’m thinking because he’s thinking it too.
I run a hand through my hair. “So he’s tracking us now.”
“I don’t know.”
Jax pulls out his phone and stares at the screen for a second. Then he adds, almost casually, “Brixton went there last night.”
I sit forward. “What?”
“I saw him pull up around nine. He climbed through her window. He left just before ten.”
“You’re fucking kidding me.”
Jax shakes his head.
I stand up, pace to the window, and back. “That idiot. He threw a fit about her staying here without him and then decided to prove a point by sneaking into her room.”
“That’s exactly what he did.”
“He doesn’t understand. He thinks this is some fucking game. He’s not taking her safety seriously.”
Jax doesn’t argue. Just keeps staring at his phone.
“There’s something else,” he says quietly.
The house goes silent. I can hear the hum of the refrigerator. The tick of the clock on the wall. My own heartbeat pounding in my ears.
“Danny,” Jax says.
My stomach drops. “The ex-cop?”
Jax looks up at me and nods once.
Danny’s a guy Jax knows from when his family went through some shit years ago. Former police detective who left the force under circumstances no one talks about. Now he runs background checks and digs up information for people who need to stay off the official record.
If Jax went to Danny, it means he needed something we couldn’t find ourselves.
“He got back to me,” Jax says.
I try to read his face. Anything that’ll tell me how bad this is before I have to ask.
A few silent moments pass. The kind of silence that makes your skin crawl from your own racing thoughts.
“How bad?” I finally ask.
Jax just nods.
Heat floods through my chest and down my arms.
With all the new cameras in place, with Callum’s dumb ass climbing through windows on footage that’s probably already backed up to a cloud server somewhere, there’s no clean version of this anymore.
No easy way out.
I try to let it settle. Try to think through the implications before I react.
“Have you talked to her?” I ask.
Jax doesn’t answer right away.
I start putting it together. “If there are new cameras up and he saw Cal last night...”
Jax just looks at me.
He doesn’t finish the sentence because he doesn’t need to.
We both realize what’s really happening here.
Her dad knows about Callum. Probably has footage of him coming and going. Maybe footage of all of us from the nights we’ve been parked outside watching.
He’s building a case.
Trying to prove that we’re obsessed with her?
To prove to her that the boys are dangerous and can’t be trusted?
To justify whatever he’s about to do next.
And Tigerlily—she’ll disappear into that house and convince herself it’s the right thing to do.
And Callum—cocky, reckless Callum who thinks he can charm his way through anything—is an idiot, but a thought crosses my mind.
“What if we use Cal as a decoy?”
Jax’s eyes dart to mine. And we’re both thinking the same thing.