Chapter 14
Ellie
Kara had a way of making everything urgent. I came back in through the side door, shaking the cold from my shoulders, and irritation rode close behind me. Holding a ladder while she fiddled with the porch camera was not how I wanted to spend my afternoon.
The angle had been fine. I knew it was fine.
I had checked it yesterday, and the day before that, the feed clear as day on the monitors.
But Kara wanted it shifted higher, then lower, then back again.
If Alex had been off patrol it would have been her job to hold that ladder, but with her circling the perimeter, I was the one stuck bracing the damn thing while Kara craned over the third floor.
It felt like wasted time. I should have been inside, keeping track of Sabine, managing her injury, making sure she didn’t get herself into more trouble. Instead I stood in the cold, watching Kara argue with the wind over a piece of equipment that was already working.
The worst part was how normal it felt. Kara liked perfection, liked to press on every detail until it gave.
She said the camera might have shifted in the weather, that a few degrees could be the difference between spotting a threat and missing one.
Maybe she was right. But it felt more likely that she just needed something to control, and I had let her pull me into it. Fucking Kara.
I moved deeper into the house, jaw tight. The command room was quiet but for the low hum of equipment. I dropped into the chair, pulled up the feed controls, and set to work. Because Kara had shifted the porch camera, the whole system needed to be reset and resynced. Another slice of time wasted.
This was another thing that should have been Alex’s lane.
She was the one who typically handled our tech.
I handled it well enough, but the work I preferred was handling people, not wires and monitors.
My value was in keeping bodies whole and safe, not babysitting pixels.
Yet here I was, fingers moving through menus, adjusting calibrations while Sabine was upstairs with nothing but her own bad ideas for company.
I worked through it methodically, running the diagnostics, correcting the angle until the feed locked into place. The irritation burned steady in my chest. Every minute here was one I could be using where it counted. Kara could call it attention to detail. To me, it was busywork.
The feed blinked, then cleared. I leaned back, rubbing a hand across my jaw. On the central monitor, the split screen held steady. My gaze caught on the box marked for her room.
Sabine lay across the bed, a book balanced in her hands.
No pacing or restless energy trying to test the edges of her cage.
She looked settled, almost docile, her attention buried in the pages.
The sight stopped me. It did not fit the woman who had bristled at every order, who had tried to take the stairs on a bad ankle just to prove a point.
Calm, contained, quiet. For a moment I wondered if the storm had broken, or if this was only the eye of it. I tapped the desk with more force than was necessary and stood, rolling the stiffness from my shoulders.
Cam’s steps sounded on the stairs just as I finished locking the feed back into place. I leaned back in the chair, rubbing the tension from my jaw, when her shadow darkened the doorway.
“Kara had me outside holding a ladder,” I said by way of greeting. “All so she could shift the porch camera a couple of degrees.” I shook my head, still annoyed at the wasted hour.
Her mouth quirked. “Sounds like her.”
“She would straighten a picture frame six times if it was off by a hair.”
She didn’t argue, but the faint tug of amusement lingered on her face.
I grabbed the notebook I’d left by the console. “How was Sabine? Pain in the ass?”
She gave a low chuckle. “Not bad. Needs that bandage redone, though. I know you’ll handle it, doc.”
We walked out together into the great room.
The space opened wide behind the stairs, larger than the house suggested from outside.
Couches sat angled in the middle, a wall lined with weapons racks and another with maps pinned under neat rows of notes.
Tall windows gave a view of the yard, framed with heavy curtains.
Cam moved with the same quiet vigilance as always, scanning the corners without breaking stride. Different temperaments, different styles, but the work kept us aligned.
The afternoon stretched into a steady rhythm.
I worked through the system logs, checking timestamps, scanning the feeds again for anything Kara might pick at later.
Once or twice I touched base with her over comms, her voice clipped as she circled the perimeter.
Nothing unusual reported, nothing that called for more than a note.
The house stayed locked down, every door sealed, every window latched.
Cam took her turn on the outside sweep while Alex kept to the trees, moving like a shadow.
Inside, I kept to the command room and the great room, my attention pulled from screen to window to door in a constant circuit.
Dull work, but the kind that carried its own weight.
The quiet was never quite comfortable. Every sound seemed sharper, every silence heavier. We moved through it with the ease of routine, but the charge beneath it never let go. The threat was out there, whether it showed itself today or not.
When evening crept close, I left the monitors and headed for the kitchen.
Dinner fell to me, and I kept it practical.
A pot of rice, chicken cooked in the cast iron, vegetables thrown in more for balance than taste.
Nothing fancy, nothing wasted. By the time the food was ready the others would come in to eat, another day passed without incident, but never without the reminder that incident was always possible.
I balanced the dinner tray in one hand as I climbed the stairs, the heft of it steady against my palm.
Sabine had been quiet most of the day, the monitor showing her stretched across her bed with a book, so I expected to find her in the same place now.
Her room door stood closed, but when I nudged it open the bed was empty.
A soft thump sounded from farther down the hall. I followed it and stopped at the open double doors of the library.
She was perched in a velvet chair near the center of the room, a heavy book spread across her lap.
Shelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling, crammed with old volumes that smelled of dust and leather.
The curtains were pulled wide, letting the last threads of daylight catch in the glass.
Two more velvet chairs sat angled near the fireplace, the whole space steeped in a stillness that felt older than the rest of the house.
She had chosen the room deliberately. It was full, alive, not the barren confinement of her bedroom.
“You shouldn’t be walking on that ankle,” I said, my voice carrying sharper than I intended.
Her eyes flicked up from the page, and she tipped her chin toward the crutches leaning against the chair. “That’s what those are for.”
I set the tray on a side table and crouched in front of her, reaching for her foot.
She shifted but didn’t pull away as I checked the wound.
The swelling had gone down considerably.
“Getting better,” I muttered, inspecting the skin.
"We'll get it rewrapped before you go to bed, but its good for it to air out some. "
“The hot bath earlier probably helped,” she added.
I raised a brow. Her mouth tightened, and she rushed to add, “Cam helped me in and out. I didn’t walk on it.”
A short laugh escaped me, cutting the tension. “You’re settling in, aren’t you?”
Her glare sharpened. “I’m not. This situation sucks.”
I rose to my feet. “Seems like you’re making the best of it anyway.” My tone carried no mockery. It was simple fact, and she knew it.
The words were barely out of my mouth when the house shuddered with sound. The alarm tore through the quiet, sharp and violent, cutting off any reply she might have had. The shriek rattled the glass panes and knifed down the hallway, loud and sudden.
I was already moving. My body knew the rhythm before my mind caught up. Sharp noise meant breach, and breach meant motion.
Sabine jolted in the chair, the book tumbling to the carpet. Her eyes went wide, her hands clutching the arms of the velvet seat. I didn’t waste time on her expression. Fear was natural. What mattered was positioning.
“Stay here,” I snapped, my voice low enough to cut through the alarm. I didn’t wait for her answer. The room had changed in an instant. What had been stillness filled with books and dust was now the mouth of a funnel, every sense aimed outward toward the perimeter.
I moved fast, boots hitting the floor with a bass rhythm. Downstairs I could already hear the shift in the house, the scrape of chairs pushed back, the slam of a door swinging open. The calm routine of the evening collapsed in on itself, replaced by the crackle of crisis.
The alarm did its work, stripping away everything unnecessary. No more irritation about Kara, no thoughts of quiet meals or swelling ankles. Just the sharp pivot of a system honed for this.
I took the stairs two at a time, the vibration of the alarm carrying through the wood. Ahead of me, Alex vanished into the command room without a word.
The side door banged open, a draft curling across the hall as Cam stepped in from the courtyard. Her head was on a swivel, dark eyes cutting toward the command center. “What’s going on?” she asked, her voice pitched low but carrying.
Before I could answer, Kara came out with a rifle in hand, the strap snug across her chest, her other hand lifting to adjust her earpiece. “South gate alarm triggered,” she said, her voice clipped and precise. “I’m going out to check on it.”
“I’m coming,” Cam answered.
“Grab a rifle,” Kara told her without breaking stride.
She ducked into the command room. Kara’s eyes cut to me. “Stay with Sabine. Keep her upstairs until we clear the perimeter.”
I crossed to the weapons cabinet and pulled a rifle free, checking the chamber.
“I’ll be in the upstairs hallway.”
“Yep.” Alex focused on her console, voice low as she relayed camera feeds into comms.
The side door shut behind them left the foyer quiet but for the muffled alarm. I ran up the stairs, the rifle solid in my grip.
Keeping her safe was my job. Pretending that was all it was—that was the lie.