Page 69 of Ruthless Possession
"Walk," I tell mine.
He walks.
Inside, the kitchen light is on. Caiden has the third one zip-tied to a chair already, a wiry guy in his thirties who's working very hard to look like he isn't scared and failing completely. Caiden's standing over him with his arms crossed, not saying a word, which is somehow worse than anything he could say.
I shove my guy onto a chair. Trenton deposits his next to him.
Three chairs. Three men. None of them Harris.
I cross to the security panel by the back door and pull up the camera feeds. Four windows on the screen. I find the one I'm looking for, Morgan's face, pale and still in the safe room's low light, Charlie tucked against her side. Both of them watching the monitor. Both of them intact.
I hold down the intercom. "We're clear. Stay put."
A beat. Then her voice, tight and controlled. "Confirmed?"
"Three. None of them him."
There's silence on her end. I can picture exactly what her face is doing right now, the way her jaw sets when she's keeping herself together through sheer will, the small muscle that jumps near her temple.
"Stay in the room," I tell her. "We need a few minutes."
I release the button and look at Trenton.
He's already moving toward the camera in the corner of the kitchen, the one that feeds to the security system, the one whose footage uploads to the cloud server we set up last month. He finds the cable at the back of the unit and pulls it free with one clean motion.
The red recording light goes dark.
The wiry one in Caiden's chair shifts his weight. "Hey. Hey, man. Harris said it was a job, okay? Said it was a domestic thing, a custody. "
"Custody." Trenton sets the camera cable down on the counter. Carefully. He turns to face the room. "He told you it was a custody situation."
"Yeah. Yeah, exactly. We didn't know about any?—"
"You came to my house." Trenton pulls a chair out from the table, turns it around, and sits on it backward with his forearms resting across the top. He looks at all three of them. Takes his time. Let's the silence do some work. "At two in the morning, with a plan to take a child."
The guy opens his mouth.
Trenton doesn't raise his voice, doesn't move, just looks at him with those dark eyes that have stared down worse things than a hired hand on a kitchen chair, and the guy's mouth closes again.
"Here's what's going to happen," Trenton starts. "You're going to tell me everything Harris told you. Where he is. How he contacted you. What he's planning next. Every detail, in order, starting now." He pauses. One beat. Two. "And then we're going to have a conversation about what it means to come into someone's home and threaten their family."
My guy, the young one from the east side, is staring at Trenton with the expression of someone who has just finished recalculating every decision that led them to this moment and doesn't like the math.
Smart kid.
I pull up a chair of my own, sit down, and wait.
Trenton
I'm at the front of the house before Matthew finishes his text.
The gravel on the driveway will give me away if I'm not careful about it, so I stay on the grass where the ground is soft and the sound doesn't carry. The night air has that heavy, wet quality that comes just before dawn, thick enough to feel on my skin, thick enough to make it hard to read distances.
I round the corner of the porch and stop.
Two of them. Not one.
They're standing at the base of the front steps with their backs to me, close together, heads tilted toward the house like they're listening. The shorter one has his hand on the railing. The taller one has something in his right hand that catches a sliver of moonlight. A tire iron, maybe, or a pry bar.
