My heart is pounding in my chest, my temples pulsing as I start to see red in the dark of night. If this is the wrong place, or if he doesn’t open the door, we’re screwed.

Worse than that. We’re dead. Guns pop off in the distance and I hold back a whimper.

The door pulls inward, and Isaac and I nearly tumble inside.

“Please, can you let us in?” I gasp, looking up into the face of the cabin’s owner.

A rush of relief courses through me.

He’s short and stocky, his hair gray and messy, his long gray beard scraggly. Beneath all that hair is a pair of intelligent dark brown eyes that take us in before looking out toward the woods. He steps aside and waves a wrinkled hand inward, guiding us in.

“Come on then, before they hear you.”

Isaac and I pile inside, Buster panting beside us, as the door closes. Juice slams a slab of heavy wood across it, like some medieval castle entrance. I glance at Isaac. His chest is rising and falling abruptly, his eyes wild as he takes in the small interior of the cabin before landing on the disheveled gentleman who just happens to be our savior.

“Just out for an evening stroll, I take it?” Wallace is cool as a cucumber, staring at us with a glint of amusement in his eyes, and I wonder whether he isn’t a little bit crazy. I remember wondering that before, and joy streaks through my chest. It’s so good to remember anything from the missing void, even under these circumstances.

“Professor Wallace. Always a pleasure,” I say between breaths.

Twigs scratch my scalp, stick out of my hair, and my shins burn from running through the woods, trying to keep my knees up so as not to trip and get us killed or tortured or whatever they plan on doing with me.

Wallace grins, staring at us both as he crosses his arms. “It would appear your journalism has gotten you in trouble with the wrong people, mmm?”

Before I can answer, I remember that my purse has a bug in it. Even though it’s buried deep, I don’t want anyone to hear our conversation.

“Is there somewhere I can put this that might be soundproof?” I ask, lifting my purse.

He lifts an eyebrow at me but, being the man that he is, he doesn’t question it. Instead, he nods, holding a hand out for the purse. For reasons I can’t quite explain, I trust him. I hand it out to him and he disappears into another room before returning shortly after, the purse gone.

“I would love to hear what you’ve been into,” he says, gesturing toward a living room to the left. The small area has no windows and is lit with an oil lamp, giving the space a contradictory feeling of cozy and eerie. The light flickers as Isaac and I sit on a small loveseat. We sink into the old sofa, and as I glance down at it, I notice that the aged and fading floral pattern appears to dance in the flickering light. Isaac wraps an arm around me, and I happily sink into him, allowing his warmth to comfort me now that we’ve reached relative safety.

Then again, come to think of it…

“Are we safe here?” I ask.

Wallace sits in a rocking chair across from us, creaking forward and back as he settles in. “Of course, you are. Believe it or not, you are not the first person to enter my home in this way.”

“I can believe it,” I mumble, thinking about our shadowy pursuers. My thoughts drift back to the truck, and the bug that Isaac left in the backseat.

“Isaac! We have to go back to the truck.”

He doesn’t move. In fact, his arm tightens around me, giving me the feeling that standing up will not be a choice I’m offered. Something about that annoys me. Since when is Isaac in control of what I can and can’t do? “No,” he says.

I glare up at him. “We left a bug in there that could have sensitive information on it. We have to get it! We have to make sure that it’s tracked!”

I don’t know why I want to fight him. I just do. He’s been trying to control our situation to the point where I’m losing my own grip on it, and that’s not going to fly. This is my investigation. I’m not going to be held back by some man thinking he owns the right to protect me. I can take care of myself.

“Scarlett, it’s late. We just got chased through the woods by a large group of people. The last thing we should be doing is going back through the dark to get something we can just as easily acquire in the morning.”

“Did you say bug?” Wallace chimes in.

I turn my attention back to him, shoving down my annoyance. I nod. “That’s why we’re here. A week ago someone chased me down and tried to have me burned alive. I survived but I don’t remember the incident or the events that led up to it. Isaac and I are trying to solve that mystery, and when we found our apartments bugged, you were the first person I remembered that might be able to help. Would you mind taking a look?”

He nodded. “I’m guessing one of them is tucked away in that purse of yours? Do you mind if I go get it?”

“By all means,” I say, watching as he leaves the room, Isaac and I sitting in loaded silence. I’m about to suggest going back to the truck again when Wallace returns with a laptop in his hand and the bug in another.

“I was able to disable the recording device, so we can speak freely.”

He sits back in his rocking chair, holding up the bug to take a closer look at it in the lamplight. “I’ve seen bugs like this before, usually found on the black market. This is some top-level stuff you have here, state of the art.”

He sets the bug on a beaten up wooden side table and flips open his laptop. It feels like we’re on the Oregon Trail sitting in this cabin, so the high-tech computer he’s got on his lap feels grossly out of place.

“How are you able to get Wi-Fi and stay off the grid?” I ask, curious.

He shrugs. “Wi-Fi is easy enough to hack into when you know how to do it. I’ve got neighbors close enough for this to happen while no one knows about it. I don’t stream a lot of video up here.”

He chuckles at his own inside joke before he starts working, the artificial gleam from the light paling his face.

“The thing with this kind of bug is that it’s usually connected to a cloud. If I can just tap into the coding I found along the bottom of the bot…”

He types with staccato fingertips, the sound dancing around the room as Isaac and I sit and watch him at work.

His eyes narrow and he grins. “And that’s how you hack it, folks. The recordings are divided out. The bugs are advanced enough only to trigger when a sound or light occur, so that recordings can be easily organized. Shall we listen to the first one?”

I nod, a sinking feeling developing in my gut. Am I ready to listen to this? What kind of stuff do they have on me? Wallace taps the pad on his laptop and turns up the volume. The sound of footprints emanates from the bug.

“Testing, testing. Implantation in place.”

My heart drops right along with my stomach at that voice. It’s Chantel.

“Bug number seven-ten-twelve is in place. Apartment secured.”

More footsteps and then the closing of a door finish the short recording. A wave of anger washes over me as Wallace looks up and meets my gaze.

“Someone you know, perhaps?”

“Yes,” I grit out through my teeth, staring up at Isaac. He’s glowering, and it’s nice to see my anger reflected somewhere.

“I should have trusted my instincts. Something with Chantel seemed off the whole time we were hanging out.”

“You mean when you left me in the hallway to go be with a stranger you didn’t remember?” he asks, and I scoot away from him. He removes his arm, picking up on the cue but he sits as close to me as ever.

“Not to interrupt your squabble but it’s likely a good thing that you recognize that voice. Now you have a lead, and you’re lucky. You didn’t know just what kind of danger you were in before. Now you know. You should call the police and report this.”

A shiver runs down my spine at those words, and Wallace closes his laptop, leaving the bug on the table. “I’m not going to the police, no way, no how. They won’t believe me. They didn’t believe that I was being watched in the first place, and I’ve got this feeling that Chantel’s not doing this alone. That there’s more this than meets the eye and whoever’s behind it all, they’ve got contacts.” What if I go to Detective Mullins and he’s in on it?

Okay, so that’s spectacularly paranoid, but still. We’d just been chased through the night, shot at, and so far, there have been no advancements in my case. Detective Mullins hasn’t so much as called me and that smacks of… I don’t know, suspicion. I don’t like it and if my gut instincts says something is up, something is damn well up.

Wallace interrupts my slew of paranoid thoughts. “I take it you don’t have a hotel you can go to for the night?” he asks.

I shake my head. “We were chased here, likely being followed. I’m sorry, Professor Wallace. I didn’t mean to put you in any danger.”

To my surprise, Wallace simply laughs.

“Come here,” he says, standing and beckoning for us to follow. We stand, and I put some distance between Isaac and myself. I need to regain control of the situation, and until I do, I can’t have him thinking that he has it. How did I let it get this far?

Wallace leads us down a dark hallway until he opens a door to the side and steps in. When we follow, we’re met with the bright light of at least ten TV monitors. Each one has a different image on it, mostly of the surrounding forest, but there is one of the front door as well.

“This is how I knew to let you in. I recognized you. Otherwise, this place is a fortress. I have guns set to go off and scare intruders in the distance. When you knocked on my door, I let them loose at the edge of the property…"

“Thank you,” I breathe.

Wallace leads us back out, stepping into a kitchen. “Your dog can spend the night in here. Otherwise, the guest bedroom is just down the hall, opposite of the living room. Given the hour, I imagine you might want to get some rest.”

I nod, thanking him one more time as Isaac and Wallace find a little food for Buster before we head down the hall to get some sleep. The room is miniscule with a queen-sized bed taking up almost the entirety of it. I stare at the bed. Do I want to sleep next to Isaac or not?

He crashes onto it, apparently not thinking twice about the situation. I hesitate as he kicks off his shoes and pulls the covers up over himself, turning down the other side for me.

“You can be mad at me as you want but we still need sleep.”

He says this while his eyes are closed, not looking at me. Which is a shame, because I’m leveling a great glare at him. With a sigh, I plop down into bed next to him, my traitorous body reacting to the horizontal closeness instantly. Sensing my irritation, he makes no move to cuddle me, instead turning onto his back. Within minutes, he is breathing heavily.

I watch him for a while, making sure that he’s deeply sleeping before I slide right back out of bed. He didn’t even notice that I didn’t remove my shoes. I tiptoe out of the room and back down the hallway, Wallace nowhere in sight. I peek into his camera room, taking note of where he’s monitoring before I walk to the kitchen.

I noticed the back door there earlier and made a mental note. Isaac may not think getting that bug is important but I know it is.

Buster’s asleep too, snoring soft doggy snores nearby. It’s been a rough night for all of us. I inhale, holding the breath in as I step out into the cold, and close the door gently behind me.

I am going to do what I need to in order to solve this case. No one, not even Isaac the firefighter, will stop that from happening.