BRENTON
Brenton looked at the text, half asleep. Someone was banging on the door to his room, screaming his name.
Riley: I’m fixing a problem tonight, be back by dawn, see file on bar in kitchen. <3 We’ll talk when I get home. Turning phone on silent.
What?
“Brenton! Get your damn ass out here!” Zachary’s roar finally made Brenton jump up. Fuck, what did she do? “Riley’s not in the fucking house!”
Oh shit. He grabbed sweats, barely getting them on as he opened his door and followed Zachary down the stairs. Troy and Andrew were staring at a file while Gabe ran in with his laptop.
“What is this?” Brenton snarled. “And what the fuck did her text mean?”
“We haven’t opened it yet but there was a USB with it, so Gabe is going to look at it first,” Andrew flipped open to the first page of the file.
Abel Cartona’s face stared back at them. Brenton snarled at it but didn’t understand where it was going. There was a note on the back of the image.
I found him
Riley
Gabe plugged the USB in and whimpered at video files that had no meaning to Brenton.
“Gabe,” Troy whispered, confused as well.
“I kept one USB, labeled ‘Unknown Female Product Test’ and the date of the day after our capture… I couldn’t bring myself to watch the videos… We had only been home a few hours. I figured I could watch it the next day, when I was feeling better. The videos are of Riley… and what was done to her…” Gabe was shaking, and Brenton went cold. His hands were clammy, his palms sweaty. Zachary cursed several times while Andrew just sat quietly, stiller than natural. Troy’s jaw dropped. “Then the USB went missing that night from where I threw it…”
“Riley found it,” Brenton assumed. She had to have found it. Then she must have watched it.
Gabe hit play on the first video and they watched Abel and Riley from a top down viewpoint. There was audio. Brenton wanted to be sick and Gabe was green. The entire pride was feeling it, all looking desperately ill. The next video was at a different angle, showing Abel’s face. They couldn’t watch any of the videos to completion. They didn’t need to.
“She found him,” Troy whispered desperately, “and look at all the stuff in the file. She did more than find him.”
Gabe typed after he removed the USB and slammed his hand down on the counter.
“She did it all with my fucking laptop. She deleted the files, but she didn’t clear the damn recycling bin. I have it all. She cleared my notifications on Abel’s movements, all my research on him, and all my images of him around Denver. She used it all for herself and didn’t say anything.”
“The file has all of it,” Zachary growled, spreading pages out over the bar. “Look,” he snapped, pulling a picture up. “One of the fucking board members.”
“Several of them,” Brenton mumbled, looking through it all. She’d done all this and put it together. And she was out getting revenge. He should have noticed this before. He’d seen the anger at dinner, when they pushed her out of the investigation. He felt the rage simmer under her for days, but he’d been unwilling to confront her. She was scared of him, and he let it blind him.
“She took her bike,” Troy muttered. “We didn’t notice because we left the garage open.”
“What do you think she’s done? Do you think she’s okay? We have to go after her!” Andrew looked between the pride, and Brenton swallowed. He was right, they had to go get her. She could be in danger. She was in over her head on this and didn’t trust them to handle it.
Brenton’s phone went off, and he looked down to see who was calling. He prayed for it to be Riley, but it wasn’t.
“What do you want, Special Agent Corban?” Brenton snarled into the phone.
“Do you know where your pride member, Riley Stern, is right now?”
“No, we just found something she left for us,” Brenton put the agent on speaker phone.
“I hope it’s not the same file she left here for us to find,” Corban was grim. “It’s pretty awful.”
“If it had a USB stick that I wish didn’t exist, then yeah, we probably have the same file.” Brenton ran a hand through his hair. “What do you need?”
“The home Abel Cartona bought outside of Denver is on fire. And so is the forest behind his house. Firefighters are working hard to put it out.”
“We don’t know if she did this and if she did, we didn’t know she would.” Brenton clenched his fists. “But, Special Agent, we’ll be fighting for her in court. She’s going to have every lawyer I can pay for.”
“We’re not going to press charges. I’m a jaguar, Brenton. I know how we felines work, and this was definitely some feline shit. No one is dead, some trees and a house really don’t bother us. With rain coming in tomorrow, the fire won’t do much. So, no charges.”
“Thank you, Special Agent,” Zachary sounded so thankful that Brenton was concerned for his damn second.
“She said we could speak to her at dawn,” Corban continued. “I would like to, just to wrap some things up. Ask her why she gave Abel a head start on us going after him. That’s the only reason that we can think of for her to set his house on fire and call us in.”
Brenton didn’t understand that either. Why do both? Where was she playing this? She didn’t even kill the fucker in the fire. He would have. And he damn sure wouldn’t have told the SSTF that he was up to something.
“She told us she would be home by dawn,” Andrew told Corban. It was one am, dawn was between seven and eight. They had six hours of waiting to see if she would be coming home.
“Special Agent, can you guarantee her safety right now? Do you think she is okay?” Zachary asked.
“Local law enforcement claims to have seen a small figure on a motorcycle fleeing the scene of the fire. She has a motorcycle license, correct?”
“And she took her bike,” Troy groaned.
“We are currently tracking Abel. We’ll have him before the sun is up. We have enough evidence that this probably won’t go to trial. He’s going away for the rest of his miserable existence. She even had his bank statements to prove he spent the money.”
“Yeah, we got that, too,” Brenton sighed. She was probably okay. But he still wasn’t sure why she did it this way.
“Well, let us know if she gets home,” Corban hung up. Brenton looked up the ceiling and sighed heavily.
“We wait and if she’s not home by dawn, we go find her?” Zachary snarled. “This shit is unacceptable, Brenton. She can’t go off and fucking set houses on fire behind our backs.”
“Yes, and I know,” was all he had to say.
They walked to the den, taking the file, USB and laptop with them.
“Gabe,” Troy started quietly once they all sat down, “how did we miss Abel meeting with all the board members? How did we miss all this?”
“You were working too hard,” Brenton gave the answer just as softly. “It happens. I’m not mad. And yeah, none of these guys were at the meeting today, so that says something about what’s going on.”
“She may have saved your business,” Andrew mumbled, sitting in the corner of the brother’s couch. Brenton sat with Zachary. They left the middle one open for Riley, only her. She would know where they were when she got home. If she got home.
“She did,” Brenton muttered, angry about it. She’d done all the fucking work. He shouldn’t be mad at her, but he was. She’d done this behind their backs and under their noses. Why?
They sat in silence for a long time until nearly four am when Thomas walked in on accident.
“Come back later,” Brenton snarled. “We’ve got pride business to deal with at dawn. Tell everyone up there to stay in their rooms, including Finn.”
“Alright!” Thomas left just as quickly as he’d shown up.
They got a call, Abel Cartona was arrested.
At five in the morning, they heard her bike screaming down the driveway. They listened as the garage door closed. None of them missed the smile she wore when she walked in.