I spun so I couldn’t see the pile of bags at all, but the image of the rotting head floated behind my eyes. “It’s a threat,” I said. A threat meant for me. It wasn’t any old corpse but the one I’d chopped up and buried. This had to have come from the same psycho who’d left me the disturbing sketch and the dead cat.
And the incidents were escalating… What would it be next?
Would Colt really have done all this just to get back at me? He’d been angry and some of his talk had made him seem kind of unhinged, but this was a totally other level. I had trouble picturing him coming up with a scheme this deranged.
Of course, I’d misjudged him before.
Another thought occurred to me with a sudden chill. “How did they even know? I cut up the guy right here in your basement—Rowan and I made sure no one was around when we buried the bags. I’m sure we didn’t leave any evidence.”
Wylder’s mouth flattened. “Whoever it is must be watching you very closely. And your stalker is obviously well-versed in stealth. I’m starting to get the impression this is some kind of game to them.”
Who else might hate my guts that much? For a second, my mind darted to Ezra, but the drawing and the cat tail had turned up before he’d even known I was in his house, let alone met me. And would he really have set things up so his own home looked so unsecured to his underlings? That didn’t feel right either.
The longer I stood here with the body right behind me, the queasier I felt. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to hide away in my room just to make the Noble heir happy.
“I’m going to talk to Gideon and see what’s going on with the cameras,” I said.
Wylder scowled, but before he could argue with me any more, I walked off. He needed to learn someday that he couldn’t just order me around and expect me to jump at his command.
My legs wobbled with my first few steps, but by the time I reached the stairs, my stride had steadied. I hurried up, leaving the scene below and all the memories it’d stirred up as far behind as I could.
What a fuck-up of a night.
I didn’t bother knocking, just walked right into Gideon’s office. He was in almost the same pose as when I’d come to talk to him about the dead cat. His shoulders were rigid, his body tipped toward the array of screens.
He startled a bit as I swept in and spun to face me. He looked as exhausted as I felt—and almost pained.
“You’re back,” he said, his gaze sweeping over me. “You look okay. You handled Jasper, then?”
He sounded tense, but there wasn’t a trace of doubt in his tone. He’d believed I could handle myself.
For just an instant, our brief but panty-meltingly hot kiss came back to me. I swallowed hard, the heat of the memory merging strangely with the much less pleasant sensations already roiling inside me.
“That’s one way of putting it,” I said. “He didn’t take anything from me I couldn’t stand to give. Of course, things don’t seem much less dangerous here. You haven’t found anything from the surveillance cameras?”
He winced. “You saw what happened downstairs?”
“I saw enough.” I flopped into the chair next to him and frowned at the screens, which were all showing different feeds from the security system. “How could none of the cameras have caught anything? I know this asshole has that trick with disrupting the Wi-Fi, but didn’t Ezra put those new hardwired cameras in?”
Gideon nodded with no shift in his uneasy expression. “He understood the problem and approved the installation as soon as I explained. But there’s only one that has a view of the right part of the lawn, and your stalker appears to have found a way to disrupt that too.”
He clicked a few keys, and one of the streams of footage zoomed into rewind mode. I squinted at it, wondering why it looked blurrier than the others. Men bustled about on the lawn in reverse, then vanished, and then—
A dark blotch filled the screen so suddenly I flinched. “What’s that?”
“Oil or paint is my best guess,” Gideon said. A rasp was creeping into his voice. “The men are too busy searching the grounds for me to ask anyone to take a closer look yet. It’s not like it’ll help us find the prick. He must have shot at it with something like a paintball gun. It dripped off after a few minutes, but that was all the time he needed.”
My spirits sank. This guy was too fucking smart. He probably could have killed me already if he’d wanted to. But no, he must be enjoying terrorizing me.
It had to be Colt, right? Who else would revel in my distress that much?
“There is something,” Gideon muttered, flicking through the footage. “Right—”
He nodded to the screen. Just as the liquid that had splattered the lens started to separate, I caught a flicker of movement in one of the gaps. But from the look of it, it wasn’t more than someone’s heel.
“If I could just pick up one identifying feature…” Gideon leaned close to the screen again, the glow reflecting off his pale face, his brow knit. He played that scrap of footage over and over, but the shape never revealed more than that dark flicker.
“Gideon,” I said after a few minutes. “I don’t think you’re going to get anything from that. Even if we could see it clearly, the back of someone’s leg isn’t going to narrow things down much.”