Page 41 of The Knight

Cole watches this all with observant blue eyes, taking it in far more closely than I'm comfortable with. After a long moment of silence, he finally asks, "What happened?"

"Well," I stumble over the right explanation to justify the SD card's state, "there was a bit of trouble with the lens and I had to go into the airport hanger..."

"I dropped the camera." Blake's lie shocks me so much that I fall silent, staring at him wide-eyed. "Brenna saw everything that happened, though. Maybe she could give a statement to the police."

Frowning, Cole shakes his head. "That can't happen," he says, while Lukas just firmly tells Blake, "No."

Grumbling, Blake mutters back, "You guys act like they're the boogeyman."

"You don't have the experience with them that we do." It's Tanner who speaks up now, to my surprise, sounding uncharacteristically serious. "People have tried these take downs before. This one will only work if it's public and anonymous. Otherwise..."

I look around at each of them, wondering yet again whotheyare, and what will happen if this all goes wrong. "Otherwise what?"

"They'll make you disappear," Cole says simply, as if it's nothing to mention secret societies willing to kill people at the drop of a hat. "You can't testify against them. Not alone, as the only witness to some big, elaborate crime. It'll never work."

Lukas adds, "So we just have to hope that I can somehow get some data off this impossibly damaged SD card, because without it we have nothing."

I fall silent at this, folding my hands on the table and staring down at the grain in the wood. All of this is my fault—if I'd just paid a little more attention to the task at hand, been less of a clumsy idiot, everything would be okay. We'd finally be able to take down Hass, maybe even part of this mysterious operation the guys won't explain to me, and Silas could rest in peace.

Hot tears gather in my eyes and tighten my throat. It takes all my effort and concentration not to let them fall. To have come so far, risked so much, and turn up nothing—it's the worst outcome I can imagine.

I'm so busy trying not to cry that I barely notice the minutes pass. At one point I feel a heavy hand on my knee, and slide my eyes over to look at Blake, frowning at him. He has a dark look in his eyes, and he briefly squeezes my knee then slides his hand back, somewhere between comforting and confusing. The one-eighty from him seems to have come out of nowhere, but I start to understand it when I see Cole cut his eyes at Blake, and Blake's smirk in response.

This is just another game to them.

It's always a game, the way they toy with me.

Yanking my eyes away from them, I watch Lukas steadily work on the SD card, and tell myself I don't care why Blake kissed me or what's going on between him and Cole. What really matters is taking down Hass—and getting the hell out of here as soon as the work is done, so I can return to Wayborne and have a normal life again. If there's anything the winter break showed me, it's that I still have friends and family in Virginia, even if none of it is perfect and it'll never feel the same again now that my brother is gone.

After several long minutes, Lukas looks up at me with something like regret on his face, and I know. It's not going to be fixed. Everything I touch will always be broken. This, most of all, because of how important it is.

"I'm sorry," he says aloud, and we all go still at the obvious news that follows. "I can't get any information recovered off the card. It's just... gone."

Swallowing, I nod, because if I open my mouth to speak embarrassing tears will come out. I can't stand the thought of them seeing me cry, especially because this is all my fault. I ruined everything.

Maybe I deserved to be bullied.

For a long moment, no one says anything. Cole breaks the silence with a single, inelegant, "Fuck me in the nuts."

Tanner scrunches up his nose. "No thanks?"

"What's with the question mark, Connally?" Blake shoots Tanner a look. "Were you considering it?"

"Maybe I was a little—"

"Shut up, all of you." Lukas quells the childish taunting with a single sentence and his narrowed blue eyes. Then he looks to me. "Brenna, what do you want to do next? We could try something else, like surveilling his house to see if we get anything. I know that property, and the fence is high, but we might be able to catch enough to get a warrant, if nothing else."

Clearing my throat, I do my best to swallow my grief and shame, telling myself that I'll get through this just like I got through Silas dying and even being kidnapped. "I think... maybe we should try to find those guys who took me last semester. The police haven't given me any updates in a while, and I think they're treating it like it's unsolvable. But if we get them, maybe they'll be able to explain why and how Hass 'found' me."

Cole arches a brow. "And how do we do that?"

"I don't know," I confess, frustrated. "They were like ghosts in the night. The only thing I know is that one of them mentioned a guy named Sal. And they wanted Silas's laptop." Daring to hope, I ask Lukas, "Any updates on that?"

He shakes his head, and my heart plummets into my stomach. "Sorry, Brenna. Your brother was very, very good at encryption and security. I haven't been able to crack it."

"Damnit." Rubbing my eyes, I admit, "I don't know what to do next. Maybe if we had more time... but the trail gets colder the longer we wait. And I have no idea what Silas even has on that partition. Or what password he used to secure it. I didn't know my brother at all, it turns out."

A moment of silence passes. Quietly, Blake points out, "She could still testify. Maybe the police will let her do it anonymously. If we talk to one of our guys—"

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