Page 104 of Distress Signal
“Twenty-four…” Lane whispered, eyes widening, all the blood draining from his face. “Aria?”
I could only nod, shifting out of the way so Sutton and her partner, Thomas, could enter the house. When they were gone, Lane turned to me.
“What thefuckhappened?”
“I have no idea,” I told him honestly, though I hated the admission.
My baby sister was in there, unconscious on the kitchen floor, blood pouring from her head, and I had no fucking ideawhy.
Trey was moving toward his own vehicle before Lane could make the demand, and we all followed along, Crew rushing to catch up after handing Aria’s care off to Sutton and Thomas. In the hatch of Trey’s SUV was a mobile command center of sorts, with all kinds of complicated looking equipment designed to allow him to check security systems remotely if something—like this—came up while he was on the road.
“There aren’t any cameras over here,” I reminded him, silently kicking myself for drawing the line there when he asked if he could install them. I thought the motion detectors, flood lights, and security system would be sufficient. I didn’t exactly live in a high crime area.
But I should’ve known better, should have realized there was no such thing astoo muchwhere the safety of my family was concerned.
And now, because of me, because I swore nothing bad could ever happen out here, my sister had been hurt.
As if sensing my distress, Crew put a hand on my shoulderand squeezed. I knew he meant well, so I did my best not to shake him off.
I didn’t need to be comforted right now, though. What I needed was to beat in the face of the fucker who had done this to my sister.
“I know there aren’t cameras over here,” Trey said in answer to my comment. He withdrew a laptop and fired it up, tapping around on the screen until a set of feeds appeared. “But there are at your house.”
Trey rewound the footage an hour, and my brothers and I watched the screen raptly, waiting for the commotion we knew was coming.
The distant porch lights provided a small bit of light. Trey zoomed the feed in as close as he could, and I had to admit, I was impressed. While the picture became a little grainy, I thought it had more to do with the darkness than the loss of quality.
“I got the motion sensor alert at three seventeen,” he muttered to himself, stroking a few more keys that fast-forwarded the footage to the correct time stamp.
Right on cue, the flood lights mounted to the corners of the covered porch clicked on, illuminating a dark, hooded figure.
Seemingly without a care in the world, they ascended the stairs and walked right to the door. Trying the knob and discovering it locked, the fucker wasted no time turning and driving their elbow into one of the glass windowpanes.
“And that’s when I got the breach alert,” Trey said.
I watched the timestamp in the corner of the footage, waiting as five minutes ticked by where nothing happened. The flood lights extinguished, tossing the whole scene back into darkness.
Inside the house, the kitchen light flicked on, and we all watched in horror as two figures struggled, framed by the window that overlooked the yard. One of the figures disappeared from view while the other moved back through the house, sprinting through the door. The flood lights popped on again,catching the black-clad person running toward the left and out of the frame.
“Aria wasn’t the target.”
I could feel three sets of eyes snap to me, and Crew asked, “What do you mean?”
“Whoever this was…they’re after Reagan. No one but us knows Reagan moved in with me. Aria’s assailant broke into the place they thought she’d been staying and attacked the tall, blonde woman they encountered.”
“Then why is Aria still here and not being held hostage somewhere like Reagan’s sister?”
“They realized they made a mistake. Saw Aria’s face, realized she wasn’t who they were after, and bolted.”
“I suppose that does make a certain amount of sense,” Lane gritted out. “Doesn’t change the fact that our sister wasattacked,” he added in a hiss. He turned to Trey. “Send this to me so I can forward it onto Addie. The FBI might be able to get more out of it than you can.”
“Fine.”
I knew Trey only agreed so easily to avoid an argument. Emotions were high enough at the moment; we didn’t need to add infighting to the mix. But I also knew he’d spend hours in front of his computer, scouring the footage from some usable information to figure out who’d done this to Aria.
Speaking of Aria, behind us came commotion at my front door, and we all turned to see Sutton and Thomas wheeling our baby sister out toward the ambulance.
“We’re taking her to Boise!” Sutton shouted. “Any of you want to come with her?”
