Then came the time for me to go back into Blazing Inx for some appointments, and I’d broken into a sweat at the thought of leaving her.
Picking up on it, and I guess knowing all about how I was feeling given how she’d lived until she moved back here, Sienna had suggested that she and the boys come in with me and sit in the break room.
She’d loaded up some work and some of her smaller projects and started working on them like nothing was different about the location to where she usually did it.
And that’s where we were at even now. Blaze, July, the guys from the club, and Ramon, popped into the break room periodically to spend time with her and watch her work, so she was rarely alone.
To some, it might seem stifling and overprotective, but for her, she got it and didn’t mind giving me that peace of mind, regardless.
It was like there was a space in that part of my life that’d been carved out just for Sienna. She fit in perfectly at Blazing Inx, like she’d always been part of it. It brought me some peace at a time when it was hard to get any, what with the constant worry over what was going to happen next.
At night, though, I’d wake up constantly, listening out for someone walking around or things being thrown into the yard. It was nuts because the chances of hearing the latter were slim to none, but my brain didn’t understand that right now.
We’d also managed to delay the visit from our families. I wasn’t sure if it was safe for them to come right now when we didn’t know how the drug smeared bone had gotten into the garden, and we also didn’t know where Hazel was.
After explaining it to her family and my mom, they’d agreed—reluctantly—to delay it for a couple of weeks. The closer we got to it, though, the more aware I was of how much time was passing with Hazel out there planning something. We didn’t know what, we didn’t know when, but going on her previous behavior, we knew it was going to happen.
And then there was the information Nico had given me, having watched hours of footage to find out how the bone had gotten into the yard without tripping a sensor.
There was a setting on all security cameras, including the plug-in ones you can buy everywhere now, that lets you set a weight and size for objects passing through the sensors. If it was over the set size and weight, it triggered the alarm on them. This meant if a bird flew by or, say, a cat walked in front of it, you wouldn’t get an alert that’d scare the shit out of you for no reason. We also didn’t know what day it’d been put in the yard, so they’d had to sift through hours of footage, looking for something dropping or being thrown.
It was Sage who’d found it. Two days before the dogs had gotten sick, something had flashed vertically on the screen, landing in a small patch of tall grass near the fence that bordered the field behind Sienna’s house. You had to squint and look hard to see it happen, but sure enough, there it was.
We’d tried slowing it down, but it hadn’t made a difference, and we’d been at a loss until we’d noticed the shadow on the ground to the side of where the bone had landed.
She’d gotten a motherfucking drone.
We should have considered it in this day and age, but it just wasn’t something that’d occurred to anyone inside and outside the club. But now that we knew, we were prepared for anything and everything.
Grinding my teeth together with frustration, I rolled onto my side and pulled Sienna closer to me. The thought of anything happening to her again was eating away inside me and making my gut hurt.
Every night I did this, and every night the only way I could get even a little bit of sleep was if I listened to the rhythmic sound of her breathing. It was relaxed, she was sleeping through the night, and it was a peaceful sleep because she trusted me.
I was just closing my eyes, hoping to catch even an hour, when my phone beeped on the table next to my head. Picking it up, I squinted at the words on it and froze. It was an alert I’d never expected during all of this.
The alarm at Blazing Inx had been triggered.
Squeezing out from under Sienna, I moved around the room, pulling my clothes on, and getting ready to jump on my bike.
I’d never leave her on her own without telling her first, though, so I gently shook her after I’d pulled my boots on.
“Baby, wake up.”