The Squad

That’s not what’s worrying me now, though. I don’t think he picked up on it, but she seemed to give in way too easily at the mention of my wife’s name. Not her married name, but her maiden name. My mind never stops working, so I started putting two and two together. Knowing what she’d escaped from and my wife’s work, I was trying to put the two together and coming up empty when I was alerted to someone in the lab.

Not just the lab, but the area I’d given little Catalina to work in that was all hers. I pulled up the room and saw the Flanagans leaving. “I wonder what they were doing in there?” I could rewind the footage but didn’t need to when I saw them making their way through the house, heading in my direction.

Most of the others had already gone to bed for the night since it was way past midnight here, not sure what these two were still doing up. Then again, I’d given Arianna a lot to think about, and her husband, like most of the men here if not all, doesn’t leave her side, so of course, he’s with her.

I put aside my own thoughts when they entered my office minutes later. “You two are still up, was there something you needed?” She looked from her husband to me and back and bit into her lip. “I don’t know how to tell you this, I mean regardless of everything else, we’re guests in your home and our daughter…”

I hid my grin at how flustered she was. It was a safe bet that she wasn’t used to this. The woman looking sheepishly embarrassed in front of me because her kid had committed the social faux pas of violating a host’s home is the same woman who’d pinned a two-hundred-pound man to a wall with an arrow. It’s almost incongruous.

“Your daughter, what? Just spit it out.” I guess they’d found Catalina’s evidence. I wonder why she’d left it lying around? Or maybe she wasn’t done snooping. Damn kid is too brilliant for her own good. No doubt, she knows that the others would be back while she’s asleep, and she doesn’t want to miss anything.

Arianna’s face turned red, and her husband looked at me like it was my fault. Since I knew he was already looking for any excuse to light into me because my little reveal had upset her earlier, I decided to put her out of her misery. “You found the printout of the earlier conversations that went on in the conference room.” They both looked at me in shocked surprise.

“You knew that there was a bug in there?” I just smiled at them. “Of course, once bitten twice shy.” I wasn’t about to let Catalina get the drop on me a second time. She’s a genius sure, but she’s still an eight-year-old little girl with a one-track mind. I figured she and her little delinquent friends would want to stick their noses into what we were doing here. They’re no different than the wives in that aspect, after all.

I’m in the process of getting her friend Nia here as well, but with the restrictions, it’s taking a little bit longer than expected. I can’t wait to see what the three of them get up to with all the resources I have here. The resources I have all intentions of letting them have complete access to.

I had no doubt when I watched her from my hiding place earlier that she would do it, and to say I was proud of her is an understatement. The way she’d waltzed in looking all innocent, the way she’d sat at my desk and swiveled around in the chair that was twice her size like any normal kid would while slipping her little listening device beneath the desk was priceless.

I didn’t make a sound, didn’t give myself away when she cased the room as if sensing my presence before jumping down from the chair and slipping from the room. I didn’t tell her dad what she’d been up to because I think he can do with a break from her antics. Though I do get a kick out of watching that tic in his jaw go haywire whenever she gets up to something. He’s gonna have a fit when he learns what his wife is up to.

Cierra thinks I don’t know what she and her crew have been up to since they got here, and the men who stayed back here who didn’t go with Lyon’s crew are having a hell of a time keeping them in line while trying to pretend that they’re not all tagged. If I didn’t have this place wired right, I’m afraid their spyware would’ve malfunctioned. There were so many on the island at once.