Page 54 of Redemption

“Won’t she know that someone has opened the gates?” Riot asks as we head through the house and out the front door.

Good question, and not one that I had thought to ask.

Pete shakes his head. “No, the cameras are looping for another hour or so, and there is no security on the gate that would let her know that the gates have been opened.”

“The more you tell us about her security, the more certain I am that she intended to stay a civilian and keep out of the criminal world,” I say. A thought occurs to me, and I add, “Or at least that she wanted it to look that way, so no one looked too closely. Or maybe she didn’t spend very long here.”

“This was her main residence from what I can gather,” Pete corrects me. He adds, “I only got a quick glimpse of the emails, but she has been talking to Drake for a long time. I would be surprised if she ever stopped.”

“Someone else can figure out her motivations, and what the fuck Drake is up to because I can guarantee that he is up to fucking something,” Luc mutters.

He’s not mad. It’s just a fact.

I can understand why he wants to cut them off completely. They have caused him nothing but pain, and there is no logical or necessary reason why he needs to be involved anymore. If he’s not involved, then we aren’t involved. We’re a team, and with something like this, that’s how we work.

Mr. R will understand, and there are plenty of teams at the organization who are more than capable of taking this over and uncovering all of the twists and turns that I am sure the case holds. He might even hand it over to Zemi and her guys.

Linda may have a now-proven link to Hunt, and Hunt is our case, but the Hunt case is huge and has multiple teams working several different angles. Hell, Rylie is off taking out the high-profile people that have links to Hunt but are in positions of power and can’t be taken in by usual means. That’s what we do after all, we step in and take over when the usual law enforcement services can’t. We can also go further than they can.

Which is one of the many reasons why we are all with the organization. We know that while there are some rules that we have to follow, there are very few, if any, that would mean we would have to let someone go because of some loophole or connection that they have.

We can almost always bring the person we are after to justice.

We head through immaculate gardens, which are quite honestly as boring as the inside of the house, and I have no idea how she’s managed that. I have never found nature boring, and yet she’s somehow managed to make it so.

The puppy is trotting at Luc’s side, as we head down the really, really long driveway. I mean, there’s privacy, and then there’s this. Although I suppose we can’t talk because our driveway is crazy long, we are at least fairly close to a town when we get to the bottom of the driveway.

Finally, the gate comes into view, and Luc picks up the puppy so she doesn’t get lost and because she’s only small, and that was already a long way to walk for a little puppy, so her little legs have got to be tired.

Everyone stays silent until we get into the trees and start to head back to where the cars are parked.

“Have you got a name for her yet?” Rage asks as he walks next to Luc and strokes the puppy's head as she rests happily in Luc’s arms.

“I think I’m going to call her Wynnie,” he says, with a soft smile that turns into a chuckle when she moves her head and starts licking his face before she starts to nibble on his beard.

I giggle. “That’s super cute. I think she approves.”

“It definitely suits her,” Trick agrees with a smile.

Jensen looks at Pete pleadingly as he falls over yet another tree root, and curses at it like it tripped him on purpose. “Dude, how much further? The heat here makes trekking through this unbearable. Not that I find that bearable under normal circumstances.”

Pete winces. “Sorry, we’ve probably got another thirty minutes or so of walking. If it makes you feel better, if we had come out of the other exit in the fence, then we would have an hour and a half left.”

“It does make me feel better, although I have to admit that it did not feel like it took this long to get to the house in the first place,” Jensen grumbles.

“My legs would like to argue that it definitely took that long,” I tell him, pulling a face that leaves no room for interpretation about how sore my legs are. Just in case I add, “I am fucking exhausted.”

“Me too,” Atlas agrees.

“We’ll get back to the house, eat, and I’ll let Mr. R know what we found. Pete can send the info over, and I’ll request pickup for tomorrow. There’s no point in us hanging around for any longer than we need to,” Trick summarizes again, I think he’s hoping that it will make the walk go quicker.

It doesn’t.

“It would have been nice to meet the team that’s out here,” I reply. “We rarely get to meet the teams in the places that we go to, and Oberon sounds pretty cool from the one-sided conversation I listened to on the plane.”

Trick rolls his eyes and chuckles, “Yeah, he seems nice.”

Atlas nods, “Yeah, I’ve heard some pretty wild stories about them. They sound like great fun. Apparently, they were going after someone on the island, and two of the team ended up getting drunk with him, and after the guy confessed, they all ended up crying and hugging because they’d done the typical drunk person thing and become best friends with each other. They still write to him in prison.”