He stood back against the walls in the shadows created by the soft lights. She obviously needed time to process with the recent events. Her brother’s death. Still, she wasn’t thinking about her brother.

She was thinking about her father.

He watched the woods, peering through his night-vision monocular. He saw no heat signatures, except for an animal or two.

And if a drone was out there, watching, spying . . .

What exactly could he do about it?

I have to get my hands on that drone-neutralizing tech.

She sighed deeply, sounding like she held on to a hundred years of regret. He understood her melancholy but wished they were in a safer place.

“Tell me about him.”

Another sigh, then she said, “I was born in Sacramento, but when I was twelve, we moved to Silicon Valley. Dad was my best friend. We spent a lot of time together and used to mountain bike in the Sierra Nevada mountains.”

He heard the pain in her voice. Something had happened to strain their relationship. If he shared his own pain, then she might open up. And he wanted to know more about her. Personally, that was. Still, learning more could also help him discover the truth behind what was going on.

“I felt the same about my dad. He was my hero. I wanted to be just like him. He and I worked on an old ’67 Mustang together. And then he died in a search and rescue accident.”

In the end, he died for someone who turned out to be a criminal. Dad wouldn’t have let that stop him, though. Alex had struggled with the fact that Dad seemed to put others before his family. What about Mom? What about Alex? He needed his father. But deadly accidents happened in life—whether one was volunteering to save another or for a million other nonsensical reasons.

“I’m sorry, Alex.”

“So what happened to your father?”

“Oh, he didn’t die in anything as heroic as an SAR mission. He was killed in a car accident. Years before that, when we were all kids, Mom died of leukemia. But this house, the company . . . Dad had been working so hard to build something. Creating a legacy for us, he’d said. The only problem was that all his work took him away from me. He spent less and less time with me until . . .” Her words trailed off with an incredulous chuckle.

Alex’s skin prickled, and he peered through the monocular again. He couldn’t see anything in those woods, but he could hear something.

Someone.

She stiffened and sat up, alert. She heard it too.

“We’ve stayed too long,” he whispered.

They hurried into the house, pausing only once they were inside so Mackenzie could flip off most of the lights. Then at the front door, Alex froze. Mackenzie gasped.

The front door was wide open.