I stopped and pointed up, motioning for us to climb. I quickly checked the gun in my boot and my knife in the other, making sure they were secure. I was nervous as hell. Like, heart-racing, lungs seizing, pins and needles shooting up and down my spine and massaging my head kind of nervous. Panic attack nervous.

Camden placed his hand on my shoulder and held it there until I felt like I could push through it and go on. There was no choice. We committed to being heroes – we couldn’t back out because I felt like a coward at the last minute.

Heroes. I liked the sound of that.

I gave him a smile that probably looked depressing as hell. Then, with another boost from him, I climbed up the tree until we were at the right set of branches. I lay down on it, straddling it with my arms and legs, and shimmied my way across the branch. It dipped a bit with my weight but not by much. I moved as slowly as possible, not wanting anyone to notice a tree with leaves shaking for no reason and hoped it would be passed off as an animal or something.

I looked down. I had cleared the wall but it was a fifteen foot drop to the ground, thankfully in an area behind a set of flowering bushes. I hoped my ankles would forgive me.

I glanced over my shoulder at Camden who was waiting at the end of the branch, barely visible against the tree. I nodded at him, then quickly swung under the branch and let go. I landed on the ground with a soft thud and then rolled once I realized my legs weren’t reliable. I lay on my back and looked up at the tree, staying low and waiting until Camden had joined me.

I could barely see him go across the branch but I did see the branch start to sag dramatically under his weight. Fuck, him being 6′2″ and all muscle, he had to be at least 60 pounds heavier than me. He paused, probably unsure of whether he should continue or not.

Suddenly a light lit up the wall in front of me and I could hear the whir of a golf cart’s engine in the distance. I froze and prayed they wouldn’t come any closer, that they wouldn’t shine up in the tree. Camden stayed completely still. So did my heart.

After a few nerve-bursting moments, the light finally moved along the wall and the golf cart continued on its way. I slowly turned over and poked my head around the bushes. It looked like this was part of their nightly patrol.

“Camden, hurry,” I whispered as softly as I could. He heard me. The branch started moving again, the leaves shaking. I winced.

Then the branch broke with the loudest snap.

I gasped as Camden and the branch came crashing down to the ground. I quickly scampered over to him and looked around in a panic, hoping no one heard anything. Camden got up, staying low and put out his hand to let me know he was okay. We stayed huddled next to each other, frozen in fear, waiting for time to pass, for our passage to go unnoticed.

When no lights came back on us and we didn’t hear anyone approaching, we exhaled in unison. I patted him on the back, to let him know we were okay so far. He nodded to the row of hedges that lined the lit path nearby. If we stayed behind them, there was a chance we wouldn’t be seen and it would lead us all the way to the back of the mansion.

We got down on our stomachs and started crawling on the stiff grass, sticking as close to the hedge as possible. I almost found it amusing that we were doing moves that belonged in a Mission Impossible movie but considering this was an actual life and death situation and Tom Cruise wasn’t going to start sprinting out of the bushes to save us, it wasn’t very funny. Maybe one day I’d look back on the impossibility of this all, what we had to go through, the things we had to do. One day, if I was lucky.

We crawled until my limbs were thoroughly scratched up and I added grass stains to the things I was currently covered with, but we eventually came to the house. Camden stopped and I crawled up around the side of him. He brought his mouth to my ear and whispered. “There are lights on at the farthest end of the house and upstairs. There are no lights here and there’s a door. Do you think you can tell if it’s alarmed?”

I nodded. I knew when security systems were up and running and with luck I could defeat them. That is if Travis had your regular home alarm system. If this place was wired like Fort Knox, I had no chance in hell. Only problem was, it would be noisy.

I whispered back. “Smash and crash. I can use my gun. But if there’s anyone around where the alarm panel is, they’ll hear it.”

“Let’s hope it’s not alarmed then.”

“Let’s hope there’s no one on the other side of that door, period.”

He quickly kissed me. “If anything goes wrong, you get out. You run like hell. Don’t worry about me.”

Like hell I would run away. But I nodded to placate him and took in a deep breath. We looked around to make sure the coast was clear and ran across the path for the door, flattening ourselves against the wall. We waited a few moments and then I quickly reached into my pocket where I had stuck with lock-picking tools from earlier. Same ones I used to break into Camden’s house.

It didn’t take me long to pick the lock. That was the easy part. The hard part was having the courage to open the door. Though Travis’s house wouldn’t have a system connected to the police in any way, it would be connected to some monitoring station in the house or even outside of it. If the door was alarmed, I had 30–60 seconds to find the alarm panel and smash it with the butt of my gun. If we were lucky, the beeps wouldn’t be too loud and no one would hear me destroy the panel before it had a chance to signal that some had broken in.

If we were unlucky … well …

I readied myself, getting my head into game mode, finding the confidence I had somewhere inside me and opened the door.

I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath until we were both inside. It was dark where we were, with tile floors. Maybe a laundry room. I heard the beeps being set off, sounding like sirens in the night even though in reality they weren’t too loud. I followed the sounds, walking as quietly as possible with Camden right behind me then found the alarm in a closet. I took out my gun and with a quick jab smashed the panel, Camden’s hands catching the falling plastic and glass before it clattered to the floor.

The alarm was disabled. Now we had to stand there and wait for our fate, for the guns that would be inevitably drawn on us if we’d be heard. We listened, hearing only the crickets outside the door that was still open and the sound of each other breathing. It must have been the longest couple of minutes of my life and yet I was terrified to move, to open the door and explore the rest of the house. I felt safe in the darkness of that room with Camden at my side.

Finally his hand grasped mine. It was wet with sweat and somehow knowing he felt as scared as I did made me feel better, that I wasn’t alone.

He brought out his cell phone from his pocket and shone it around us briefly. We were in fact in a large laundry room, two washers, two dryers and a linen closet where the alarm had been. He aimed the light at the closed door that led into the rest of the house and then put his phone away. I heard him reach into my backpack and withdraw his gun. I gripped mine tightly in my hands and he went for the door, opening it as slowly as possible.

We poked our heads out into a long hallway, the only illumination coming from a green-glass lamp on a table at the end of it. The walls were done up with stoic portraits of Mexican men, posing gallantly like royalty. I had to wonder if Travis actually built this place or if he just took it over from someone else in the cartel. The thought of him, his cold inhuman eyes, made me shiver but I had to let the feeling go. This was far from over.

I wondered where we could go next. Though there were a few doors and rooms coming off of the hallway, it wasn’t exactly smart to start opening each one and asking if Gus was there. We’d have to spy, observe, hunker down somewhere until we knew what was what and who was where.