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"You need stitches," Mason says.

"I need this phone unlocked,” I snap.

"Miles…"

"Mason." I don't look up from the device. "I'm fine."

"You have blood coming from every cut on your face.” Now he sounds annoyed, and worried about me. I don’t think Mason has ever seen me like this before.

"I know."

"And your eye…"

"I know." The first layer of the phone's security comes apart under the bypass tool, at hardware level, it’s the same gap that exists in most commercial devices if you know where to look. "Give me twenty minutes."

He goes quiet. That's the best I'm going to get from him right now and we both know it. But I also know the moment he walks away he will be on the phone to either Cain or dad.

The second layer takes eleven minutes. My hands are steady. That's the thing I notice, my hands are completely steady despite the ribs and the eye and the unpleasant warmth spreading across the left side of my face where the impact was hardest, and I’m sure is covered in blood. Steady hands are a choice, not a condition. Cain taught me that and I've never forgotten it.

The phone unlocks, and the front door opens while I'm working. I hear them upstairs. I knew Mason or Delcan would call them.

I hear voices, but I don't look up until a hand lands on my shoulder and I recognize the weight of it before I see the face.

Cain.

I turn to see Hayden behind him, and Lileah. I hear my mother's voice from the hallway saying something to Mason that I can't make out. That’s when I see Doc carrying a medical bag. I look back at Cain who’s staring at my face for a moment.

Dad will be so pissed off that he had to go to Europe for a business meeting, but I’m sure mom or Hayden will call him the second they know what happened.

Cain pulls out a chair and sits down across from me. "Talk," he says.

I tell him everything, from the screen going dark, the feed, the family photos loading one at a time, and the images of the house. Then about their entry to the house. There were three of them, possibly four. And finally, the message they delivered on their way out.

I know they’ll be back if I don’t stop. I won’t stop, and they don’t scare me.

Cain listens without interrupting. That's always how he listens, with his complete attention. It’s the quality of a man who has been receiving bad news for thirty years and knows the value of letting it finish before he responds.

When I stop talking, he looks at the phone. "And that?" He points to it.

"Theirs. I took it during the fight." I disconnected the bypass tool. The device is fully open now, the contents accessible. "I haven't gone through it yet. I wanted to wait."

Something moves through his expression that I can't fully read. "You waited?"

"You should see it at the same time I do. Plus, I need to figure out how they got into the system and make sure it doesn’t happen again."

He looks at me for a moment, then he nods.

The doctor appears at my shoulder, but I ignore him.

“Lincoln’s here too; it will be faster with the three of us working on this together. We’ll get the system secure again.” Cain smiles then lets Doc sit in his seat to get me cleaned up.

***

It took four hours to get my system back and protected. I have more than five different systems running to make sure no one can get through, and my laptop with Sadie on it has four different VPN’s with extra protection on it. I can’t risk her getting hurt.

The phone is connected and the contacts load first.

Not names, codes. Alphanumeric identifiers, these are usually used by people who don't want their communication network traceable to anyone. There are seventeen contacts. Each one is tagged with a city code that I start matching against the geographic overlay in my head before I've consciously decided to.