But I can’t focus, because Noah fucking Marlowe is on top of me, and I can feel every part of him press against every part of me. And I flash back to the party when our bodies mashed together and I squeezed him and that fucking beautifulmoanhe made—
“Gunshots,” I answer when I find my voice. “They’re gunshots.”
“I knowthat. I mean, why the fuck is some maniac shooting at your house?”
I have no idea. Well, I have some idea. If I’m right, it’s very, very bad. But I’m not ready to look at this situation intellectually while bullets still riddle my front door.
I grab Noah’s hand and drag him to his feet, then take off down the hall.
“Mackenzie, we have to—”
Queen Boudica saunters out of the kitchen, licking her lips. “Mew?” she asks. I fling her into my arms and toss her over my shoulder. She howls with outrage and scrambles for freedom, but no way am I letting her run around with an active shooter outside.
“Mackenzie, what are—”
“Shut the fuck up,” I growl. I drag Noah into the study and yank the first volume ofThe Decline and Fall of the Roman Empirein a sharp downward motion. A bookcase swings outward, revealing a steel-lined room about the size of an elevator shaft. I leap inside. Noah stands there, mouth open. I fist his shirt and yank him in after me.
I slam my hand into the control panel, and the door swings shut, the locks engaging with an electronic hiss.
“Mew!” Queen Boudica cries.
“Where the fuck are we?”
“Panic room,” I gasp. Is it just me, or is it hard to breathe in here?
It’s probably something to do with having my chest pressed up against Noah. Queen Boudica squirms against my grip, her claws raking across my shoulder. I relax my hold so she can step onto the top of the control unit. She curls up there, whipping her tail across my face as if to inform me she’s pissed off.
“Is this room secure?” Noah asks. His breath’s a little raspy, too. I chalk that up to the fact he just about had his ass made into Swiss cheese.
“It’s invisible from the outside. You’d have to know it was here in order to locate it. So unless the shooter is some old close family friend my father let in on his little secret, we should be safe.”
“I don’t know what’s safe right now,” Noah growls. “Someone shot at us, and now I’m locked in here withyou.”
I nod, then realize that’s pointless to do in the dark. I feel along the panel for the button that turns the internal light on. The first try, I get a sprinkler. Queen Boudica yowls with fury. I quickly turn that off again. On the second try I pop up the footage from the CCTV cameras. On the third try I manage to get a low red LED strip to light up, illuminating the corners of the room and giving me a faint outline of Noah’s features.
“We can’t have the lights on.” He reaches up to turn it off.
“Relax. They can’t see it from outside. The walls are so thick, we won’t even show up if they do an infrared scan of the building. At least, that’s what the manual said.”I think.After I read all the books in the library, I moved on to the panic room manual. (Hey,youtry being stuck in a mansion for four years with only a cat for company). I got halfway through the weighty tome when Queen Boudica let a rat loose in the ballroom and I used the manual to crush it. I wasn’t going to pick it up again once I’d covered it in rat innards.
But Noah doesn’t need to know that.
“Impressive.” Noah gazes around, his hands fiddling with something in his trouser region. I hear a clattering noise. “Shit. I dropped my phone.”
“Serves you right for playing with yourself during our time of crisis.” I focus on the CCTV cameras, flicking through the different views. I can see the damage to the front door and stone pillars from the bullets, but no sign of a shooter near the gate or at the perimeter.
Noah does this weird penguin hobble, but his shoulders are too broad for him to bend down. “Can you pick it up? We need it to try and call for help.”
“Oh sure,” I roll my eyes, even though he probably can’t see. “With you in here taking up all the valuable real estate. I’ll just wrench my arms out of my sockets to save your precious phone.”
“You should be able to manage it. You were always freakishly flexible in gym.”
“There’s flexible and then there’s defying the laws of physics. Besides,” I slam my palm into an invisible panel on the wall. A dial pad and receiver slide out. “We don’t need your phone. This is a secret line. No one can tap it.”
“Impressive.” There’s a dark edge to Noah’s voice I don’t like. “Howard Malloy thinks of everything.”
I grab the phone on the wall and punch in a number. “Antony? I need your ass over here, now.”
“At your Barbie Dreamhouse? Why? Someone giving you trouble again?”
