“Ladies and gents, please leave via the stairs,” he yelled along the corridor, “but be aware. Nothing good ever happens when an alarm goes off around here. Motherfuckers.” His last word was muttered like he hadn’t meant for us to hear it.
Jarrid pulled his gun from the holster on his side. “I’m not wrong. Last time the alarm went off here, I shot the windows out to get someone to help me with Sean after some fucker shot him with a weaponised drone.”
“Woah, shit. Okay, well, you’re in charge of making sure I don’t get shot. Thank you very much,” I declared.
Jarrid chuckled as we made our way to the stairs to get out of the building, wondering what the hell was going on.
“False alarm,”Sean muttered as we walked back into the tech room. The alarms had brought him and Thomas rushing back here because, like Jarrid, they were suspicious when they went off.
“Nothing is ever a false alarm around here,” Thomas replied, his voice tinged with anger.
“Yeah, well, whatever it was, no one’s getting in here,” Jarrid countered as I stopped in front of my desk, where my bag was still slung over the back of my chair, trying to work out what I was seeing.
“What’s this?” I asked, reaching for a pen I’d discarded earlier and using it to pick up the black material draped across my keyboard because I didn’t want to touch it until I knew what it was. It was instantly recognisable. “It’s a skeleton mask,” I saidas horror overtook me. “The same one the burglar at Preston’s house was wearing.”
“You’re sure?” Thomas asked, appearing at my side.
I tossed it down onto my desk like it had burnt me. “The image is etched into my brain; it’s the last thing I saw before I took a tumble down the stairs, with a helping hand from the little fucker who kicked me.”
Thomas spun around, his eyes scanning the space. “How the hell did it get in here? Shut this place down. Someone used that alarm to break in here and leave this. I want to know who and how.” And there was my deadly boss, the one I’d heard about over the years but never seen fully in action.
“Boss,” Sean replied on instinct, given he was in charge these days, but I guessed these two had their roles ingrained into them, just like I did. I opened my computer and flicked through the video footage of the basement floors until I found what I was looking for: the same small figure walking through the locked halls of the basement with a hood pulled up so I couldn’t see their face.
“Here,” I called, and Thomas and Jarrid gathered behind me, Sean currently scouring the building to see if our visitor was still here.
We watched as the intruder used a keycard to unlock the doors, moving through the space like they knew where they were going. Then, to make matters worse, they pressed their finger to the biometric scanner, and the fucking door to the tech room opened.
“They work here?” Thomas said through gritted teeth as I pulled up the log that told us exactly who had entered and when.
The silence that descended as we read the file was deafening because it didn’t make any sense.
“It was me?” I said when I finally found the words to explain the information we were seeing. “That’s impossible. It doesn’teven look like me, and I was outside with you guys.” I twisted and looked up, knowing that neither man would think the short, skinny guy on the screen was me.
We all watched as the person left the mask on my desk before walking into the armoury and coming out with a handgun and ammo, managing to evade their face being caught by a single camera as they moved through the building, back out to the stairwell.
“Ooo, goody, they’re now armed as well. More reason for me to fucking end them. Question is, how the hell did that guy walk into a building that should have been locked down tighter than Fort Knox, and why?” Thomas hissed.
No one replied because we had no idea, but I was determined to find out because this was starting to feel personal.
40
ROMAN
I got homelate after hours of trying to work out who the hell broke into Lanton House and used my keycard that was still firmly in my possession, and my fingerprint… again, which was still where it should be.
I bent to pick up the post, throwing the pile along with my keys onto the side table just as a message beeped on my phone. I sighed because I was exhausted and just wanted to grab some food and go watch Hana from the comfort of my office while she went about her evening. The thought warmed me, but then instantly curdled as I pulled up the message.
Unknown: I have your girl. If you want to see her alive, be at the following address in 90 minutes. Bring your laptop. Don’t tell anyone, or she dies.
It gave an address in a place I’d never heard of, and then another message popped through that made the air go from my lungs, and I stumbled, hitting the side table with my hip as I stared at a black and white picture of Hana. Her tear-stained face stared down the lens of the camera as a gag silenced her.
I didn’t hesitate, my laptop still in the bag hanging from my shoulder, grabbing my keys and slamming out of the front door, not even bothering with the alarm. I didn’t care about anything other than getting to Hana.
I drove like a maniac,but it still took me almost the full ninety minutes to reach the edge of… nowhere, it appeared. An ominous feeling curdled in the pit of my stomach as the trees began to get denser as I drove through a forest. There were no streetlights, the greenery hiding even the light from the moon, so my headlights glowed in the darkness like ghosts leading me to fuck knows where.
My hands tightened on the steering wheel as I checked the sat nav again, making sure I was going in the right direction as my thoughts returned to the photo of Hana. I wasn’t a violent man—I usually left that to the men and women I worked with—but I whispered a promise to rip the still beating heart from whoever had taken her.
My heart leapt into my throat when the road opened up to show a small cabin in the distance. Alone in the night, like an oasis, it offered a promise of shelter, when in fact, I knew it was probably more like a lion’s den, and I had no idea if I’d come out alive.
