Right as the elevator doors open, I hear the stairwell door crash open. Jakob hustles me on, stabs the close buttonrepeatedly, and then the button for the ground floor. The door slides silently closed; as the view of the penthouse floor narrows into a thin vertical slice, I catch a glimpse of bodies crouch-walking past, machine guns tucked against shoulders.
I can only hope they didn't see me. The elevator lurches gently into motion, sinking toward the ground. The silent wait is awkward—on one hand, you're afraid that when the doors open, some asshole with a machine gun is going to shoot you to death, but on the other hand, it's hard to maintain active terror when you're idling around waiting for an elevator to stop.
The lift slows, settles; Jakob nudges me into the corner against the bank of buttons and presses back into me, physically shielding me with his body as the doors whoosh open.
"Fuck." Jakob's curse is a startled growl.
It's followed by a sharp, deafening bark, and the back wall of the elevator sprouts a hole.
He charges through the door, and then I can't see anything, can only hear grunting, grappling, curses, fists on flesh.
There's another blast of a firearm, this one muffled.
Silence.
I may not exactlylikethis mysterious Jakob, but he's my ticket to not dying, so I'd like him to not be dead, please.
I hold my breath and wait to find out.
3
UNKNOWN, OR UNKNOWABLE?
JAKOB
For a few moments, all I can do is lie there, gasping, hurting, and amazed that I pulled that off.
I think of Thomas, and the many, many hours we spent sparring and wrestling together, before his heart attack. God, that was a loss. Thomas wasn't just a driver—or just a bodyguard. He was my friend. One of two humans on this earth I've ever truly, totally trusted. Thomas went behind my back to helpheragainst my wishes, because he knew I'd lost myself to obsession. He was protecting me from me. He knew my secrets. He knew me when I was still Jakob, before Caleb Indigo ever existed. Thomas, in fact, was the first person I ever hired as a full-time employee. At that point, I had a lot of liquid capital and a burning passion to reinvent myself. My new persona would be bigger, better, richer, more powerful, more cunning, and more unstoppable than Jakob Kasparek ever was or could be. What I didn't have was an office to work out of, or much of a concrete plan besides getting into commercial real estate and keeping my businesses largely on the right side of the law.
I bought a used Escalade, contacted a headhunter, and conducted roughly a hundred interviews before hiring Thomas. It was something in his demeanor that got me. He was calm,polite, stoic, well-spoken…and underneath all that was a subtle but definite air of do-not-fuck-with-me hardness. For almost eighteen months, I lived out of a hotel and worked out of that SUV with Thomas as my sole employee. He was my constant companion for nearly twenty years, and when he died so unexpectedly, I wasn't sure I'd recover. He's the only reason I emotionally survived walking away fromher, from the life I’d so carefully constructed.
"Jakob?" A tentative female voice shakes me from my possibly concussed reverie.
"Yeah," I groan, sitting up and dislodging the body.
My belly is soaked with hot, wet blood—his. I look down at myself as I get to my feet; I'm stained with blood from chest to belt, and my black button-down is soggy and sticking to me. Yeah, I'm gonna need a change of clothes.
I hear shouting from the stairwell, and adrenaline sizzles through me all over again. I snag the dropped pistol and shove it into my waistband, rifle through the dead man's pockets—I take the two spare magazines for the pistol, a rubber-banded roll of twenties, a cell phone, and a folding pocketknife. Last, I strap the dead man's assault rifle across my chest and the single spare magazine for that.
"Let's go." I march away from the elevator in the direction of the stairwell to the parking garage.
Brys follows me. "Not to question your capabilities or anything, Jakob, but do you know what you're doing with that machine gun?"
"It's an assault rifle, not a machine gun," I correct. "And more or less, yes."
"Cool, I don't care what it's called. It's just that you didn't seem to be too accurate with that pistol. And, like, you threw the gun after it was empty. Now, I know I'm not, like, superknowledgeable about guns and whatever, but the only time I've ever seen a good guy throw a gun at a bad guy is in satire."
I open the door to the stairwell, poke my head, listen for a moment, and then creep in, Brys on my heels. "No, I do not have any formal training in the use of firearms. You've had the bad luck to fall in with the one person in my entire social circle who'snotan operator—and that's me."
I've watched plenty of training videos, however, and I have some idea of what I'm doing. I'd never say that to my Arrows, of course, because they'd laugh me out of the room. I tilt the rifle over the railing, peer down, listen, and then put my shoulder to the wall and slide around the stairwell, keeping as wide a field of view as possible on the way down. We reach the bottom, and I push the door open from one side, exposing as little of myself as possible, gesturing for Brys to stay well out of the way of any lines of fire, should anyone shoot at us.
The garage seems quiet and empty but for the rows of parked cars. I'm not one to take such things for granted, however. I glance over my shoulder at Brys, who is scanning the shadowy corners with wide eyes, gnawing on her plump, pink, kissable lips.
Wait, what?
I growl at myself for the errant, idiotic, unhelpful thought. Sure, we've kissed twice in the two hours I've known her. Sure, those kisses have left my pulse pounding, my blood sizzling with a superheated effervescence, and my long-suppressed libido on a rampage.
There's no space in this situation for me to be distracted by said plump, kissable lips. Or by her plump, round, spankable ass. Or those big, bouncy, kissable breasts.
