CASSIE
I frozeand looked at Hawk, then Jagger and Vigo.
Jagger held a finger to his lips and we held still, waiting to hear the sound again.
But this time when noise came from the end of the hall it wasn’t a piece of furniture bumped on accident but the slow, careful footsteps of someone approaching my dad’s office.
Panic filled my chest, adrenaline urging me to run or hide.
Hawk pointed to the other end of the hall outside my dad’s office, opposite the direction we’d come from the elevator.
He mouthed the words, “Another staircase.”
Shit.
Shit, shit, shit.
He grabbed my shoulders and pushed me behind him and the Hawks moved carefully toward the door of my dad’s office. In the hall, footsteps continued to advance.
Slowly. Carefully.
Jagger lowered his mouth to my ear. “When we tell you to run, make a break for the stairwell.”
He turned away before I could ask more questions, and they propelled me toward the door to my dad’s office, their bodies awall of muscled flesh that kept me from seeing anything in front of them.
We were only a couple feet from the door when they made eye contact with each other.
Then there was a flurry of movement.
Vigo pulling me into the hall behind them as a group of men a few feet away shouted.
I only caught flashes of them — dressed in black and carrying scary-looking weapons that looked like they’d been ripped out of a war movie — around the Hawks.
“Stop!” one of them yelled in an accented voice.
Before I knew what was happening, Vigo threw his bat, faster and harder than I would have thought possible. It winged through the air end over end, smacking into the guy in front, who dropped his weapon and tipped backwards, knocking the men behind him off balance.
“Run!” Jagger shouted.
I turned and bolted for the stairwell that had brought us to the second floor.
Behind us, the other men collected themselves and started moving, and when I looked over my shoulder, I saw that they had their guns drawn.
But as we skidded toward the elevator, it wasn’t gunfire I heard behind us but the clink of something small and tinny hitting the floor of the lobby.
I froze on instinct, following the sound, and spotted the grenade, its pin missing, lying a few feet from the elevator.
Time seemed to slow down, everything happening in slow motion.
The Hawks turning from the grenade.
To each other.
To me.
The men in the hall, not advancing.
Retreating.
