Page 70 of Revenge & Truth

Tapping my earpiece twice, I activated the connection so I could now hear and speak to Hound. “I’m good to go on my end,” I whispered.

“Just abooouutt finished,” Hound answered clearly, concentrating on what he was doing. “There. Okay, give me two minutes to check the connections and make sure I’m now lord of the castle.”

I snorted at that, hopping down from the bin, returning it to where I found it, and put my lockpicks away.

“We are good to go, Luna. You are but a shadow in the night. Go forth, seek and destroy thine enemy,” Hound cheered, making me roll my eyes at him.

God, he’s lucky he’s so fucking hot, and acting like a teenage boy didn’t make me want to jump him any less.

twenty-four

Not taking my eyes off the five screens set up in the command center I made in the van, I texted the guys she was in and no troubles in sight. When everyone agreed that I should be here with her to watch her back, I had to keep from doing something ridiculous like jumping up and doing a victory dance at the fact I didn’t have to watch helplessly through a screen.

Okay, so I’m still watching through my computer, but this time I was right outside if she needed me for anything. Every other job had me kicking myself that I hadn’t introduced myself to her in real life so I could be of help. None of that mattered now because, in the end, it worked out just as it should when I proved to her I could be an asset to her professional and personal life. The more personal side of things wasn’t going as quickly as I’d like it to, but I understood. She had a lot on her mind, and I was the last one to the party, so I had some catching up to do. Tonight was my night, though. I could feel it in my bones—well… a bone. Either way, I knew this was what we needed to bridge the gap between online Hound and physical Hound.

Scanning through all the cameras, I double-checked to make sure the house was empty. You never know with these types. For all we know, he could have a woman tied to a bed. “Just assuring you that you’re the only one in the house, Luna,” I told her, keeping my voice soft to not startle her.

“Thanks, I’m heading upstairs now,” she said. “Is the blueprint accurate when it showed the library on the main floor down the hall opposite the kitchen and garage?”

“Yes, when you get to the top of the stairs, right will be the kitchen, and left will be the library. Directly behind you is the front door, and you’re coming out the back of the stairs if that makes sense,” I explained.

Not wanting to distract her, I fell silent, watching the outside of the house as well as the inside. The neighborhood was quiet, hardly any traffic, with the majority of the homeowners being older. I made sure to check the surrounding homes, and we’d picked the perfect night to pull this off. The neighbor to the left was on vacation, to the right had tickets to a play in the city which would keep them out late, and across the alley was an old man with dementia and his wife who was blind as a bat. They had a caretaker during the day, but the wife managed things in the evening and on weekends.

Checking in on Astin, I found her in the library, running her hand along the spines of the books looking for the dummy. In Ivy’s information, she said it would be hollowed out, but I didn’t know if that meant the whole book was or if the old coot just carved out a chunk big enough to fit a key. Every so often, Astin pulled a book off the shelf, opened it, flipped through the pages, and put it back. After about ten tries, she grabbed one high up in an awkward corner, and when she opened it, I heard a soft, “Fuck yes.”

“Hound, I got the key,” she shared, waving it at the camera.

Here was this badass woman who could skin you alive if provoked, acting like a little kid winning the treasure hunt. “Nicely done, but I expected nothing less from the notorious Luna Selene.”

I saw her eyes roll at the comment then she left the book on the table in the middle of the room. “Guess what book it was in.”

“That’s a tricky question, there could be so many choices,” I pointed out. “The Key to Success, Taking Charge of Your Finances, Boundaries, Law for Dummies, I could go on and on.”

“Practical Ethics,” Astin said, trying to hold back her laughter. “He had to have done that on purpose, right? There’s no way he picked a book at random, and it just so happened to be the winner.”

“It’s clearly a book he isn’t reading, so I feel like it could go either way on how he made the choice,” I reasoned.

Once she was back in the basement, I didn’t have eyes on her except for the stairs and where the safe was hidden. These were added after the fact, causing me to think something might have happened where he was certain someone was going to steal from that safe, which stands to reason when a key piece of information or evidence goes missing. If the judge blabbed all this to Ivy after a few drinks and a hand job, then there’s no telling who else knows.

Astin finally appeared back on camera with her tools which she laid out in some sort of pattern that made sense to her. There were few things I loved more than watching this woman work. She always had an air of deadly grace about her, but when she was in the zone on her jobs, it was like watching an apex killer stalking its prey. Astin slipped on the leather gloves over the latex pair she was wearing and closed her eyes, both hands resting on the safe door. I couldn’t see her face, but I didn’t need to. This was a ritual she did before cracking any safe wide open.

The second Astin found her center, the work began. Efficient and deadly were two qualities the woman I was madly in love with displayed as she worked on the electronic keypad. Her deftness with a knife shone, cutting just deep enough to strip the plastic off, but not scalping the fragile copper with the light of a small flashlight was true skill. It took her seven minutes to hook up the codebreaker I created for her and slap the magnetized back to the door. That had been her suggestion and a brilliant one at that.

It wasn’t until she bent down to get the key we copied that I noticed the combination lock in the glow of her flashlight. “Fucking cocksucker,” I swore, knowing this would be the hard part for Astin.

There wasn’t a doubt in my mind she could figure out the combination, but we didn’t have unlimited time for her to work on it. Astin put in the keys and turned them, or at least tried to, but they wouldn’t budge. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Astin practically growled.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, watching her step back from the safe with her hands on her hips.

“I have to get the combination lock done before I can turn the keys. Earlier, when I was working with the one at home, I did that just because I was nervous about figuring it out. Once that was right, I then turned the keys to finish unlocking the safe,” Astin informed me.

Not really seeing the problem, I gave her a “Huh.”

Then an ear-splitting shriek sounded as if a fire alarm was going off. Unable to zoom in with these cameras and see what was happening, I looked through the house to make sure it was as I last saw it. There was nothing, no reason this should be happening, and no alarms for the security system had been tripped, leaving that the safe was making the fucking noise.

“What the fuck is going on, Hound?” Astin demanded.

“I don’t know, but nothing on my end is showing up,” I assured her. “It has to be the safe is boobytrapped.”