Page 31 of A Knight’s Revenge: The Complete Series

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“ C lear!” Max said in a low voice, his words amplified by the earpiece I wore in my right ear. “Entering back alley now.”

We crept into the deserted alley behind Spencer Tower where the door to the internal fire escape stairwell was located.

We knew from general reconnaissance that security guards occasionally used this spot for smoke breaks, but fortunately for whomever was on duty tonight, they’d decided not to time their break with our heist.

Max and I were both armed and were not going to hesitate to hurt anyone who got in our way—there was no time to fuck around.

Once we used Bennett’s fob to enter the building, we risked alerting anyone who might be monitoring the Heir’s comings and goings that something unusual was going on.

We were going in with brute force, if necessary, because this was our one shot at getting into James Spencer’s personal safe.

It was also possible this would all be over before it began, depending on whether Bennett had already figured out his fob was missing and alerted Spencer security to revoke its access.

I’d done my best to buy us time, breaking his key chain like it had been dropped and stepped on somewhere on the path from the docks to the locker room, and I’d strewn his car key haphazardly in the grass nearby.

If he retraced his steps, he’d at least spend some time hunting for the fob on the vast lawn that separated the docks from the locker rooms.

It had been exactly ninety minutes since he’d left me in that shower.

Adrenaline coursed through my veins at the prospect of finally getting into Spencer Tower, and it was the only reason I was able to keep my feet moving under me.

Max hadn’t been lying when he said everything was ready to go as soon as I pulled the trigger.

We’d known that of all the jobs, this one was going to have the fastest running clock.

“External cameras have been handled,” Dom said into our ears. “As have the cameras in the stairwell until you get to penthouse level, so be prepared.”

Our team had attempted to hack the Spencer penthouse cameras many times, but they’d been unsuccessful.

Fortunately, Spencer only kept security cameras on external entrances and in the one elevator with penthouse access.

Like the Hargraves, they didn’t want cameras in their most private space, no matter how unhackable they supposedly were.

“Showtime,” I said as we approached the door. “Let’s hope Bennett hasn’t sounded the alarm yet.”

I pulled the fob from the pocket of my black tactical pants and pressed it to the sensor next to the heavy gray door. It beeped, the lock on the door disengaging with a loud clunk, and we were in.

Then we began the long trek up sixty-five flights of hard, concrete stairs.

It was eight thirty on a Friday night, so there was a chance we could encounter someone choosing to take the stairs between floors on this side of the building instead of waiting for an elevator, but fortunately for us, none of the tower’s occupants chose to venture into the dank, cold staircase this evening.

By the fortieth floor I was sweating under my helmet and balaclava, and my legs were so goddamn tired already from my strenuous swim earlier tonight.

Max had plied me with an energy bar and a smoothie on the way over here, but it hadn’t cured the bone-deep exhaustion I felt from everything I’d endured.

That included Bennett making me come so hard I’d nearly lost feeling in my legs for a second time that night. I’d sort out my feelings about that another time.

“Come on, Jojo,” Max urged, still taking the stairs two at a time with boundless energy. “Nearly there. We’ll be in and out before you know it, and then we’ll go home and sleep for two days.”

“Fuck yes,” I replied, huffing as I willed my legs to just move . “I’m fine, I promise.”

Finally—fucking finally —we reached the flight of stairs between the sixty-fourth and sixty-fifth floor, and we slowed our steps, pulling our guns from our belts once again.

Okay—Max had kept his gun aloft this entire time, but my arms were fucking tired, all right?

“Approaching penthouse entry,” I said quietly.

“Camera will be positioned on the west-facing wall,” Dom’s voice informed us.

Max dropped low on the stairs and reached around the bottom of the landing to aim his gun at the camera.

“Disabling camera now.”

With a quiet pop, he discharged his weapon, and the sharp crack of the camera’s glass let us know he hit his target dead-on.

“Clear,” I announced.

We moved swiftly onto the landing, and a nondescript lone black door awaited us.

“Moment of truth,” I whispered, pulling Bennett’s fob out once again. With any luck, he would still be scrambling around in the grass back at the Academy, looking for this little thing.

I held the fob to the small sensor next to the door, and with an audible pop, the lock disengaged.

Max pulled the door open wide enough for me to slip through. Holding his gun aloft, he followed me on light, quiet steps.

The entrance to the emergency exit in the Spencer penthouse was located down a small set of concrete steps at the corner of their pool deck—an expansive patio that jutted off of the lowest level of their three-story home at the very top of Spencer Tower.

I weathered the hard pang of nostalgia and longing that hit me as we skirted around the dark, quiet pool.

The four of us Heirs had practically lived at each other’s pools from Memorial Day to Labor Day every summer since we’d learned to swim, chauffeured around by whichever one of our nannies had been assigned the task at the time.

Even shrouded in darkness, I could tell not much had changed other than the fact that no more happy childhood memories were being made here and hadn’t been for a long time.

“Pool deck is clear,” Max reported to Dom. “There’s a light on in the first-level living room.”

We slinked along the outside railing, keeping out of view from inside the patio doors, and we prepared to enter the building.

“Spencer and his wife are still confirmed present at the Ferrero charity fundraiser at the Serpentis,” Dom said, referencing one of Andrea’s most profitable casinos. “And there’s no sign of Bennett’s car entering the vicinity.”

I pulled the second gun I was wearing from my belt and checked it was loaded. “They don’t keep a butler, but the housekeeper is probably here,” I whispered. “Tranq gun at the ready.”

“On three,” Max murmured as we paused in the shadows up against the side of the building a few feet from the entrance. “One, two, three, move .”

In one smooth motion, I darted to the door and swiped the fob across the sensor as Max pulled the door open.

I slipped inside, entering the cavernous living room—dark except for the warm yellow glow of a single lamp on a nearby end table.

Across the open floor plan and under the harsher light of the kitchen sconces, I spotted the dark gray bob of hair belonging to Mrs. Harris—the Spencers’ longtime housekeeper and grouchiest woman alive—who was bustling around behind the sparkling white-marble kitchen counter.

I took aim at the back of her neck as I squeezed the trigger, and the dart flew from my gun with a soft pop.

She staggered, clutching at her neck, before she dropped to the spotless hardwood floor with an audible thud.

“First level is clear,” I announced, motioning Max to follow me through the living room, across the expansive foyer, and to the stairs that led to the second and third levels.

“Get a move on,” Dom urged. “We know the Spencer Enforcer team will have someone regularly monitoring the entries and exits from the penthouse, but we don’t know how long it may take them to notice and flag the entry of Bennett’s fob from the fire stairwell as odd—and that’s if he hasn’t already informed them it’s missing. ”

We jogged up the stairs and hooked a left at the landing on the second floor. Tromping across the long, colorful rug lining the hallway that cost more than a luxury car, we headed straight for the door at the very end.

James Spencer’s private study.

I ignored the open door to the oversized media room we passed on the way—too many memories, not enough time to deal with them.

We came to a stop at the closed white door, ready to pick the simple lock if necessary.

“Hell yeah,” Max exclaimed under his breath when the knob turned with ease. “Someone got cocky.”

“My dad never locked his study either,” I whispered as we crept into the deserted office.

I took in the floor-to-ceiling windows behind the large desk through which the bright lights of the City lent us enough light to allow a good view of the room.

“At some point, you want to relax in your own home, you know? There’s so much security already.

Not that it helped him much in the end,” I added with a sardonic scoff.

Max gave me his sympathetic eyes before he began casing the wall-to-wall bookshelves on the right-hand side of the study. “The safe is behind the books on one of these shelves?”

“Yeah, Bennett saw him access it once or twice as a kid and told us about it.” We never had secrets from one another growing up, and it didn’t seem like things had changed for them even after everything that had happened. What Bennett knew about his Family, the others likely did too.

“Oh, I see,” Max said, and the happy dancing of his dark eyes told me he was grinning under his balaclava.

He yanked a row of books away from a shelf near the windows, and there was the small steel safe, neatly tucked back into an indention in the wall. “Ready?”

I nodded, moving in next to him. I pulled my tools from the small pouch on my belt and got to work.

With my tiny screwdriver, I removed the screws connecting the small battery that sat behind the safe’s control panel. I slid the thin, rectangular battery out, then I disengaged the panel itself, pulling it away from the front of the safe and exposing the wiring behind it.

“Here,” I whispered to Max, yanking two of the colorful wires from their connection to the safe. “You’re on. ”

Max pulled his little black box from his belt, plugging the two wires into it before entering a code.

The control panel beeped in my hand, and we were in.

“Do you want me to reset his passcode to fuck with him?” Max asked me as I pulled the safe’s small door open.

“Yeah. Set it to 080215.”

The night my parents were murdered. If he ever ventured to guess those numbers, he’d know we were fucking coming for him.

“Savage,” Max replied, his fingers flying over the keys of his black box.

I peered inside the safe. There were a few thin brown file folders arranged in a neat pile, and I spotted a small silver flash drive shoved into the back corner, its shiny coating glinting in the lights of the City streaming through the windows.

I handed Max the folders before grabbing the flash drive, and I gasped as I turned it over in my gloved hand.

“This is my dad’s,” I whispered, the familiar small white letters engraved on the drive just visible in the low light.

J. Knight .

“That’s a KnightKey500,” Max added, looking over my shoulder. “Those things have serious built-in encryption and require, like, a two-hundred-character key. And they’ll self-destruct after something like ten attempts to unlock it.”

I knew this. My dad always had this on him, never letting it out of his sight. I’d always assumed it was just where he kept whatever project he was currently tinkering with.

I pocketed it. It was mine now.

“Can you scan what’s in those folders so we can go through it later?” I asked Max as he started flipping through the papers.

“Yeah, I just need a few minutes,” he replied, digging in his pack.

“Hey, you two,” Dom’s hushed voice came over our earpieces. “The elevator that leads to the penthouse is on the move. Spencer’s still at the benefit, so it can’t be him. It may stop on one of the higher floors below, but wrap it up, please.”

“Shit.”

Max leafed through the folders, rapidly taking pictures with his phone that would upload immediately to our server to be stored and reviewed.

I reinstalled the keypad back in its place on the front of the safe, and once Max had tossed the folders back inside, I closed the safe door with a firm shove.

We scrambled to put the books back on the shelf in an attempt to buy even a little bit of time before James Spencer noticed someone had been in his precious safe, and then we slipped quietly from the office and shut the door.

I crept along the second-floor hallway with Max on my heels, our feet shuffling silently on the rug. We just needed to get back downstairs and out to the fire stairwell once again, and then we were home free. I’d even leave Bennett’s fob for him on the kitchen counter as a thank you.

Just as we began our descent down the stairs, the foyer coming back into view, the elevator announced its arrival at the penthouse level with a loud ding.

We froze. I grabbed for my tranq gun in case it was Bennett. I knew couldn’t kill him.

The doors opened, and Frankie fucking Fingers came strolling out.