Page 30 of Daddies’ Dark Desires (Forbidden Fantasies #19)

TRENT

I ’m waiting in the hallway by the bank of elevators for Harper, scrolling through security feeds on my phone, when she comes bursting out of the stairwell a few extra feet away.

She’s running when I step into her path, her eyes wild as she runs into my chest. Hard. Her hands twist around my shirt.

My heart drops as I get a good look at her.

She’s pale. Shaking.

“Harper?”

Her words are all jumbled, but I grabbed Sunny. In trouble. Stupid plan. My worry crescendos to a baseline. I need to settle her down before I’ll get the whole story out of her.

I grab the back of her neck and lean in. “Breathe. Start again.”

Harper blinks, those dark eyes luminous even under the fluorescent lights. I take a deep breath with her. I hate seeing her in a panic. But I hate more that we’re back to this.

Her digging on her own without telling us about it.

Ryan’s last words ring in my head. Don’t trust anyone. Not even them.

I tip my forehead against hers and take another deep breath with her.

“Try again, princess.”

She shudders, and I smooth her grip to flat palms against my chest. “Sunny. She’s not back. She went to check something out, and she’s not back—she’s not answering?—”

I don’t let her finish. I’ve already pulled my comm from my ear and jabbed the side button. “Grant. We’ve got a problem.”

I pull Harper close again and press a kiss to her temple to calm her—realizing too late that it’s too intimate for the office, too much, but I’m not stopping.

Fuck, this is why I should have left her alone, but the inevitability of loving her erases almost all the guilt away.

I turn her with an arm around her shoulder and escort her to Oliver’s office.

She only stumbles once, and that’s a testament to how deeply she’s affected by her friend’s sudden lack of response.

And if they’re doing what I think they’re doing, the consequences of being right and getting caught are as bad as she’s imagining.

Grant arrives at Oliver’s office when we arrive, just a few steps ahead of us. His short hair is mussed from agitation. He opens the door and pins Harper with a look as I push her inside ahead of us.

“Someone inside this building has been working against us,” I say.

Harper hiccups. “And now, my friend is gone.”

Fuck the cameras. If someone touched Sunny to get to Harper, they just bought themselves a death sentence.

Oliver’s already tapping his way through searching our servers. Our cameras. We watch Harper set off the alarm, and my hand on her shoulder tightens.

Her fingers find mine, and I loosen my grip just a fraction. This girl has wiggled herself straight into my soft spot. It’s gotten bigger with her nestled in there, and that makes me furious.

Because if someone hurts her…I’ll go dark. Decimate anyone who has anything to do with it.

And that’s dangerous.

She has no idea just how dangerous.

When I refocus on Oliver, he’s into the logs. Not the cameras.

Grant pulls Harper into a seat, and I am barely able to relinquish my control. But he crouches in front of her, much more firm instead of rigid as he extracts information from her the best way he can.

I find that I can’t let her full out of my grasp, standing behind her and rubbing my thumb across the back of her neck.

“Sunny noticed something that we all missed, and she followed the lead. She’s so good, but I couldn’t get back in when she didn’t reappear?—”

“I noticed the missing access card.”

“We narrowed it down to an office. She was just supposed to put a keystroke tracker on the computer. I set off the alarm so she could get in and out without anyone there to catch her. How did this happen?”

Which means whoever it was either knew it was a farce or had alarms set up in his office that made him backtrack.

In the investor wing, we don’t keep as close an eye on things. They all have their own endeavors, but they’ve all been vetted.

Our trust has let in corruption. I tap on my comms again, switching to the security channel. “Shut down the exits. No alarms. Eyes on stairwells and elevators. We’re looking for Sunny Rodriguez. Intern. Small, blonde?—”

“Practically sunshine as a person,” Harper says. And it’s an apt description. That girl’s a jack of all trades. Quick on the computer, overly friendly, hidden dark streak.

“She’s not answering.”

“Her battery has been taken out of her phone.” Oliver’s voice is quiet but not soft.

She’s too smart not to have a backup tracker somewhere on her.

We just have to wait for her to turn it on.

Sunny doesn’t look or act like the secret agent type, but I’ve seen her get sucked into her work, breaking through a problem like she belongs.

A pencil between her teeth, hair falling from her bun, and three monitors running.

It’s no wonder Oliver chose her as an intern.

But it’s more that I overheard her and Harper talking during one of our late nights. We wouldn’t let her go home without us, and Sunny stayed to keep her company.

“You know, I’m not afraid of dying. I’m afraid of being useless.” They sat cross-legged, sharing dumplings out of a greasy takeout box. “I’d rather go doing something that matters than stay invisible doing nothing.”

And Harper just…looked at her like she’d swallowed her heart.

I know all too well how far Harper is willing to go to figure something out. Especially something she believes in.

“Show us,” Grant instructs her, nods to me, and we’re headed to the investor’s wing.

Shit.

These fucks.

I never liked people who can only think about how to get richer. We make plenty of money, the firm pays investors and employees well. We don’t need to hurt innocent people to get more.

There’s plenty of evil people out there that we can make money from as we destroy them.

I use my card to get us up to the top floor and get waved through the keylocked doors. They give us a few second glances, but they do their jobs without question. I’ll fill them in when it’s time.

Grant leads the sweep with a hand on Harper’s arm, talking to her as we step in each room, catalogue anything that looks out of place, and moving on to clear the floor.

Three of the offices are empty; we get a few questioning looks as we work our way through. But one of the last two empty spaces show the signs of disruption we’re looking for.

“This one?” Grant asks, still trying to prod her for more information. It’s clear she didn’t see any of this though.

“I think so.” Harper steps into the room, but she doesn’t touch anything. She’s too smart for that, but the way she trembles and covers her mouth when she rounds the desk.

I stride up behind her and see the remains of Sunny’s phone and battery in the otherwise empty trash. My arm comes around her shoulders, tucking her back against me.

“Wait.” Harper peels my arm away slowly and approaches the desk. “God, she’s so smart.”

I’m waved forward, there’s a snug little tracker on the keyboard, hiding in the drive in a commonly unused port. I huff out a laugh. Yeah, that tracks with what I’ve observed of the intern.

I bend closer, the faintest green light blinking like it’s been waiting for us. An additional bug in the non-standard port—one we use for classified ops. Not something Sunny should’ve known. But then again, that girl’s been full of surprises since day one.

This one has audio/video capabilities.

I turn to look at Grant, nodding. He’s on with Oliver immediately, and when I meet Harper’s gaze, her fingers are pressed against her mouth and tears gloss over her eyes. Her shoulders square, and she sucks in a slow breath.

“She left that for us. She knew she was in danger.”

And she did everything she could to leave us clues. Now, we have to be smart enough to find them all.

I peel the bug out of the computer and hand it off to Grant, plugging it into the device in his pocket. His eyes darken as he quietly and calmly confirms with Oliver over the comms.

His jaw clenches when he peers up at us again. “And whoever took her…knew we were watching.”