Page 28 of Obsessive Love (The King #1)

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Sophia

W e sneak down the stairs, listening for any noise that might alert us to someone still in the house, but we're met with complete silence. Jaylen tiptoes across the foyer and peeks through the frosted glass panel beside the door.

"From what I can see, no one's out there," he whispers, turning around to face me and putting both his thumbs up. "Go check the kitchen whilst I make a start at trying to get those padlocks off."

I nod my head and follow after him. I watch as he reaches the locked door and pulls a rectangular black case out of his pocket, unzipping it and revealing an array of small silver tools. I continue down the left hallway, peeking my head into the kitchen until I'm positive Myra isn't there.

Before heading back to Jaylen, I quickly check the dining room as well, just to be sure that no one's going to catch us trying to break into the right side of the house.

When I get back to the door, Jaylen's quietly humming to himself as he uses two tools to try and pry open the padlock at the top of the door.

After a few minutes and plenty of cursing that interrupted his peaceful humming, we hear a loud click and the padlock comes undone.

"One down, one more to go," he says, crouching down as he starts picking the other one.

I take a few steps back and glance around the empty foyer as nervous jitters begin to spread through my body.

"Jay, what do we do if we get caught?" I ask.

"We're not going to," he tuts, shaking his head and huffing as he tries to get the padlock unlocked. "Stop the negative thoughts, Soph. Believe that we're not going to get found out and then hopefully , that belief will be true."

I wipe my sweaty palms against my jumper, nod my head, even though he can't see me, and then pace back and forth in the hallway, waiting until I hear another click.

"Yes!" he shrieks, jumping up with the padlock in his hand. "I knew I could do it."

"Shhh!" I hiss, lightly thumping his arm.

"No one's home. We don't have to whisper," he states, shaking his head and pocketing the padlocks. He jiggles the handle on the door and pushes his body against the steel, slowly opening it. "Jesus Christ, this is stiff as fuck."

He continues to jam his shoulder against the door until there's a big enough gap for us to squeeze through.

I grab onto the back of his jumper, holding it tightly in my hand as he slowly walks into the dark hallway beyond the door.

"Why didn't we think about grabbing flashlights?" he whispers as we carefully scoot through the darkness.

"Probably because it's the twenty-first century and we have them on our phones," I say, pulling my phone from my pocket and handing it to him so he can illuminate the hallway ahead of us.

I relax my grip on his jumper and peer around his broad frame as he shines the light around, showcasing multiple steel doors.

"Are you kidding me?" I huff. "We're gonna be down here all night just picking locks at this rate."

Jaylen stalks forward to the first door on the left, jiggling the handle and finding that it is in fact locked. When he moves down the hallway, he shines the light down on the floor and creeps forward, squatting slightly as he approaches the door.

He turns to me, attempting to signal something with his hands as if we're some highly trained spies when in reality, I have no idea what he's trying to tell me and he just looks like he's about to have a seizure.

As I move to walk towards him, he shakes his head and brings his finger to his lips, silently shushing me. He then points upwards at the small square window at the top of the door and starts waving his hands around again.

When he finally seems to realise that I'm not understanding what he's trying to tell me, he creeps away from the door, quietly making his way back to where I'm standing.

"There's holding cells in there," he whispers. "I can't see into them, but I can see a guard walking back and forth in front of the bars, so we have to make sure we're completely silent. Otherwise, we're busted."

I nod and then allow Jaylen to grab onto my arm and lead me over to one of the other doors on the right side of the hallway. He hands me my phone and moves my fingers so that I'm partially covering the flashlight and then he aims it at the handle of the door.

Pulling his tools back out of his pocket, he crouches down and begins jimmying them into the lock until the door cracks open.

He pushes the door wider and pulls me inside, taking the phone off of me and shining it around as I quietly shut the door behind us.

"This is perfect!" he says, shining the light on the desk at the back of the room. He casts the torch around the rest of the room, showing a bookcase filled with folders, a drink-making section, and then another door, which I'm assuming leads into another room.

"Okay, you start by looking through the folders, just remember which one you're taking out and where it came from. We can't leave anything out of place," he whispers, rounding the desk and sitting in the leather chair behind it.

"What am I looking for exactly?"

"Uh, I don't know. You're the one who wanted to snoop around, Soph, so look for anything suspicious or anything that could explain why he keeps one side of his house locked up like Fort Knox. Considering his office is locked up, there's got to be something here."

I watch as he wiggles the mouse across the desk and then Jericho's laptop illuminates my cousin's face. He pulls a small USB from his pocket and plugs it into the side, then pushes away from the desk and walks over to me, pulling a folder off the shelf.

"Come on, Soph. I don't know how much longer we'll have to look through things," he says, taking the folder over to the desk and flipping through it.

I scan my eyes across the remaining folders on the shelf, and guilt begins to slither through my body.

"Maybe he's just a super private person," I say, turning to my cousin. "He might not have anything to hide at all." The conversation that I had with Jericho the other morning is at the forefront of my mind and the image of his usually stoic face looking so vulnerable as he spoke about his brother and the woman that he lost has my stomach in knots.

"Soph, everyone in our family is all about their privacy and security, yet they don't have half their house locked up," he states. "There has to be something that Jericho doesn't want us to know."

He examines my face and sighs, walking over to me.

"Look, that steel door blocking off this hallway is new. It hasn't been there for longer than a month, which leads me to believe that he put that in place after finding out that he would marry you and have to move you in here. Add in the fact that he tried to get out of marrying you and then requested for his brother to be a secondary bodyguard for you, makes this whole thing seems highly suspicious."

"I just feel guilty going through all of his things, especially if there isn't anything to find," I tell him, nibbling on my bottom lip.

He opens his mouth, about to reply, but a beeping sound echoes around the room and snatches his attention away from me.

"Shh," he hisses, hurrying over to the desk and pressing some buttons on the laptop until the sound stops.

We stand in silence, both staring at the door of the office, hoping and praying that the guard in the other room didn't hear anything.

After a few minutes of silence and no movement outside, Jaylen motions for me to move behind the desk with him.

"I'm in," he says, typing a bunch of numbers into the rectangular box on the screen.

I watch as the screen turns black and the loading symbol pops up. When the laptop loads, an image of a red-headed woman appears on the screen for a minute. Her shimmering green eyes stare straight at me, and a wide smile is painted on her face.

When another screen pops up in front of her face, loading four squares of CCTV footage, I realise that the image of the woman was Jericho's screensaver.

"Jaylen, I think we should stop this now and just lock everything back up," I tell him, walking away from the desk as it dawns on me that I've just stared into the eyes of Jericho's dead lover. Somehow, seeing her face and thinking over our conversation from the other day has me feeling like all of this snooping is wrong. "This doesn't feel right anymore. We need to go."

"Soph, you need to come look at this!" Jaylen hisses, leaning closer to the laptop.

"No. We need to leave," I say, walking towards the door as guilt consumes me.

"You seriously need to come look at this! We were right. They are hiding something."

His words make me pause and I turn around slowly to stare at him. He's watching the screen with wide eyes and a slack jaw as his hand moves on the mouse.

Curiosity overrides the feeling of guilt and I take a few steps towards him, wondering what he's looking at.

"Are you sure?" I ask, still looking for a way out.

His eyes flick up from the screen, and he nods before spinning the laptop around so the screen faces me.

"That right there is their Uncle Carlos," he states, pointing at the top left square of the CCTV footage on the screen. He uses the mouse to enlarge the square and I see a half-naked man sitting atop a mattress, shackled to a wall. "He's supposed to be dead."

I move closer to the desk, squinting at the footage as I examine the bruises and cuts littering his skin.

"Looks like he might as well be dead," I whisper, cringing as the man rolls over and reveals multiple deep slashes across his back.

"Soph, you understand how big this is, right?" Jaylen asks, turning the laptop back around and thankfully saving me from looking at that horrifying view any longer.

I shake my head, confused as to why he seems so shocked and intrigued.

"Part of the reason Alessandro wanted this marriage to go ahead was because many of his men were being killed off or going missing and he thought that it was the Garcia family that was behind it. The fact that Jericho has live footage of Carlos locked up suggests that he's either working with the Garcia family or-"

"Or Jericho and Kaleb are behind it all and Carlos is actually in one of those holding cells in the other room," I say, finishing his sentence for him as all the pieces come together in my mind.

He nods and I gulp as a cold shiver travels through my body.

"What do you think it all means?" I ask quietly, moving closer to him and glancing around the room as my paranoia gets the best of me and the feeling of being watched floods over me.

"It means something much bigger than I ever expected is going on."

He turns the flashlight off on my phone and then holds it up to the screen, snapping a few pictures of the CCTV footage on the screen.

"What are you doing?"

I attempt to snatch the phone out of his hand but he pulls it away from me, shaking his head.

"Don't worry, I'll send the pictures to myself and delete them from your phone. I don't want you getting caught with this. You need to pretend you don't know anything about this," he says, staring me directly in the eyes as he speaks in a low tone.

I gape at him, unsure I'll be able to keep this to myself with how often Kaleb manages to corner me and get me alone.

"Sophia, you have to promise me you will not talk about what we've seen to anyone. If they're doing this to their own uncle, I don't want to imagine what they could do to you. Please, Soph, promise me that you won't say anything until I've gained some more intel on what's going on here," he pleads, looking at me with such concern.

I look back and forth between his face and my phone and then slowly nod my head.

"Okay," I whisper. "I won't say anything."

He sighs in relief and then passes me my phone.

"Send the pictures to me and then delete them whilst I log out of his laptop. Then get out of here and leave me to lock everything back up, okay?"

"Don't be stupid. I'm not leaving you, Jay," I argue.

He shakes his head and scoffs.

"See, if I'd given you a heart attack, then I wouldn't have to deal with this stubbornness," he retorts.