Page 6 of Risky Obsession

“Fuck!” I gritted my teeth against the pain and chased after him. But the agony blazing up my leg hampered my chase.

“You’ll never get away, Hughes,” I yelled across the room.

Grant reached the wall of alcohol and paused.

A secret door opened, and he stepped through. The door closed behind him and seemed to vanish as it blended in with the shelving around it.

I sprinted across the room and at the wall of alcohol, I tried to find the opening mechanism. But there was nothing obvious. I yanked bottles off the shelf, smashing them to the floor as I searched for a button, or lever, but I couldn’t figure it out.

“Son of a bitch!” He’s getting away.

CHAPTER2

Grant

Islammed the secret door behind me. My heart thundered in my chest as I sprinted through the dimly lit underground tunnel.

“You can’t escape, Grant,” Lacey screamed through the sealed door.

“Watch me,” I whispered, veering left into an open doorway. When I’d built this mansion eight years ago, I’d planned the emergency escape room myself. I’d anticipated needing a rapid getaway, although I’d always dreaded having to use it.

Thumping noises echoed around the concrete floor and walls. Bullets. That bitch was trying to break in.

I raced across the large expanse, built beneath my house which stored everything from priceless artwork that I hadn’t found a place for in my mansion, to exercise equipment that I’d bought and never used to dozens and dozens of archive boxes containing vast amounts of evidence that could crush the assholes who had owned me for decades.

Trouble was, that evidence also incriminated me.

There was no way I was going to jail for those fuckers, even though most of them were dead.

My heart thundered in my chest, matching Lacey’s furious banging. That door was built to save me from attack, though that theory had never been tested.

At the shelf containing two Ming Dynasty vases and my Faberge egg that turned out to be a very expensive fake, I pulled down the backpack I’d prepared years ago. It was weighed down with a handgun, a laptop, nearly half a million in clean cash, fake passports, and a hard drive containing information that would burn a load of powerful people, which was priceless.

“I’m going to get you, Grant!” Lacey’s muffled voice echoed down the hallway.

I removed my loaded gun from the pack, pulled out my lightweight jacket and tugged it on, and added two boxes of ammunition to the bag. I shoved the gun into the jacket pocket with my emergency burner phone and zipped the bag up. With one last glance around the dusty items, I heaved the bag onto my shoulders and raced toward my escape exit with my mind careening between guilt, regret, and joy over what I had to do next.

Determined to outrun my past, and the bitch who threatened to bring it all crashing down on me, I stopped at the detonation timer. The decision to trigger the timer that would obliterate my most valuable physical asset was like a giant anaconda crushing my head.

“Grant!” Lacey’s scream only just reached me.

She was the reason I had to do this—she and Aria Morgan, and the cops who found the Drug Inventory Management Device inside Chui’s sunken yacht. I hadn’t been too worried because the data stored on the device was encrypted, but some fucker had cracked through my defenses and frozen all Chui’s offshore business accounts that I’d been dipping into for years.

I’d tried to make a runner then, but that ended in disaster when the pilot I’d hired to help me get away got greedy. Shooting him was the moment I’d shifted from white-collar criminal to murderer. It was his fault though. Stupid bastard. If he’d stuck to the plan, he would have been rich. Instead, he was a corpse in a seaplane at the bottom of the ocean, having his eyeballs eaten out by fish.

I should have tried to flee again and got away while the cops had no clue who I was.

I won’t make that mistake again.

I opened the trigger case. My fingers trembled. My heart thundered in my chest. “Fuck it.” Clenching my jaw, I pressed the red button.

The lights on the timer set the countdown. Twelve minutes. Precisely the amount of time I needed to get clear of this place before it blew sky high.

With the walls closing in on me, I forced my legs to run to the secret exit at the opposite end of my house. The silent ticking clock seemed loud in my head, matching my heart that thundered in my ears.

My lungs burned, desperate for air, and my nose throbbed from that bitch’s punch.

A pang of guilt washed through me. She didn’t deserve to die. She was just doing her job.