Page 5

Calisto

I stared at Baxter. Had I fallen asleep at my desk and this was a dream? How could it be real? Nine times out of ten, night shifts were boring. They didn’t turn into an action film. And unfortunately, I was no John Wick, which left me with few options. “What do they want?”

“You,” he said. “They’re looking for you.”

I laughed. “We just talked about your jokes. That one’s not funny either.”

Baxter shook his head furiously, the look in his eye giving me chills. “I’m not joking. There was a woman with them. She told her men she wanted you taking alive. They know what floor you’re on.”

Fear curled icy fingers around my heart and squeezed, a few seconds passing in which I couldn’t speak. Hell, I could barely breathe, the action of pulling oxygen into my lungs suddenly an alien concept despite doing it all my life. Run, hide, the instinctive part of my brain screamed. Go somewhere they can’t find you.

I overrode it, doing my best to think rather than give in to the panic that demanded I crawl under my desk and curl up in a fetal position. “O’Reilly,” I said once my vocal cords were working again. I didn’t know how I knew it was her, but I did. We’d been waiting for her to make a move for weeks. It stood to reason that just when we thought she’d given up was when she struck. “Why me?”

Baxter threw me a sympathetic look as I headed for the door, my legs like jelly. His obvious concern for my wellbeing made me feel guilty for taking his earlier jibe about paying for sex to heart. “I don’t know. All I know is they’re headed this way, so you need to not be here when they get here. You need to get out of the building.”

“I’m working on it. It’s just…” I wiped a bead of sweat away as I headed for the lift, my brain working at a million miles an hour to come up with a plan, the incessant racket of the siren making it more difficult. “They don’t have ID, so they won’t be able to use the lifts. At least… I don’t think they will. While they’re coming up the stairs, I can sail right past them.”

It sounded weak.

It was weak.

And I wasn’t at all sure my theory about them needing ID was correct. They’d needed ID to access the building. Yet, here they were. For all I knew, they’d killed someone and taken theirs.

“And if they’ve left someone in the foyer to check you can’t sneak past?” Baxter asked.

“I don’t know!” I knew nothing; that was the problem. While I appreciated having Baxter as a sounding board, I needed at least a small kernel of hope that there was a way out of this. Bellamy had killed himself rather than be tortured by these same individuals. John still woke up sweating at the memory of them pressing a gun to his head. O’Reilly’s sadistic son, the same man who had already killed more gay men than could be counted on the fingers of one hand, had almost murdered Ben. Which was an ironic thought given his choice of body parts to remove during those killings. These weren’t people you said no to. And I didn’t have half the fortitude that John, Ben, or Bellamy did.

The lift didn’t respond to my first press of the button, my hand shaking as I did it. Or the second. “They did something to the lift.” Even I could hear the stress in my voice. And then, just when I thought things couldn’t possibly get any worse, the lights blinked out. It didn’t affect the red warning light, the corridor filling with an unearthly glow. Like being stuck in a nightmare disco, only with a lot less dancing and more terror. It didn’t affect the siren either, the noise having been constant.

With no other option, I headed for the stairs. Up or down? Think, Calisto. Think. Up wouldn’t get me out of the building. It would only leave me trapped on a higher floor. Down it was, then. Maybe I wasn’t the only one still at work. Maybe someone else was working late who could lend assistance. Maybe the bad guys weren’t searching other floors if they knew where to come. It was a lot of maybes to hang my hat on, but what other choice did I have? If I could just get to the floor below and hide there, it was possible they’d walk straight past me.

I’d only gone a few steps when I heard people on the stairs below. Too loud. Too close. I’d already delayed too long for my plan—if you could even call it a plan, rather than blind panic—to be viable. Spinning on my heel, I changed direction and went up instead, bypassing the necromancer’s floor to keep going. Baxter kept pace with me, his presence comforting even if I knew there was nothing he could do to help.

The next floor up was human resources and IT. Everyone that worked here was long gone, the office behind the locked door empty and silent. I hurried to the door, fumbling my ID from around my neck and pressing it to the sensor while Baxter stood like a silent sentry at the top of the stairs, his gaze darting from me to the stairwell below. “Hurry,” he hissed.

Nothing.

No green light.

No click of the door opening.

Either my ID didn’t work on this floor, which was possible—someone always here to let me in on the rare occasion I had cause to visit—or they’d disabled it. If that was the case, wouldn’t the door just open, though? I grabbed the handle and pulled, my straining muscles broadcasting my desperation.

It didn’t budge.

“Calisto, they’re coming!”

Baxter rarely addressed me by name, the slip-up showcasing the peril in the situation. I sprinted back to the stairwell, the voices and what sounded like an army marching up the stairs, louder, even over the siren. I took the next set of stairs two at a time. There was only one floor above this one, the one that housed Cade’s office. Which meant I was heading toward a dead end.

What other option did I have? It was that or surrender, and I wasn’t ready to give up without a fight. John hadn’t surrendered when they captured him. He’d thought on his feet and used a graveyard of the dead as a weapon. Ben hadn’t either, fighting with all he had not to add himself to the list of Satanic Romeo’s victims, his spirited defense the only reason he’d lived long enough for Griffin to get there and rescue him. So I had to at least try to evade them, despite the overwhelming odds.

I reached the end of the stairs and launched myself through the door at the top. It opened into a large reception area/office, which was the domain of Cade’s personal assistant. John hated this room, comparing it to a museum and calling it unnecessarily ostentatious. I’d never admitted as much to him because I couldn’t face the ribbing, but I liked it. Why have a boring office when you could fill it with interesting stuff? And that’s exactly what Cade had done, the large space dominated by statues, plants, trees, and various other curiosities.

Right now, I liked it even more, especially in the dark, the room taking on the complexity of a maze in my mind’s eye, where every obstruction became both a barrier between me and them, and a potential hiding place. “How many men were there?” I asked Baxter as I plunged into the room, aiming to put as much space between me and the door as I could before they got here.

“I don’t know,” Baxter replied. “I saw six, but there could have been more.”

Could I evade six men? It was incredibly doubtful. As a child, I’d loved playing hide and seek. And yes, I’d cheated a time or two, Baxter able to tell me where any remaining children were hiding if I grew bored or wanted to find them ridiculously fast to show off. But this was a high stakes game where the outcome was about far more than simply winning or losing.

“What do they want with me?” I asked as I worked myself deeper into the room, making sure not to knock anything over in the red-tinged gloom and leave clues to which way I’d gone. “I can’t help her.” I had a momentary thought that I should head to Cade’s office, where there was a lock on the door, that I could barricade myself in. But if I was going to do that, I could have done it on the necromancer’s floor. People could break down doors. It was just a matter of time.

“You have skills,” Baxter said just as the siren cut out to leave us in silence. He lowered his voice to an unnecessary whisper. “Skills other necromancers don’t have. Just because you choose not to use them doesn’t make them go away.”

“She has no way of knowing that,” I whispered back. I’d hated the siren, but the silence was ten times worse. It left me feeling vulnerable and all too aware of the sound of my own footsteps. I’d reached the wall at the far end of the room, the perfect hiding place revealing itself behind the plinth of a statue of a satyr, its base wide enough that I’d fit behind if I crouched.

“What if she does?”

“How could she?” I argued. I pulled a plant closer, wincing as the pot scraped across the floor. Yeah, I definitely missed the siren. I didn’t know whether to be thankful the red flashing light had continued or to wish it, too, had cut out to leave me in absolute darkness. The overhanging leaves of the plant provided an extra facade of safety, of the possibility of them overlooking me. I indulged in a brief fantasy where they wouldn’t find me. They’d go away, and I’d sneak out of the building and return home to my little flat in Shepherd’s Bush.

Did they know my address? If they did, wouldn’t they have gone there instead of here, though? My flat had no security precautions past the usual locks and bolts. No piercing siren and flashing lights. Did Cade get notified when something triggered the alarm? I assumed he did.

The police were probably already on their way. All I had to do was remain undetected till they got here. O’Reilly might believe she was above the law, but even she wouldn’t stick around in the face of police flooding the building. Although ‘flooding’ was probably wildly optimistic. How many officers would they send? Two? Three? More? Would Ben hear about it? Probably not, since there was no murder. Not yet, anyway. The night was still young. I wiped my sleeve across my forehead, nervous sweat making it clammy.

“Edmund Wainwright,” Baxter said, the two words striking fear into my heart. “If she somehow found out about that.”

“How could she have done?” It was hard to whisper while pissed off. “No one knows about that. No one except you and me. I was a child, and it was a mistake. One I’ve never repeated since and never will.” The flashing red light imbued Baxter’s expression with even more cynicism, his silence speaking volumes. “She can’t know,” I repeated, more to make myself feel better than to continue arguing.

I wiped another bead of sweat away while I tried to think of a contingency plan if I found myself in her possession.

Deny everything.

Not much of a plan.

Heavy footsteps sounded outside the door, my breathing speeding up. “If they take me,” I said quickly before the door opened and conversation became impossible, “will you stay with me? You won’t disappear, will you?”

“I’ll stay with you,” Baxter said.

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

A forceful kick opened the door, and I hunkered down further, like a rabbit huddling in its burrow with a fox waiting outside. There’d be no more talking. There’d just be waiting. And hoping.

“We know you’re in here, Mr. Dominguez.” The woman’s voice sounded calm and reasonable. “Do us a favor and come out, would you? We mean you no harm. I’d just like a conversation.”

If the noise wouldn’t give my position away, I might have laughed. A conversation? Who stormed a building to have a conversation? Which again begged the question why she hadn’t taken an easier route? Was it flexing? Did she just want to make it clear she could do whatever she wanted and no one could stop her? Was it a message? To Bellamy and John, perhaps, who’d thwarted her once, that they were only free because she hadn’t gotten around to them yet.

I remained silent. As did Baxter, even though he didn’t need to.

The seconds stretched on. “Fine,” she said finally. “We’ll do things the hard way, if that’s what you want. You have nowhere to go, so I don’t know what you think you’re going to prove by making life difficult.” Footsteps came deeper into the room. “Check the office,” the woman said. “I doubt he’s gone in there when there’s so much junk out here, but you never know. I don’t think he’s the cleverest out of the bunch. No offense, Mr. Dominguez.”

Offense taken. Footsteps headed off toward Cade’s office. Good. That left fewer men out here. Fewer men meant it would take them longer to search.

“Spread out,” she said. “Search every corner, and I mean every corner. I’m not leaving here without him.”

The beam of a torch swung my way, and I ducked my head. Would it help my cause if I gave myself up? My thighs were cramping from crouching, but I didn’t dare so much as twitch in case it drew attention to me. There were four beams of light, my heart sinking when I realized that they each had their own quadrant to search so they wouldn’t miss anything.

“I’ve heard a lot about you, Mr. Dominguez,” O’Reilly said. “A lot of very interesting things. About you. About your family.” Was that a threat? It sure sounded like one. “We should have a chat about your family.” Over my dead body.

One of the torch beams inched ever closer, my heart pounding so hard it felt like it might come out of my chest.

Baxter jerked his head toward the beam of light. “He’s going to find you.” No shit, Sherlock. I guess I’d be having that chat after all.