Chapter 30 #2
“Find out how many are in the house,” he said. “We’re almost there.”
I nodded slightly, then glanced toward the kitchen. “Did his wife make it back in town?” I asked, soft and casual, like it wasn’t the question I’d been dying to ask all night.
The woman froze. Just for a second. Her hands clutched at the end of a dish towel she’d carried with her.
“No,” she said after a beat. “Not yet. Still traveling.”
Still.
Traveling.
“Of course,” I said.
Liar.
I glanced toward the wide staircase at the end of the hall. I knew where I needed to go. I just needed her to let me.
“Is anyone else here?” I asked, just as casually. “He didn’t say if anyone else would be working.”
She shook her head. “No, no one else. Just me. The gardener came earlier this morning, but he left around a couple of hours ago. And the alarm is off—he likes it off when someone’s home.”
Perfect.
“Thanks,” I said, pausing by the stairs. “I’ll be quick. Then I’ll lock up behind me.”
“I’ll be in the laundry,” she said, with another tired smile, already turning back down the hallway. “Yell if you need anything.”
She was still choking the dish towel as she walked. Why did she have a dish towel if she was working in the laundry? Maybe folding them?
The moment her footsteps faded, I exhaled and ascended the stairs two at a time.
“House seems clear,” I said into the mic. “Only the housekeeper is here and I don’t think she’s a threat. But…”
“But?” That was AB prompting.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just—felt weird.”
“Trust your instincts,” Voodoo said. “We’re almost there. Get into his office and lock yourself in until we’re there.”
Adrenaline spiked and a wave of hot-cold slid over me.
“I’m going.” I reached the landing, hand already brushing the small flash drive hidden in my jacket pocket.
Step two had officially begun.
The upstairs hallway was quiet—too quiet for a house this big, with this many doors. Each one loomed as I passed, closed and silent like a mouth holding secrets behind its teeth. But I didn’t hesitate. I had to check behind a couple of doors before I found the right one.
Thankfully, they were all unlocked. Once I located the office, I pushed it open gently, slipped inside, and shut it behind me. The lock was a smooth brass turn. I rotated it with a soft click, then leaned my back against the wood and finally let myself breathe.
The office was colder than the rest of the house.
The curtains were drawn against the gray of the outside, and the room’s palette was darker—navy, deep mahogany, and steel.
Books lined the walls with obsessive precision.
A matching set. Expensive, but barely touched.
Everything in the space was curated, performative.
But the real value here wouldn’t be in the display.
It would be in what he tried to keep hidden.
My eyes swept the room. There was supposed to be a safe in here, probably a wall one from what the guys said. That would come later. To the right, a slim, fingerprint-locked drawer—which meant it held something personal, something he wanted fast access to.
But first?
The computer.
A sleek black monitor sat in the center of the desk like a mirror to the man who used it: pristine, clinical, and probably hiding a hundred filthy truths.
I moved to the desk, pulled the chair out just far enough, and pressed the space bar.
It blinked to life. No password. Either cocky, or recently used. Either worked for me.
From my pants pocket, I drew the slim flash drive AB had handed me earlier. Matte black, no branding. I slotted it into the port on the side, heart steady, fingers sure.
“It’s in,” I murmured.
“Copy that,” AB said. “I’m on it. Shouldn’t take long. You’ve got maybe five minutes before it starts mirroring data.”
I nodded, eyes already moving again, scanning the shelves, the walls, the floors for hidden compartments or floor safes. Something.
I knelt briefly to check under the desk, noting a scuff on the baseboard that didn’t match the others. But before I could dig deeper, something rustled behind me.
I froze.
Not the creak of floorboards, not the soft sound of wood settling.
This was the unmistakable scrape of movement.
I turned slowly.
And the world narrowed to a pinpoint.
There was a man standing near the bookshelf. A man who hadn’t been there when I locked the door.
I knew him.
God help me—I knew him.
One eye stared at me, flat and cold, the color of stormwater.
The other, milky white and sightless, sat in a socket made crueler by the angry scar that bisected his eyebrow, cut across the ruined eye, and slashed down to the corner of his mouth.
The skin was tight and shiny from where it had once burned. Or been cut.
The scar looked worse than I remembered.
And I remembered everything.
He smiled, if you could call it that. One corner of his mouth tugged upward. There was no warmth in it—just familiarity and something far more terrifying.
“Well,” he said, voice a hollow scrape I’d heard in too many nightmares, “I’d almost given up on seeing you again.”
Shock shattered into terror, and my breath caught sharp in my throat.
He took a step forward, not rushed. Not angry. Just certain.
I couldn’t breathe.
“It’s good to see you again, Pet,” he murmured, that name curling around my ribs like barbed wire.
In my ear, someone was talking.
“Grace? Status?”
“Gracie, say something—”
But I couldn’t hear them.
All I could hear was the sound of my own heartbeat slamming like a drum against my chest as the man who’d wanted to own me stepped closer, and the walls of Mark Sinclair’s office closed in.
His smile curled like smoke. “I’ve missed you.”
And just like that—every escape route vanished.
Grace and the team will return in DARE, the epic conclusion of the Blood Brothers saga.