Chapter Fifty-Two
THORIN
Thor.” I’m in bed, lying on my stomach and in a deep sleep. I’m dreaming about being back at the cabin and in the wilds with Aurelia when I feel someone shaking me awake so hard my goddamn teeth gnash together. “Thor! Wake up. Wake the fuck up!”
“Khal, I swear to God,” I warn inside my pillow. “I’m going to break that fucking hand if you don’t get it off of me and get out.”
Ever since the coma and the TBI, nothing comes easy to me these days—first and foremost sleep—so I’m as grouchy as a bear in hibernation when disturbed.
I rarely feel like myself when I’m awake, and the only relief I get is when I’m asleep, so I’m less than one second from tackling Khalil to the ground when he says, “Someone tried to get at Aurelia. We need to go.”
I lunge from the bed and I’m on my feet before he can finish speaking. “What the fuck are you talking about?” I’ve got his shirt in my fists, and I’m slamming him against the wall before I can remember that he’s not my enemy. “Who touched her?”
Khalil shoves me off of him and then grabs my discarded clothes from the floor before shoving them into my chest. “I’ll tell you in the car. Let’s go.”
I get dressed in record time while Khalil paces angry steps across the floor. I then follow him out of the room and the condo. Zeke is already waiting in the driver’s seat of the rental, and I barely get the door closed before he’s speeding away.
It’s the wee hours of the morning as we race all the way to the apartment building that’s become our regular haunt.
It doesn’t matter that we already know there’s no way to slip inside undetected.
There’s a doorman. We park in our usual spot across the street from the building and try to figure out how to get inside to check on our girl.
“We should try that thing we discussed,” Zeke suggests. “I can pose as a pap and see if we can get any information.”
“Did you bring the camera?” I ask as I watch the front entrance.
Zeke nods and reaches under his seat to pull out a high-grade camera that we purchased for this purpose. “I’ll go,” he says. “He might not be an easy sell, and I’m the only one with the temperament to pull this off convincingly.”
True. With the way I’m feeling right now, the moment the doorman refused to answer a question, I’d try to put him through the cement.
“The only identity you mean,” Khalil remarks.
Because if Zeke were Bane or Seth right now, they’d be just as bad. Seth would have just walked right up to the doorman and stuck his knife under his chin until he told the alter where his Sunshine was.
Zeke flips Khalil off and hops out of the truck. Khalil and I hold our breath as we watch him cross the street and approach the doorman. The portly man doesn’t seem to want to give Zeke the time of day as soon as he notices the camera Zeke makes sure to flash around.
They don’t speak for long, but it seems like an eternity before Zeke climbs back inside the tinted truck and shuts the door with a vicious curse.
“Remind me to inform Aurelia that she’s never fucking returning to this place.
The doorman didn’t care if I was a pap or not. He sold her out for twenty bucks.”
My gaze snaps toward the window, returning to the doorman as I contemplate beating the shit out of him. Too many cameras, I remind myself.
“What did he say?” Khalil presses impatiently.
“He said that Aurelia checked out of the apartment an hour ago, but he overheard it mentioned that she was returning to her permanent home not far away.”
I frown at that, even though I’m relieved to know she’s close. If Aurelia lives nearby, though, why the hell didn’t she just go there instead of the apartment?
“Did he tell you where it was?” I ask.
“No need,” Zeke says as he shows me his phone and the Google search he has pulled up.
There was drone footage of a sprawling mansion and an address underneath along with the hefty price tag that the home had come with.
Like her apartment, it was that fucking easy to get her location, and learning that after hearing she was attacked today—or I guess yesterday—puts me in an unbearably black mood.
“Let’s go.”
Even with a map, we have a hell of a fucking time finding the place since the GPS stops directing us about a mile away from where the home is actually located. And blocking our way in is a guarded gate. We find somewhere discreet to park so we can remain inconspicuous while surveying the area.
I can see several homes in the distance scattered around the rolling hills, and my gaze snags on the highest one. I can’t make out the details from here, but I know in my tightening gut that it’s hers, sitting above all the rest like the king of the hill.
Getting in won’t be easy, and while that eases some of my agitation, I’m still restless to get inside and find her.
“All right, so how do we do this?” I ask.
“We kill the guards.”
Khalil and I startle at the telling shift in Zeke’s voice, and he grins as we gape at the man now in the driver’s seat. “What the hell—Seth?”
He shoves Zeke’s hair out of his eyes and winks. “In the flesh.”
“When the hell—how the hell are you awake?” Khalil demands.
Seth wiggles his fingers and says, “Magic.”
“What happened to Zeke?”
“He said he wasn’t ready to see Sunshine, so he bailed.” Seth playfully rolls his eyes toward the roof of the car. “What a pussy.”
I snort, but Khalil says, “Leave him alone, Seth. You weren’t there when she left.” And then he turns his head to direct the last part at me. “And neither were you, Thor, so cut him some slack.”
I nod and clasp Khalil on the shoulder.
“So are we doing this or what?” Seth asks as he pats Zeke’s body down in his seat, looking for his favorite knife.
“We’re not killing them, Seth,” I decide. “They’re the ones keeping people out. That’s a good thing.”
“Sunshine doesn’t need them. She has us.”
“We’re not killing them.”
Seth glares at us both before muttering under his breath. “Pussies.”
Ignoring him, I climb out of the car to get a better look at the surrounding area, and my gaze snags on the mountains behind the entire community and the smaller hills at the base.
“That’s our way in,” I say. “They didn’t bother to block it off because no one will be crazy enough to try to climb down from there. ”
“No one but us,” Khalil agrees.
The sky is a soft blue and pink, and I can even see the bright dot of Venus winking at me when the three of us creep toward the patio doors overlooking the pool.
My legs twinge in pain since I pushed myself too hard climbing up and then down the mountains nestled behind the community.
And because Aurelia’s house—a classic chateau that reeked of old money—sat on the highest hill, we had to hike up the pretty steep incline.
By the time we reached the property, we were covered in sweat and dirt and scrapes and bruises. Khalil was bleeding near his elbow where he’d lost his grip and subsequently some of his skin, but he paid the wound no mind as he picked the lock on the door.
I’m ready to say fuck it and just knock out a panel of the glass when he pushes the door open and walks inside like he owns the place. I’m right behind him, with Seth taking up the rear.
“This is niiiiice,” Seth says as we all look around. The cavernous room we entered bounces his voice around, and I cringe.
“Keep it down, Seth.”
“Why? She’s going to know we’re here soon enough.”
“Because we don’t know who else might be here,” I tell him.
We dip in and out of all the rooms on the ground floor, looking for signs that anyone else is here before we make our way to the second floor, where we do the same thing, stopping in front of a set of ornate double doors cracked open, but not enough to see inside.
No one else is here.
Good.
After what happened yesterday, Aurelia will be feeling fragile and paranoid and will want to be alone—something we’ve banked on.
This time, I enter first as I push inside the room that’s easily the size of the cabin’s ground floor from wall to wall. The chandeliers in the ceiling twinkle in the soft light of the rising sun as if welcoming us inside and the sleeping form on the bed catches my attention immediately.
I don’t let myself go to her though and skirt the edges of the room instead while looking around.
The paneled walls have ornamental molding—except for the single window overlooking the mountains.
It’s large and arched, with smaller, thin panes built in.
The window takes up the entire wall, and for a moment, I’m stuck admiring the mountainous view that reminds me of home. Here, they look super close.
I feel Khalil and Seth join me at the window and feel their awe and shock.
“Now I see why she didn’t come back here instead of the apartment,” Khalil remarks.
I turn away from the window and creep over to the bed in the center of the room. It’s a taupe color with a simple headboard and sheer white drapes hanging from the ceiling and draping the ground.
Her bedroom is exactly how I pictured it, I muse as I part the drawn curtains and crawl onto the bed. I care not about the dirt and debris I leave on her pristine white sheets as I go either. We’ll be dirtying them up soon enough.
Slowly, I pull the blanket down her body when I reach her to check for wounds, my gaze catching on her breasts cradled inside the short nightgown and the enlarged veins that give me pause. The material is sheer, allowing me to also see her puckered nipples from the cool air in the room.
I’m straddling her body while sitting on my heels so when I shift, my knees catch on the edges of her nightgown and I realize there is a split going up the middle and stopping between her breasts where the bow is tied, keeping the bodice together.
The panels of the nightgown part, and my breath catches painfully in my chest when I notice her swollen belly peeking out.
“What the fuck,” I whisper hoarsely. “What the fuck.”