Chapter 15 #2
The reply is a myriad of groans and complaints, but I just shrug, and they begin to slink off now that the smoke bomb is neutralized, there’s no more drama, and they know they aren’t getting back in.
I check my phone. It’s past two. Despite having to clear everyone out early on our opening night, the relaunch didn’t go too badly. We were packed the whole time and everyone looked like they were having fun, which means they were spending money.
I reply to Daisy, who messaged us earlier to say that she was safe in the bunker, to tell her that she can come back upstairs now, and to meet us by the bar.
The last of the firefighters leave once all the smoke is cleared and I join the others who are already back inside.
Shade paces the dance floor. When he sees me approaching, his eyes cast toward the cellar door. He’s a wreck.
I mean, I guess I can’t blame him. He did just find out before the smoke alarms went off that his brother is a murderer who let his best friend be taken away to a hellhole for a decade. He should probably talk to the cops in the morning…maybe a therapist, too.
‘Where’s Daisy?’
I frown and glance at my phone. It looks like she hasn’t read the message I sent. ‘Maybe she fell asleep.’
‘I’ll go check on her,’ Mav says, heading to the door. ‘You guys should look at the cameras. Maybe they picked up whoever is fucking with us.’
I nod and pull up the camera feeds on my phone. Two of them overlook the wall where the vent is. I watch from multiple angles, but at no point does anyone tonight crouch down and appear to be messing with it.
‘The cameras got nothing. They must have done it while the contractors were in and out before the new system was installed. Could have been anyone,’ I snarl in frustration, hearing my phone crunch a little in my fist just as Mav throws open the cellar door.
‘She’s not down there!’
‘What?’
Shade and I follow him back downstairs, taking the steps as fast as we can.
‘Look everywhere,’ Shade commands and we go through the whole cellar.
‘She said she was down here,’ I mutter as I check the bathroom and the other rooms.
‘Daisy?’ Mav calls, looking in our Dark Lounge, but there’s no answer.
A horrible feeling starts to crawl through me as we search room by room, and she isn’t in any of them. She isn’t anywhere. I find her phone in the hallway on the floor.
‘She messaged us. She has to be here,’ Mav says. ‘Everything was locked up tight. She wouldn’t have left the bunker without telling us, and not without her phone.’
My heart in my throat, I get my laptop from the bedroom and power it up quickly, bringing up all the cameras, and the security door data from tonight on a screen bigger than my phone.
‘Did you come downstairs after the alarms went off?’ I ask Shade as I look at the activity from the past few hours.
He shakes his head. ‘The only time I was down here tonight was after the club opened. You were here with me.’
‘This doesn’t make sense,’ I mutter, looking at the time stamps. ‘Your old phone was used to unlock the cellar door while we were still down here about a minute before the alarms went off.’
‘I use my keycard to open the doors,’ he says, watching the computer over my shoulder. ‘I destroyed my old phone when Daisy moved into the hotel, same as you. It doesn’t exist anymore.’
He stares at the screen. ‘I didn’t even know it was on the new system.’
‘It’s not. It was flagged, but the override code was keyed in.’
‘Who has that?’ Mav snarls.
‘Us. Dom. The bar staff. That’s it.’
Mav stands and makes for the door. ‘I’ll ask Sandy if she gave it to anyone.’
I let out a breath, trying to figure out what is going on. Where is our girl?
‘Seventy minutes ago, Daisy’s phone was used to unlock one of the doors to the tunnels.’
‘That’s only a minute after she said she was down here, and not to worry. Why would she leave?’
‘Someone was down here, while we were down here, and they have your phone, Shade.’
‘I have my phone,’ he growls angrily, presenting it in his hand for me to see.
‘A clone of your old one then,’ I say impatiently, standing up.
‘That would explain how the stalker was able to manipulate the cameras in the KIP house so easily, always being one step ahead. The virus. How many times have we messaged sensitive shit to each other that this asshole was reading? Who would have been able to get a hold of something like that? When would they have even—’
‘I don’t know,’ Shade interrupts. ‘But Daisy is gone, and he was down here. She’s in danger.’
I bring up the cameras again, this time watching Daisy. She’s on the dance floor, and then she leaves Mav and goes into the bathroom. She comes out a few minutes later, looking like everything is normal.
‘There,’ Shade points at the screen. ‘Go back.’
I rewind by ten seconds and watch it again.
‘There,’ he says again. ‘She grabs her arm while she’s on her way back to Mav and looks over her shoulder.’
I nod, and we watch as she stumbles against the wall by the cellar door a few seconds later and a guy in a mask and a top hat approaches her.
‘That’s the same dude she looked at when she grabbed her arm,’ I say.
We watch as he takes hold of Daisy, looking like he’s helping her, and goes to the cellar door.
He tries the phone in his hand. When that doesn’t work, he glances around and puts in the access code.
The door opens and he slips into the bunker.
A few seconds later, the club starts to fill with smoke, and Shade and I appear upstairs.
‘Where was Mav?’ I can’t help but accuse.
‘There was a fight around then. He was helping to break it up.’
‘Son of a bitch,’ Shade grinds out. ‘The guy in the top hat drugged her and brought her down here while we were in the next fucking room. We must have run right past them. He must have messaged us from her phone so we wouldn’t come looking for her.’
I hear Mav’s footsteps coming quickly down the hall and he bursts into the room. ‘Sandy gave the number to the new kid to restock the bar earlier. Idiot wrote it on a sticky note and stuck it on the wall by the phone behind the bar in case he forgot it. I told Dom to fire him.’
‘Fuck. Anyone here tonight could have seen it.’
Shade sinks down. ‘We should have put cameras down here. Fuck. I wanted her to have privacy for once, you know? This is my fault.’
‘Shut up,’ I snarl. ‘We don’t have time for this. Let me think. Her phone was used on the main tunnel door forty-five minutes ago. I have a camera in the tunnel. I haven’t tested it, but we might get something from that that we can use.’
‘What camera do you have in the tunnel?’ Mav grinds out.
I side-eye him and cringe a little. ‘The camera I put up yesterday. I’m all for Daisy’s privacy, but with the cartel and the stalker…’
‘Why didn’t you tell us?’
‘I didn’t get around to it. Sometimes it’s good to have an ace up your sleeve,’ I shrug.
I make sure we can all see the screen as I find the camera, bringing up the right time.
‘This is just before her phone was used.’
‘There,’ I say.
We see a grainy picture of movement in the tunnel as the thick door opens partway into the frame.
A figure appears, leaving the bunker with an unconscious Daisy flung over his shoulder.
He rips off the top hat like he forgot he was still wearing it and frisbees it down the passage, but we still can’t see who he is.
He turns and shuts the door to the bunker, seeming to carry our girl easily, his face hidden in shadow.
‘Look up,’ Shade practically yells. ‘Look at the camera, you fucker!’
Miraculously, he does, and I find myself staring into the face of Shade’s brother. The mask he wears obscures his face, but there’s no doubt.
I freeze the frame. How many secrets does this son of a bitch have?
‘Andrew,’ Mav snarls, and he sounds so shocked that I know Shade hasn’t yet told him what he realized just over an hour ago about his brother.
‘What the fuck? What the hell was he doing here? I don’t…. What?’
‘He’s the stalker,’ Shade says, sounding completely bewildered.
‘And we think he killed Larson and then framed Daisy for the murder.’
Mav opens his mouth, but I put up my hand to stop him. ‘We’ll explain in the car.’
Shade
‘Where would he take her?’ I vaguely hear Blake ask.
‘I don’t know. We try the house first,’ I reply, my head reeling.
I try to get my shit together as we go through the tunnels, coming up about ten minutes later at the graveyard where we parked the truck.
Mav drives because, right now, he might be the most level-headed of us, but he still puts his foot down like he has a death wish.
At least there’s hardly any traffic on the road since it’s barely three in the morning.
Blake explains to Mav about the keychain while we travel, and I think back to the day Daisy was found in the woods.
‘He probably used the same drug back then,’ I say aloud, wondering how I never saw this side of my brother.
I mean he’s been an asshole for years, but I always assumed he was pretty much harmless.
Kind of weak, happy being Pop’s favorite stooge and pretending he was better than me in all the ways that mattered to him.
But the way he carried Daisy out of there like she weighed nothing…
He was prepared. He’s had a clone of my phone, maybe for years.
He’s been planning this for a long time. Why?
We have to find him.
I try his phone again. No answer. Maybe if I could just talk to him, figure out why he’s doing this…
‘Stop calling him,’ Blake growls through clenched teeth. ‘You’re letting him fucking know we’re coming for him.’
Reluctantly, I put my phone away.
‘When we get closer to the house, slow down,’ I say to Mav. ‘I can open the gate, assuming Andy hasn’t had my access cancelled, and this isn’t the first time I’ve turned up in the middle of the night. But don’t act suspicious. We don’t want that butler to stop us from going in.’
Mav does what I say and pulls up, even grinning into the camera on the gate as I open it with my phone.
It parts slowly, and we enter the Novelle estate. Once we’re through, Mav punches it up the long driveway. We skid to a stop just outside the front door, and I’m out of the truck before the engine’s off.
I run up the stairs and pound on the door. As soon as it opens, I push my way in, ignoring the exclamations of the new butler who’s in his pajamas as I sprint through the foyer and down the hall to the office.
Andy isn’t here and there’s no sign of Daisy.
‘The police have been called,’ the butler says, out of breath as he enters the room. ‘They’ll be here in minutes.’
I grab him by the lapels of his long-sleeved pajama shirt and throw him into the nearest bookcase.
‘Where is he?’ I snarl.
‘Who?’
‘My brother!’ I bellow.
The butler scoffs at us. ‘Mr. Novelle is not here.’
‘Where then?’ Blake yells from behind me.
Mav pushes the butler against the shelf hard again.
‘Tell us what you know, or I’ll break bones you don’t even know you have,’ Mav promises darkly, but all the butler gives us is a haughty silence, clearly intending to wait us out until the cops arrive.
‘Maybe I can help,’ says a small voice from the door.
Samantha, the maid who helped Daisy escape Nasty Nurse and got our girl’s passport for me is standing just outside in the hall, hair disheveled and looking half asleep.
Behind her, I see a few other members of staff standing in the corridor, looking wary. The whole house has clearly been roused by the noise we’re making.
‘My brother kidnapped her about ninety minutes ago,’ I tell her. ‘Do you know where he could have gone?’
Her eyes widen. ‘I heard him on the phone—’
‘You tell them anything and you’re fired, you little bitch,’ the butler snarls.
‘Fuck you, Pinkers.’ She gives him the finger. ‘I quit.’
‘I only heard half the conversation,’ she continues as she turns back to me, ‘but he was talking about meeting at an airstrip. It sounded like it was pretty close.’
‘Shit,’ Blake says from behind me. ‘The cartel flies into one just outside of Richmond. It’s where I met my new boss. That’s gotta be it.’
‘Why would he be taking her there?’
But Blake is out of the room before we can say another word.
We follow on his heels, leaving the Novelle house.
Blake jumps into the driver’s seat and peels down the driveway, and I hurriedly use my app, but the gate doesn’t open.
He floors it, and we burst through one side of it, ripping it off its hinges completely and it flies across the road into the trees.
He turns left and speeds down the road.
I just hope we aren’t too late for whatever my brother has planned for our girl.