46. Kovu
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
KOVU
I t takes long moments for me to figure out what’s woken me.
I’m holding onto Camilla’s leg like it’s my lifeline as the others let out gentle snores around us. But it’s not that that tears me from a peaceful sleep I never knew before Camilla came into my life.
There’s a phone ringing around here somewhere, but when I lift my head to look on either bedside table, I can’t see any of ours anywhere. They’re probably in our discarded piles of clothes.
Yawning, I push myself up and go in search of the offending device when another one starts vibrating right along with the first one.
It’s not totally out of the norm that more than one of us would be getting a phone call at the same time, but at three in the morning? That seems improbable.
I find Crew’s phone in his sweatpants, and my brows tug together when I see he has seven missed calls from Wyatt. That can’t be good.
Before I can continue my search for the other phones, his starts vibrating again, and I answer on the first ring.
“Hey, it’s Kovu.”
“Get out of the compound right the fuck now,” he rushes out the words.
“What?” My sleep-fogged mind still too jumbled to make sense of his words.
“They’re coming. You need to get out. Right now.” It’s the urgency in his tone that pushes me into motion, and I quickly cross to the bed, shaking Crew awake.
“Okay, I’m on it. How long do we have?”
“They’re breaching the entrances now. Stay on the phone and I’ll guide you out through whatever entrance has the fewest men.”
“Should we go to the panic room?” We’ve never used the damn thing, but we had it installed just in case when we first built the place.
Crew’s eyes widen, and he immediately jumps into action without having to hear anything other than those words. He leans over Camilla and Kaos to wake Bishop, and then gently coaxes our girl from her sex-induced sleep.
“No. I haven’t changed the codes, and we can’t risk Caleb knowing them.”
I swallow heavily as panic eats away at my consciousness. This is it. They’re coming for us, but we don’t know what their plan is. Is it to kill us? To separate us? To take Camilla?
The last one has me tugging on my clothes haphazardly as Crew lifts her from Kaos, helping her into her own sweatpants and sweatshirt that we hadn’t had a chance to put away before she demanded to know what we were doing in here.
Bishop and Kaos are doing the same even though they have no idea what’s going on.
I close my eyes and breathe through the emotions that are battering down on me. There were years where I felt nothing. Where emotions were the last thing in my mind. But now I’m full of them, and I have no idea how to regulate them in a situation like this.
“Kovu?” Wyatt prompts me, and my eyes dart open, meeting Crew’s as he reaches for the phone.
I hand it over and move toward the closet where we stashed some guns. If they’re coming in through the garage, we can’t get to my armory, so we need to make do with what we have on this floor.
It’ll take them some time to clear the first two floors, which means we have some time, but we’re sitting ducks up here.
Crew speaks in hushed tones to Wyatt as I throw the three guns and handful of knives I taped to the bottom of some shelving to the doorway. If it weren’t for the emergency situation we’ve found ourselves in, perhaps I’d be smug about the fact the others thought I was ridiculous for keeping weapons in here, but you can never be too prepared.
By the time I step out of the closet, the four of them are dressed, and Camilla seems to have snapped out of her sleepy haze as she tugs her hair into a messy knot on the top of her head.
She searches for her handbag and pulls her phone out before quickly typing out a series of messages.
“Luca?” Kaos asks.
She nods. “And Emerson. I want her to get the remaining girls out of the city with them. I don’t think they’ll hit the estate when we’re not there, but I won’t risk it.”
Bishop’s on his phone talking to someone as he paces in short figure eights. We need to get out of here, but we have to have our shit together before we do. If we run out of here half-cocked and unprepared, they’ll pick us off easily.
Crew switches out his phone for a pair of earbuds that seem to have appeared out of nowhere, but I don’t question it as I hand out the weapons. I have some in my bedroom that I’ll grab on the way out, but I don’t know how much time we have.
“They’ve breached the building,” Crew tells us.
I swallow down the panic and quickly dart out into the hallway to my own bedroom, where all the weapons I bring home and don’t bother returning to the armory are sitting on various surfaces.
I collect the five guns, seven knives, and two smoke bombs I never got the chance to use and shove them under my arm before making my way back to Camilla’s room.
She eyes the weapons and shakes her head with a small smile on her lips.
“For once your mess has worked to our advantage,” Kaos jests as he shoves a gun in the back of his pants and a knife into his pocket.
Camilla takes two guns and a knife, strapping the latter to her ankle with a holster I didn’t see her put on.
Crew and Bishop take what they need, and I shove what’s remaining into my sweatpants. Not the most ideal pants to hold this many heavy weapons, but they’re just going to have to do.
“Ready?” Crew asks.
We each nod, and Camilla presses her eyes closed, snapping her Mafia queen persona into place and hiding away the woman she only shows us.
I lead the group into the hallway and move toward the stairwell.
Bishop runs further down and hits the button for the elevator, but before I can curse him out for being an idiot, he runs back to us.
“Make them think we don’t know they’re here,” he explains.
I nod and open the door, quickly checking to make sure there’s no one waiting for us before I usher the others into the enclosed concrete space.
Kaos passes me and heads down the first flight of stairs with his gun trained in front of him. When he nods, I head down after him and to the next landing as we move toward the ground level.
We pause at the door that leads to the garage, my hand poised on the handle. There’s a good chance we’re about to walk into the thick of it, but we don’t have a lot of options. The reason this place is a fortress is because there aren’t many entrances, and that’s really going to fuck us over today.
Crew holds his hand up with a frown tugging at his brows.
“The cameras are down,” he whispers.
I run a hand through my hair as my heart climbs into my throat.
We’re going in blind.
They have us trapped, and we have no way of knowing what we’re about to walk into.