Chapter 39
THIRTY-NINE
Levi
“All right. We’re in.” I glance over the screens in front of me as they light up with the cameras I’ve hacked into in the governor’s home.
Zephyrine, Bishop—my latest acquisition to our team—and I are all in the basement of the Avarice, the casino and resort that Grant and I own.
I keep all of my latest equipment here in one of the subbasements because it’s the closest thing we have to a fortress, and usually the most convenient.
It’s not at the moment, but I can’t exactly do this work out in the middle of the woods.
But doing the work here means I had to bring Zephyrine to the Avarice with me, as she’s the most likely to be able to identify rooms and help me create a floor plan we can use to navigate the governor’s mountain home.
She’s sitting next to me, her fingers playing with the gold cross on her necklace as she slides it back and forth and takes in the scenes in front of her.
The home looks dead at the moment, with only one or two people walking the grounds, but I’m sure it brings back memories seeing a place she hasn’t been in such a long time.
“He’s not there, is he?” she asks as her eyes scan the displays.
“Shouldn’t be. The copy of his schedule we have says he’s in Denver all this week.” Bishop scans his phone again as he takes a bite out of an apple, his foot propped up on a chair at the back of the room.
Bishop’s an old high school friend of mine who lived with us and worked for my father when we were younger.
His family and mine never quite saw eye to eye, and our fathers had a tense relationship that went back decades.
His family owned another ranch outside Purgatory Falls, one that had failed years before we sold our cattle off.
When his dad turned to other sources of income to make ends meet, it sent him on a collision course with the Horsemen.
But it didn’t stop my father from taking Bishop in when his father kicked him out, as long as I was willing to vouch for him.
He joined the military when I went to college.
I tried to reach out a few times, but he disappeared like a ghost, and rumors of his death circulated a few years after that.
When we looked for him when my parents died, he was declared missing and presumed dead.
So when I heard his name mentioned when I was looking for mercenary help earlier this year, I made a mental note to find out if it was really him.
He came well recommended but completely off book.
So I spent last week tracking him down in earnest through an elaborate game of cloak-and-dagger and was relieved as fuck when it really was my old friend who met me in the back of a dark biker bar up in the Springs.
He all but jumped at the chance to run this job with me, shrugging off how god awful the odds were and completely unbothered at how little of a plan we have to go on.
Like it's fate, he has connections for a pilot and a medic who are up for the challenge too. So now the three of us are in the casino’s bunker, working through the hand-drawn map that Zephyrine created from her memories and matching it with the view from the security cameras I managed to hack on the property.
We’ll need to use it to plan our heist and memorize it well if we have any hope of getting out in one piece.
“This is the main living room,” Zephyrine speaks up again after she’s had some time to study the screens. “This hallway over here is this one. It leads into the kitchen. There’s a butler’s pantry behind it that has a stairwell to the basement.”
“Is there another stairwell?” Bishop asks.
“Yes. Three of them. One at the back of the house. One in the butler’s pantry, and another is at the main stairwell in the side entry near the garage. It leads up to the second floor and down to the basement,” she explains.
“Perfect. The more entries and exits, the more likely we are to get out of there alive.” Bishop furiously scribbles notes on the tablet in front of him.
“This is the hallway to the bedrooms. That door on the left was the master, and the ones on the right were my brothers’.” She points them out on the screens, tapping the stylus on the map in front of her.
“Which one was yours?” I ask. We don’t need it for operational security. I doubt there’s anything useful left in there now, but I like the opportunity to see a window into her past.
“Um.” She hums under her breath and scans the screens again. “If you turn left when you get up these stairs, there’s a room on this side. I don’t see it anywhere on the screens. It’s a shorter hallway. Just a closet and a laundry room and then my room.”
“Any of those rooms with large windows we could breach or exit if needed?” Bishop pipes in.
“The laundry room’s window would be too small. My old room, yes, you could. But it’s high up. You could break an ankle jumping from it.” The way she explains it, I can tell she thought about doing that very thing once or twice.
“Better a broken ankle than a bullet to the head.” Bishop’s scribbling away behind us.
She tilts her head back and forth as her lips press together, acknowledging the fairness of the statement.
“This is the hallway to the garage. I’m hoping they’ll let us pull in there with the truck. Then you'll have easier access to the house. You'll just have to get through this door.” Zephyrine taps the screen with her fingertip. “It should be easier than any of the others.”
I sit back in my chair as she continues, recommending the best path she can think of in her head as she closes her eyes and describes the surroundings we can’t see on the cameras.
If I didn’t already have a massive fucking weak spot for this woman, I’d be developing a crush right now.
For an apprenticing nun with no background in operations like this, she’s a natural.
Asking thoughtful questions and answering Bishop’s like a pro.
I’m just thankful as fuck she’s on my side because I think her father picked the wrong child to be the heir to his legacy.
I’m fairly certain, given the right resources, she could have made an empire out of his tiny fiefdom.