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We pass a changing room, a sauna and a smaller indoor pool, only lit by a few maintenance lights while not in use. Enoughto see the bar, the glass ceiling and the big, comfortable looking sitting area. Looks nice. Maybe we'll have a pool party after we've iced Kane. Fuck, Anne would inherit this shit, right? I'm sure she'll let us use it.
Then again, maybe not if we've killed her father.
"There!" someone yells.
The first guard drops with Ghost’s bullet between his eyes. Riot gets his fists on the other one, spinning him around and slamming him into the wall head first so hard I can hear the crack from here. I wince. Pretty sure the crack wasn't the wall.
And then all hell breaks loose, with more guards running our way. "Which way is the research area, Jessica?" Ghost snaps as he guns down a square-built guy in a suit. The guy runs backwards with the momentum of the bullets until he slams into the wall and collapses.
"This way!" She takes us up a flight of stairs, and I rush ahead so she's not the first one up. Ghost and Riot are right behind, but Poe, Shiv, Junker and Skyhigh get caught at the bottom, holding back the guards as they come.
Shiv yells up, "Go! We'll keep 'em busy!"
I pretend to tip my hat at him, and then we keep on Jessica's heels.
A guard rounds the corner but obviously didn't expect us. He stops dead. "Rat girl?"
"What the fuck?" I growl and drive my fist into his face. It's satisfying to feel the bone crack. Blood spurts from his nose and his eyes roll back in his head. "Have a little respect for my woman, shithead." Not that he's listening anymore.
On the main floor of the house, I'm struck by how fucking clinical everything looks. Like one of those Scandinavian decorating magazines, where everything's white, light gray, slightly darker gray and maybe little brown for flavor. Everything looks deliberate, placed by an interior designer who doesn’t have to actually live there. If I ever wondered if Kane was short of a soul, this pretty much fucking confirms it.
"Anne’s suite is that way," Jessica notes as we jog past. The door looks as clean and generic as every other door in this place. She should have fucking drawings on the door, or like a big, "Stay out! Anne's room!" sign or some shit like that. Fuck, even I had that, and I hated my home enough that I fucking ran away.
"Where was your suite?" Riot asks with a grin. "In case we wanna take you there to celebrate afterwards."
"I didn't have one. Just a bedroom off her area, and if it’s alright with you, I’d rather not. If you want to burn it down, then we can talk."
“Feisty,” I note with a small laugh. "But honey, you're never gonna sleep here again, I promise." Not if I've got anything to say about it.
The gunshots fade as we go up another flight of stairs. I'm glad we've got Jessica. This whole place is a maze. We'd be fucking lost the moment we came in without her.
"Here." We round a corner, go down a hallway, through a door that clicks shut behind us and end up in a near circular room. A spiraling staircase follows the outer wall from the first floor, and across from us, there's a steel door. Just like the outside doors, it's got a keypad and scanner. Away from the staircase, deeper into the mansion runs another corridor. Jessica points at it."Victor's offices are down that way, and meeting rooms and stuff like that. And that door has to be to the research wing. I’ve never been in there. It’s off limits."
"You're sure you can't open it?" I ask.
"I'll try, but I doubt it. I was a nanny, not his assistant, remember." She touches the scanner and tries her code. Instead of the click of the door unlocking that we're hoping for, a blaring alarm goes off. “Nope.”
Guess I shoulda kept my damn mouth shut.
35
JESSICA
Alarm?I’ve never had an alarm go off when I tried a door I wasn’t coded to. But it’s been a while. I learned pretty quickly not to let my curiosity overwhelm my self-preservation. I hold my hands over my ears to block out the insistent ringing. How can we turn it off?
"Someone's coming. Jessica, stay back," Ghost snaps, as stomping echoes up the stairway, clear even through the horrible ringing.
Was all this a trap after all? No, I can’t believe that.
Tex puts himself close to the wall by the door, using the protruding frame to shield himself while aiming his gun. Ghost moves to the top of the stairs, taking cover behind the big balustrade with a gun in one hand and a vicious blade in the other. And Riot pushes me towards the corridor to Victor's offices, putting himself between me and where the shooting is going to be.
"Go!" he orders. "Get behind something so we don't have to worry about covering you at the same time. We'll fucking handle this."
The first couple of gunshots tear chunks out of the ceiling. Even knowing that they were going to shoot, I jump when it happens, then obey Riot, trusting him to watch my back as I run as fast as I can into the reception area for the office wing. I hide behind the corner so I can peek without exposing too much of myself.
Shouldn't Skyhigh and the others have caught up by now? I'm starting to get a really bad feeling about this.
A bullet shreds the wall right above my head, making me draw back with a scream.
