Page 108 of Savage Lover

Compulsively, I glance at my watch again. 10:16. She’s is definitely in Levi’s house by now.

Mason, Seb, and I take the elevator up to the sixth floor. We’re all kitted up in paint-spattered coveralls, but I’d rather not run into anybody who might wonder why a bunch of painters are headed into work at ten o’clock at night.

Luckily, the sixth floor is quiet. I see a light on down the hall—some junior lawyer slaving away over a huge stack of files, most likely. Our little painting crew quietly makes its way over to the garden patio.

It’s a pretty space, full of outdoor lunch tables and open umbrellas to shade the lawyers from sun or rain.

I’m more interested in what lies on the other side of the railing.

We try to move in total silence. We’re six floors up, with a street right below us. We don’t want to attract any unwanted attention.

Carefully, we extend the ladder and stretch it out over the gap between buildings. It’s easy to secure the ladder on our side. On the opposite end, the legs rest only on a three-inch windowsill. The smallest jolt, and we could knock the whole thing down, with a whole lot of noise, and a shattered spine for whoever was trying to climb across.

The person is me, to start with.

Sebastian and Mason hold the ladder steady while I start to crawl across. This is the worst part, because there’s nobody to secure it on the other side. I’ve just got to be slow and careful.

It’s fine while I’m on the side being held by Seb and Mason. However, the further I venture out to the middle, the more flexible and unstable the metal struts feel. I’m not afraid of heights. But it’s not exactly pleasant to be ninety feet up in the air over cement.

I feel like a mountaineer crossing over an ice crevice. Much like a mountaineer, I’ve got on a stupid bulky outfit. Unlike a mountaineer, it’s sweltering hot tonight, so I’m sweating under the coveralls and latex gloves.

The ladder creaks and twists to the right, making my stomach lurch. The legs cling to the window ledge, just barely. I keep inching forward, until I’m up to the glass.

Touching my earpiece, I say, “You all set, Jonesy?”

“Mm-hmm,” he grunts. It sounds like he’s holding something in his mouth. “Window sensors should be off.”

“Should be?” I say.

“Only one way to know for sure.”

I start to cut through the glass, careful not to upset my precarious position on the ladder. I slice out a perfect circle, suction the glass, and push it through into the bank. Then I crawl through the hole.

I drop down into an office. This isn’t Raymond Page’s office—that’s two floors up. This is just the plain, boring space of a regular drone, who has three mugs of half-drunk cold coffee on their desk, and a depressing motivational poster on their wall—a picture of a kitten in the rain with the caption, “It Will Get Better.”

I wait for Seb to follow after me. He makes it across the ladder alright—getting through the hole is a bit harder. He’s so damn tall and he’s filled out enough that he almost gets stuck halfway, like Winnie the Pooh when he ate too much honey. His backpack isn’t helping.

“Cut it a little smaller why don’t you,” Seb grunts.

“I forgot I had Groot coming after me,” I say.

Mason won’t be following us—he’s got to pull the ladder back, and then he’s going to hang out a while on the patio, in case something goes wrong and we’ve got to come back that way. Plus, somebody’s got to listen on the police scanner to give a heads up if any unwanted company is headed our way.

“You nervous?” I say to Seb.

He thinks about it for a second.

“Actually . . . no,” he says. “I was before. Threw up twice this morning. But this is like playing in a big game—once you’re on the court, you’re not nervous anymore. You just do it.”

“Good,” I nod. “Well, let me know if that changes.”

I check my watch again—10:32. With any luck, Camille will be out of Levi’s house and on her way over in our getaway car. I wish I could text her. We have to stay incommunicado in case Schultz has her phone.

We strip off the painter’s clothes—nobody’s gonna be fooled by the get-up in here, and it’s too hot with all the other gear underneath. Then we head to the closest elevator. I don’t press the button to call the car to our floor. Instead, Seb and I force the doors so we can climb down into the empty shaft.

The building has three elevators—two that serve the main floors, and one that only runs from the ground floor down to the vault.

Disabling the cameras and sensors on that elevator would be difficult. But it could be done. The one thing we can’t do is disable the alarm. If the elevator car moves, it triggers a remote alarm directly to remote security. There’s no way around it—the elevator cars can’t move outside of business hours.

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