Page 107 of Wicked Heiress

“Three, two, one,” Lovelace continued.

Metal bars inched down from the ceiling, caging the employees into their offices and conference rooms. People screamed and begged to let them out. Those in the hallway with me halted in place, unsure what to do. Then, a thick layer of bulletproof glass slid out from the walls, locking us inside.

“Grace, I have to hang up now,” I said calmly. “I need to deactivate the protocol. If you don’t hear from me within the hour, I want you to call Sonny.”

Bastian would have been my first choice, but he was in Italy with Alex and his brothers.

“Cole, what’s going on?”

“Baby, I don’t know. I heard an explosion.”

Grace breathed heavily in the receiver.

The elevators were on lockdown, and when this protocol was activated, only my keycard would work. So I jammed it into the slot on the wall to open the elevator doors. Once inside, I repeated the same process, and a panel opened, allowing me to enter my passcode.

“One hour,” I said as the doors closed, and the car shot upward toward the fifty-first floor. “Do you understand me, Grace? I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. But if you don’t hear from me, call Sonny. He knows what to do.”

“Is Drake okay?”

Before Drake left this morning, he said he had a bad feeling. He was in New Mexico with Tate doing a demo of Lovelace because the military wanted to use the AI to deploy weapons.

“I’ll find out.” Running as fast as I could up the stairs, I climbed to the fifty-first floor in record time, scanned my palm again, and opened the door. “I’m hanging up now. I love you.”

“I love you, too, Cole.”

I shoved the phone into my pocket and covered my mouth and nose with my jacket. The floor smelled of lingering smoke, most of which had been sucked up by the ventilation system.

I took a deep breath and raced down the corridor. Drake’s lab didn’t have a door. It was completely blown off the hinges and lying on the floor.

I poked my head inside the room. Nothing looked out of the ordinary. The supercomputer was untouched, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling glass with an independent power source and cooling system.

I took off in the opposite direction and marched into Drake’s office. Again, everything looked in order. None of this made any sense. Why didn’t they take the computers if they wanted Drake’s AI software?

Because they wanted Drake. They needed his brain.

His access and knowledge.

I dialed Drake, and no surprise, the call went straight to voicemail. Then, I tried Tate Maxwell since he was the head of security and got the same result. Only two people knew all of Lovelace’s storage locations. Drake and Tate. Even I wasn’t privy to that information.

Fuck.

Lovelace wasn’t the target.

It was Drake.

And Tate.

My stomach clenched at the thought of what my cousin would endure at the hands of The Lucaya Group. All Knights went through months of hell during initiation. It bonded The Knights in the same pledge class.

Tate was a Marine before he joined Drake at Battle Industries. He could handle the torture and beatings they would go through at the hands of terrorists. But I wondered if I would ever see them again. And if they didn’t survive, what would I tell Olivia?

Fuck. No.

Don’t think about it.

I entered the lab and went straight for the glass-paneled room at the back of the space. Whoever attacked this floor couldn’t get past the layer of security.

I let the scanner read my handprint and retinas. Once inside the room, I typed the passcodes into the computer. I was then prompted for my handprint again, holding my palm to the device on the desk. A popup on the screen prompted me to stare directly at the red dot.

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