Page 8 of The Bait

“I do!” Harry yelled back at him. “I care! You cannot die, you hear me?”

Harry wanted to pull his hair out. He wanted to shake some sense into Asher or punch the living shit out of something. But he knew Asher wasn’t thinking clearly out of the panic and concern for Yunho.

So Harry tried again, more gently this time. “I need you, Asher. Yunho and Lucas need you. We need to think and work out a plan of what we do next. We cannot stay here. We cannot be seen here. We need to move.”

Asher blinked a few times, then squinted his eyes shut. When he looked at Harry, his eyes were focused.

Murderous.

“We will find who did this,” Harry promised. “And we will find Yunho and Lucas. We know they’re alive.” Because they weren’t dead on the floor, not that Harry needed to say that. “Likely taken. For information or money, I don’t know. But we will find them. We just need to think, and we need to be smart. We can’t find them if we’re dead.”

Asher nodded. “Yes. We need to find them.” He swallowed hard, his jaw clenching. “I’m going to kill every last one of them, Harry.”

Harry almost smiled. “And I will help you. Plan first. Now, let’s think. Who knew about this place? Who knew about the war room?”

“His other staff. Groundskeepers, cleaners.”

Harry nodded. This was good. Progress. “Yes. And the doctor who came out when you were injured. I don’t know if she knew about the war room though.”

Asher nodded. “That wasn’t her first time here.”

“Okay, so she goes on the list.”

“We should see if there’s any footage,” Asher said, looking back at the house.

“Not sure there’s anything left working down there,” Harry said. “But we can try.” He checked his watch. “Thirty minutes, tops. Then we leave.”

Asher gave a hard nod, and they ran back to the house. Harry assumed Asher would head straight for the war room, but he didn’t. He ran up the stairs.

“Where are you going?” Harry asked, taking the stairs two at a time behind him. “The security cameras are downstairs.”

“The system has a built-in kill switch,” Asher said, going into Yunho and Lucas’s bedroom. It was a huge room, probably the same size as Harry and Asher’s entire house. There was a massive bed, made and untouched, a sofa setting, a huge desk and chair. There were doors open, to walk in robes and a bathroom that Harry could see was empty. Asher had obviously checked when he’d run up here before.

This time he went straight for the desk, opening drawers, searching for something.

“Yunho can voice-activate the kill function from his phone, but it will also shut down if he doesn’t log in every few hours. The entire system downstairs will be dead. No one but him can access it now.”

And as soon as Yunho knew they were in trouble, he would have activated the kill switch. Voice activated on his phone, though? That was some James Bond shit, right there, Harry thought.

“So what are you looking for?” he asked.

Asher rummaged through the drawers, and not finding what he was after, he went for the bedside table. He pulled open the drawer and found a tablet. “This.”

“An iPad?”

Asher scoffed at that. “As if Yunho would ever own an Apple product. Do you know how many people Yunho has tracked through their iPhone?” He shrugged. “But this is like an iPad though, yes. A tablet, no account necessary. Lucas insisted he leave the war room and come to bed at least for a few hours, so he’d lay in bed and still watch everything. He called it a compromise.”

The screen came to life but required a passcode. Because of course it did.

Asher didn’t even try. He sighed and looked around. “Look for their laptops,” he said. “I doubt we’ll find anything.”

Harry checked his watch. Twenty minutes.

He went into the wardrobe, rifling through drawers and anything that looked like it moved. Their wardrobe was so well organised, so neat, and so damn expensive, it looked like a department store.

Asher soon joined him, tossing expensive watches out of the top drawer, looking for something underneath... like a false bottom. There wasn’t one.

Yunho was hardly about to have a false-bottom drawer in his wardrobe when he had an entire security war room in his basement.

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