Page 38 of Black Hearts

“No, I’m serious. You aren’t like them,” I said, widening my eyes in a sympathetic expression. “I mean, sure, you might help your bosses in the Circle by keeping their secrets and helping them out, but you don’t actually hurt the kids yourself, do you?”

It was an excuse straight out of Dan Vallone’s slimy playbook. Blaine saw his get-out-of-jail-free card right there, and he gulped and nodded, suddenly itching to play along. “That’s right. I… I’d never hurt them.”

And yet you happily accepted money in return for helping the Circle continue with all their heinous acts,I wanted to scream.

Instead, I kept my cool and smiled sweetly. “I thought so.” I turned to Alex for a second. “See? I told you.”

Alex played along. “Yeah, yeah,” he grunted in a faux-annoyed tone.

I cocked my head to the side, then went on, looking back down at Blaine. “You know, someone like you really doesn’t need to have the same level of loyalty as the rest. They all made their beds years ago with the shit they do, so they have to be loyal, because if they ever dared to rat on the others, they’d go down with them. But you haven’t crossed that line, have you? If the others go down, you won’t. So there’s no need for you to die out of loyalty like theyinsist on doing.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“So here’s the deal. You tell us what we need to know about the house, and we’ll let you go.” I pointed behind us at the nature reserve on the other side of the fence. “We’ll let you run that way, far away from all the others. They won’t see you from here. They won’t catch you. And once we take this place down, no one will ever even have to know you worked here.”

The guard licked his lips nervously. “What if I decide I want to be loyal? What if I don’t tell you anything?” he asked quietly.

Alex smiled and held out his gun. “Then we’ll have to kill you. But like she said, we don’t want to.” He paused. “Well… she doesn’t want to. I’d do it in a heartbeat.”

I suppressed a smile of my own. This ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine was fun.

“I….” Blaine looked down, his hands trembling. Then he looked back up again, past us and beyond the fence. He was thinking about it; thinking about the route he’d take through the reserve once we let him go. “Okay. I’ll do it,” he mumbled.

“That was easy, wasn’t it?” I said smoothly. “Now tell us about tonight’s party. We want to know the security guard layout. Don’t lie to us—we know your face and name now. If you lie, we’ll find out, and we’ll hunt you down.”

He nodded and looked down at the ground before responding in a quiet, guilty voice. “There’s twenty-three other guards.”

“Where are they?”

“One is in the security room, keeping an eye on the CCTV feeds. Two are in the ballroom, where the party is happening. Another one is patrolling the inside of the house, just in case. The rest are all around the exterior of the house or in the parking lot.”

I moved closer to Alex and spoke in a hushed tone. “That means there’s nineteen outside. Can you handle that?”

He nodded. “It’s basically what I expected. William still thinks the Heartbreaker is one of the Circle, remember? He wants to trap him inside. So they have the majority of the guards outside to prevent anyone from leaving once they’re in.”

“Oh, right. Yeah.”

“Makes your life a hell of a lot easier, only having a few on the inside.”

I nodded and breathed a quiet sigh of relief, then spoke to Blaine again. “How would someone get to the security room if they were coming in from the greenhouse entrance?”

“You’d turn left and go down that hall. You’ll pass the library on the right and see a corner staircase at the end. On the right of that staircase, there’s a little door. The security room is in there.”

“And the greenhouse itself… were we right when we figured that there aren’t any cameras around it?”

The guard nodded. “None in it, either. The cameras are only inside the house and outside the main exterior parts of it. Nothing behind the greenhouse, because it’s enclosed.”

“By the walled garden,” I murmured with a nod. “And are there any guards behind that wall?”

He shrugged. “No point. If anyone was able to climb that wall and get into the greenhouse from the garden, it leads straight inside, so the cameras and the patrol guard in there would spot them. Same thing if anyone tried to leave via the greenhouse. Cameras would see.”

Things were looking up—this made our plan just a tad easier. “Great. You have a key to the exterior greenhouse door?”

Another shaky nod. “It’s on the set I tossed to you. Right in the middle.”

“Anything else we should know?”

“The party starts at eight, but people are already arriving. Every Circle member is going to be there. I don’t know why, but it’s some big event.”

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