Page 22 of Lucius

She ran away from the apartment complex and right into a man, who grabbed her arms and kept her from falling when she slammed into him.

“Hey, are you okay? Are you Sidney? I’m Amadeus, Lucius’s brother and one of the security guards.”

Tears streamed down her cheeks. She opened her mouth to tell him what happened when the distinctive roar of a lion came from the apartment behind them.

“Holy shit,” he said. “Are you okay?”

“We have to run!”

Something sounded like a bomb going off followed by the sound of splintering wood.

“It escaped! We have to run!”

“Shit, damn it!” Amadeus said. He grasped her upper arm and hurried her along. “Don’t worry, you won’t be hurt.”

“How can you say that? There’s a freaking lion coming after us!”

He grabbed his radio off his belt as they rushed from the complex and said, “It’s Amadeus, we’ve got a problem in the apartment complex. There’s a lion in apartment three and I need all the alphas in the employee cafeteria immediately.”

He steered her toward a building that was dark.

“Hey, I want to leave,” she said, trying to pull away from him.

“Sorry, Sidney,” he said. “I can’t let you leave right now.”

“What? What the hell, Amadeus! Where’s Lucius? What is going on?”

The terror she’d felt at waking up in bed with a lion was now replaced with anger and confusion. Amadeus wouldn’t let go of her arm, and no matter how she struggled, she couldn’t get free.

A light turned on as they passed near the building and it illuminated a door. It opened suddenly and she recognized Jupiter from the security office.

“Amadeus won’t let me go,” she said. “Make him let me go!”

“Sorry, Sidney,” Jupiter said as he stepped aside and watched Amadeus pull her into the building. “You can’t leave. I’m sorry.”

The door shut and Jupiter stood in front of it. Amadeus released her arm and said, “I’m sorry, Sidney, I hope I didn’t hurt you.”

She rubbed her arm where his viselike grip had kept her with him and looked at the two men.

“Why aren’t you worried about Lucius? I told you there was a lion in the apartment. What happened to him? What’s going on here?”

Jupiter pressed his lips into a thin line and shared a look with Amadeus.

A door opened at the back of the large room, which she figured for some sort of cafeteria with tables and chairs and a kitchen area. Men walked in, single file, and one of them was Marcus, who she remembered from the popcorn stand.

They all looked tired and disheveled, and it was no wonder since her brief glance at her phone screen before she’d turned on the flashlight in the apartment had shown it was past four a.m.

She rubbed her eyes with the palms of her hands and tried to calm her flying pulse. She wasn’t in danger right now, but she definitely didn’t feel safe.

“Where is Lucius?” she asked.

A man who looked a lot like Lucius and shared features that resembled Jupiter and Amadeus stepped forward from the group of men who’d come into the room from somewhere at the back of the building.

“My name is Caesar,” he said.

She blinked a few times as the name spun in her head.

“You’re Lucius’s dad.”

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