Page 35 of Captured Pawn
I could see it in her eyes. She was tempted.
“But, if we don’t go now, the Bishops will know we were responsible for knocking out the security team, right? They’ll figure out that you’re moving up your timeline. He’ll move the stuff you need to retrieve, and you’ll never get it back.”
Her words had started as questions, but by the time she finished, she was stating fact. Sophie had her finger on the pulse of my problem. She might not know all of the nitty gritty details, but she knew enough to understand it was now or never.
“Let’s go,” she said, pulling the black ski-mask I’d given her before leaving the house down over her head before opening her door.
She’d made the call. We were a go.
Too bad it didn’t make me feel any better about turning her into a felon.
CHAPTER15
Sophie
As Nick and I ran through the shadows of the Bishop estate, I did my best to focus on the details of the mission and set aside the moral crisis I felt growing deep inside me. I knew I would have to deal with coming to terms with my choices later, but now that I’d committed to proceeding, I didn’t have time to let myself get clouded with guilt.
Nick had lifted me so that I could pull myself up and over the brick perimeter wall. While I waited for him to climb up the rope we’d thrown over, I did my best not to think about how a few nights ago, we’d been at the wall surrounding the Knight estate instead. Unlike tonight when we were working as a team, that night he’d lassoed my leg and yanked me down into his arms before proceeding to bare my ass and spank me until he had me begging for mercy.
The irony was not lost on me that I’d thought that night had been the worst thing that could happen to me. Now, after learning all that hung in the balance with tonight’s mission, getting a painful spanking seemed like a minor problem.
Nick took the lead through the shadows, avoiding the property’s still working cameras. When we arrived at the rendezvous location, Pops and Stevie were waiting for us along with two men I’d never met.
Stevie held out an iPad. “You have control of their security system. The only things you may not be able to penetrate with this are in the panic room. We’ve put the internal feeds on the fake loop. You should have at least sixty minutes. Anything more than that you’ll be risking one of the guards waking up early.”
Nick had prepped me ahead of time. It brought me comfort that Stevie was repeating what I’d expected. That meant things were proceeding according to plan.
I couldn’t see Nick’s entire face—only his eyes through his mask—but he was looking at me. It dawned on me that he probably didn’t usually wait around for others to take charge very often, but that’s what he’d done with me all night tonight.
In some ways, it would be easier if he were still being his usual bossy self, barking orders for me to follow. That way I could blame the fact that I was about to break the law on his coercion. It figured that when I’d prefer him to make me do something, he’d decided to be patient. If I did this, I’d have no one to blame but myself.
“Let’s get this over with,” I finally said.
I couldn’t see his mouth, but I’d swear by the way his eyes crinkled that he was smiling under his mask.
It only took a minute to close the final distance to the house. The second my foot stepped into the tiled kitchen, I had to push down a brief burst of panic. As if he’d sensed my hesitation, Nick reached his gloved hand back, taking my own gloved hand in his, pulling me along with him.
We moved silently through the kitchen and its attached sitting room and into the large dining room. He didn’t release my hand until we arrived at the ornate cabinet we knew was really the secret door to the room we needed to get into. I was grateful I’d seen this room on the camera feeds in Nick’s office because it felt familiar.
Nick pulled the tech gear we’d brought with us out of his backpack, connecting wires and entering the sequence of numbers that would begin the process of decoding the security code for the outer door. As nice as it would be to have that first door opened, there was a part of me that dreaded getting inside the panic vault because we had a lot less intel on what was beyond the entry door.
“What’s taking so long?” I asked after a full minute passed.
“It looks like they changed from a six-digit to a ten-digit PIN for entry. We’ll get it, but it will take a bit longer,” he answered. I might not have known Nick for long, but I detected a sliver of nervousness in him.
Just as that thought crossed my mind, I heard the click of a lock disengaging and the cabinet moved forward a fraction. Nick was able to use a shelf as leverage to pull the cabinet toward him, creating an opening as Matty’s notes had promised.
An odd sense of closeness passed through me as I stepped into the vault, knowing Matty had helped install the high-tech panic room. How many hours had he spent in this very space? I had always thought as siblings we were close, yet the main thing I’ve learned since his death was that I didn’t know him nearly as well as I’d thought.
The lights had come on automatically with the opening of the vault, so it only took a few seconds for me to realize we had a problem. Matty’s notes had outlined how the Bishops had insisted on installing an old-school safe in this room to avoid risking remote access via the web. I’d brought the tools I’d need accordingly.
The bed, couch, TV, and wall of cabinets holding a month’s worth of supplies were where I’d expected, but the eight-foot-tall safe was nowhere to be seen.
“Shit… did they remove it already?” Nick asked.
Shouting down my fear, I walked along the perimeter of the room, lightly tracing my gloved fingers across the fortified walls until I got to an almost completely hidden crack.
Nick reached out to pound on the wall out of frustration, but I stopped him by yanking on his arm.
