Page 99 of Breaking Conviction
Thea yelped and Wes sat right back down.
“What? What’s wrong?”
Thea groaned and pulled her hand back like she was about to chuck his phone. Just as it was about to leave her small hands, Wes reached and caught it.
“What the hell, Thea? You can’t throw my phone like that.”
She crossed her arms and pouted. “Someone keeps callin’ and makin’ me lose my game.”
“Thea, you can’t just throw a tantrum—”
He’d swiped out of her game and looked at his notifications.
23 missed calls from ‘My Queen’
“What the...” Wes’s heart tightened and dropped to his stomach like lead. He opened up his voice mail and Naomi’s scared voice came over the speaker.
“Wes! Oh my god, answer the phone! You have to get out of BlackStone! Dean’s scheduled some kind of attack—”
He immediately rolled his chair up to the desk and clicked through security camera footage. It took him a minute of searching, but he finally found the edge of a black van that sure as fuck wasn’t supposed to be there. The driver had parked outside the walls of the weapons room next door and had somehow managed to position the vehicle in one of his camera’s blind spots. Wes had to switch from one camera to another in order to make out what was happening.
A man carried something from the back of the van. At the camera’s angle, Wes couldn’t tell exactly what was happening, but it seemed like the man was stacking something against the outer wall. It was too hard to see clearly until finally he got a glimpse of the last box.
Sweat pricked across his brow. He’d bet every weapon on the other side of the war room wall that the man outside was stacking explosives against the facility walls.
As he watched, his mind raced, and Wes’s hand flew to the alert button. The man wiped his palms down his pants and got into the driver’s side of the van. Something that looked like a string or a cord maybe, connected to the tow hitch and instantly Wes fully understood what was happening. He tugged Thea close to him and stood to run.
But he was too late.
A boom and a child’s scream filled his ears as he turned to shield Thea from flames and flying metal.
Chapter Forty-One
Wes opened his eyes to blurry bright sunlight shining on his face and BlackStone Securities’ war room up in flames. His skin was slick with sweat as he wiped his brow, empty of his glasses, and sat up on the hot cement floor. Acrid smoke burned his nostrils, telling him he needed to get the fuck out of there, but it was the high-pitched shrieks that brought him fully to his senses.
He hadn’t passed out, but he was still disoriented. Although whether from the bomb, the head throbbing alert that automatically went off throughout the building during an emergency, or Thea’s wailing, he wasn’t sure.
“Thea, are you okay? Are you hurt?” His words came out quick and loud, but her screams didn’t change.
They’d had barely enough time for Wes to hide them underneath the heavy round table in the center of the room and Thea was climbing onto him like a life raft in the ocean. He’d lost his glasses somewhere, and it was already so smoky that he could hardly see Thea in front of him. He got on his knees and ran his fingers quickly around the floor to find his glasses. They brushed over his frames, but when he brought them to his eyes, they were cracked beyond repair.
They’ll have to work for now.
He turned to a less blurry Thea and tried his best to not sound panicked.
“Thea? Please answer me, princess. Are you okay?”
In answer, she threw herself around his neck and nearly choked him with her strong grip. He wrapped his arm around her back, tugging her close, hoping she felt a little safer. As he held her, he ran his fingers over her limbs and face to make sure she was okay to move. When he’d confirmed that her cries were from terror rather than pain, overwhelming gratitude shuddered through him and he sagged back on his calves.
“You’re going to be okay, Thea. I’ll get you out of here. You’re safe with me, I promise.”
Once the words left his lips, he shed his worry and allowed his training to take over, narrowing his focus to figure out the best escape route.
Thank God the war room was mostly cement and steel, but whatever had been used in the bomb had ignited the weapons room, too. Together it’d been strong enough to wrench open a huge hole in BlackStone’s outer walls, giving him the odd sensation that they were already outside.
Fuck… the weapons room.
When they’d built the BlackStone facility, it’d made sense to have their weaponry, demolitions, and gun range all in one place. They’d also made it easy access to the war room and the garage so they could plan, suit up, and head out in one swift go.
