Page 13 of Her Keeper
I needed to get to Brooks immediately and hunker down. I’d just have to pray she was willing to protect me.
And that she had enough guns in her apartment to get the job done.
I threw my hand up in the air and stepped off the curb, hailing the first cab that came by. When the driver asked me where I needed to go, I gave him the address of the posh neighborhood where Brooks lived.
And then I started praying she’d be on my side after she heard what I’d done.
6
MICHAEL
Iburst through the front door of my house with only one thought on my mind: Find Penny. She wasn’t here, I knew that much, but she’d been here not too long ago. And she was here when she decided to leave for wherever she had gone.
The girl wasn’t stealthy or secretive, and I was hoping she’d have left some sign of where she’d gone.
Wait, strike that. Penny Lane had managed to hide the fact that she was working or a reporter from the time she’d started working for me. So she was stealthy. She was most certainly secretive.
But she’d also left in a hurry, and I was hoping that meant she’d been sloppy in her leaving.
I walked into the office without thinking about the fact that it was still the middle of the day, and was surprised to see everyone going about their business as if it was just another workday.
As if the world wasn’t imploding around us, people we’d thought were friends revealing themselves as suspicious and attacks happening in homes that should have been safe. It took me a long, confused second to realize that it was just another workday and the people here were doing what I paid them to do: taking care of their jobs regardless of what was happening in the world outside. I had literally hired every one of these men and women for their ability to maintain their focus no matter how much shouting happened in my office.
And now they were hard at work even after I’d threatened and terrorized Penny in my office and then the board room, acting like it was all just part of the job.
Fuck, I was good at hiring the right people.
Unless you were counting Penny herself.
I forced myself back into action and headed straight for her desk, knowing that was where I’d find what I was looking for. I slid into her chair and powered up her computer in the same motion, my eyes scanning her desk for any notes she may have jotted to herself on her way out the door. There were no post-its with convenient ‘head for ‘ notes on her desk, but that wasn’t the end of the world.
I knew Penny’s brother, and I knew her best friends. I knew where they lived and could pretty much count on them calling either me or Joseph if she showed up.
It didn’t matter where she went. I’d find her.
And in the meantime, I needed to know what she’d been up to while she was in my office. I couldn’t exactly go through everything in my office to find what she may have taken—I had a good memory, but I couldn’t remember every piece of paperwork I’d ever handled—but I could get into her email platform and see what she’d been sending to other people. Anyone experienced in spying and espionage wouldn’t have sent anything important from an email account someone else might be able to get into.
But Penny wasn’t exactly experienced in espionage. At least not that I knew of. I was counting on her to have made at least one mistake.
A quick review of her computer showed me where she kept her email, and within moments I’d opened it and entered her inbox. No, there was no password.
I didn’t allow my employees to password-protect anything.
I stared at all the emails in her inbox, then, and paused for a moment. She’d been handling an awful lot of communication for me and there were hundreds of emails in there.
I didn’t know the name of the person she might have been emailing and I doubted she’d labeled the emails anything as telling as ‘information on Michael Rossi.’
Actually.
I typed ‘information on Michael Rossi,’ just on the off chance that she had in fact labeled the thread that way, and leaned forward, satisfied. One hit. Only one.
But that was all I needed.
I clicked the email open and scanned through it for attachments, my heart frozen at what I might see there. When I started opening the attachments I found, though, I saw that they…
Were nothing.
They were nothing.
