Page 108 of Oath
It would be in what he tried to keep hidden.
My eyes swept the room. There was supposed to be a safe in here, probably a wall one from what the guys said. That would come later. To the right, a slim, fingerprint-locked drawer—which meant it held something personal, something he wanted fast access to.
But first?
The computer.
A sleek black monitor sat in the center of the desk like a mirror to the man who used it: pristine, clinical, and probably hiding a hundred filthy truths.
I moved to the desk, pulled the chair out just far enough, and pressed the space bar.
It blinked to life. No password. Either cocky, or recently used. Either worked for me.
From my pants pocket, I drew the slim flash drive AB had handed me earlier. Matte black, no branding. I slotted it into the port on the side, heart steady, fingers sure.
“It’s in,” I murmured.
“Copy that,” AB said. “I’m on it. Shouldn’t take long. You’ve got maybe five minutes before it starts mirroring data.”
I nodded, eyes already moving again, scanning the shelves, the walls, the floors for hidden compartments or floor safes. Something.
I knelt briefly to check under the desk, noting a scuff on the baseboard that didn’t match the others. But before I could dig deeper, something rustled behind me.
I froze.
Not the creak of floorboards, not the soft sound of wood settling.
This was the unmistakable scrape of movement.
I turned slowly.
And the world narrowed to a pinpoint.
There was a man standing near the bookshelf. A man who hadn’t been there when I locked the door.
I knew him.
God help me—I knew him.
One eye stared at me, flat and cold, the color of stormwater. The other, milky white and sightless, sat in a socket made crueler by the angry scar that bisected his eyebrow, cut across the ruinedeye, and slashed down to the corner of his mouth. The skin was tight and shiny from where it had once burned. Or been cut.
The scar looked worse than I remembered.
And I rememberedeverything.
He smiled, if you could call it that. One corner of his mouth tugged upward. There was no warmth in it—just familiarity and something far more terrifying.
“Well,” he said, voice a hollow scrape I’d heard in too many nightmares, “I’d almost given up on seeing you again.”
Shock shattered into terror, and my breath caught sharp in my throat.
He took a step forward, not rushed. Not angry. Just certain.
I couldn’t breathe.
“It’s good to see you again, Pet,” he murmured, that name curling around my ribs like barbed wire.
In my ear, someone was talking.
“Grace? Status?”
“Gracie, say something?—”
But I couldn’t hear them.
All I could hear was the sound of my own heartbeat slamming like a drum against my chest as the man who’d wanted to own me stepped closer, and the walls of Mark Sinclair’s office closed in.
His smile curled like smoke. “I’ve missed you.”
And just like that—every escape route vanished.
