Page 56 of Oath
Alphabet located O’Rourke strolling inside, dressed in a tux andtails.
“The fuck is this?” Alphabet asked, glancing up at the other man.
“Class and style. Focus.”
Everything about the decadent location seemed drenched in indulgence. This was not the ideal setting for a soldier, but O’Rourke was playing a very different role based on his current presence on the screen.
He was halfway across the lobby, strolling over the rich Persian rug in its deep burgundy not glancing at the oil paintings that decorated the alcoves along the mezzanine with their heavy gilt frames. It looked like he was on his way toward a sweeping staircase, with its balustrade wrought in intricate bronze filigree.
The place probablysmelledlike money.
It wasn’t until he was five steps from that staircase when two men rose from the pair Louis XVI sofas. They were dressed in black-on-black suits and sported military precise haircuts. They looked like clones from a do-it-yourself Men in Black catalog.
One stepped in front of O’Rourke while the other moved behind him. O’Rourke barely slowed. But two more descended the stairs from the mezzanine level and another came from the left somewhere.
“Five-man team,” Alphabet stated, using the mouse to manipulate the view.
“There’s a sixth one you can’t see, but he’s upstairs. I’d wager there was another five-man team ready to back these guys up, but they didn’t step into frame anywhere I could make them.” The swelling of O’Rourke’s lip and the bruising of his jaw added some thickness to the words and distorted his dismissive attitude.
“Brief us on what they are saying,” I instructed. The fact O’Rourke actually gave the faintest of jerks amused me. He’d forgotten I was here.
Sloppy.
Very sloppy.
“I’ve been ‘requested’ to join their employer in a suite upstairs for an appointment.” O’Rourke folded his arms. His shoulders drooped slightly, weariness showing up in his posture. “They’re all armed. They all move like they know what they’re doing. I could agree to see where we were going with it, or Icould start an incident down there. Based on what I could see? Resistance would end with a bullet in my head.”
I didn’t disagree.
The conversation didn’t take as long as O’Rourke’s explanation and he joined four of the five in an elevator. The fifth one returned to the sofa to sit and he pulled out his phone. Probably alerting their employer to the imminent arrival.
“Keep an eye on that one,” I said, but Alphabet had already tabbed the image over to a secondary screen as he switched the view to the elevator.
It took a minute to get into the right feed but the image cut out as soon as the doors closed and it went to static.
“Eighteenth floor,” O’Rourke said before Alphabet could ask. I had my suspicions—a sharp cry drifted from upstairs, muffled by the closed doors but not quite enough to silence it entirely.
My dick went hard at the very vocal evidence of our firecracker getting off with Lunchbox. Lucky bastard.
“Got it,” Alphabet said almost on the heels of the sound reaching us. O’Rourke started to shift but Alphabet slapped something on the keyboard.
There was a clear view of the elevator until the hall indicator illuminated for going up, then it also cut to static.
“How long were you with them?” Alphabet asked, his fingers flying.
“Less than an hour. I had an escort to go back down too. They stuck with me until I lost them in Queens.”
For one long moment, Alphabet and O’Rourke seemed to freeze as though someone hit pause on a video. The look the two men shared in any other context would probably have made me laugh.
Then O’Rourke shifted to grab a chair and dragged it over. The moment he sat, Goblin settled right beneath the table nextto Alphabet. The dog had been on watch since I got here, likely responding to the tension and on guard.
Goblin relaxing eased some of the rigidness locking up my own spine. Still, I wasn’t going off my watch. O’Rourke had not earned much trust. Right now, he was in the position of forced ally. We would use him, but we weren’t going to stretch it much further.
Burn us once, shame on you.
Burn us twice, you will never get to thrice.
The poetic dialogue popped up from some vague memory, but I couldn’t place it. Probably a movie.
