Page 98 of Edge of Darkness (Night Prowler 4)
“Oh, you evil temptress,” he said, smiling back at his love, “you have no idea.”
She blew him a kiss and he turned and left, eager to get the errand over with, eager to get back into her waiting arms.
Eager to make every last second together they had really count.
Ember watched him go and felt all her false bravado, and the tenuous calm it had taken her all day to perfect, unravel.
A sob rose in her throat; she smothered it with the back of a hand to her mouth. She couldn’t cry now—not while he was still so close, not when she still had so much left to do.
There would be time enough for crying later.
Knowing he’d be able to sense her moods, she’d done her absolute damndest to quell any stray emotions with the deep breathing and visualization exercises she’d learned all those years ago when she first went into therapy. Calm was a state relatively easy to achieve if one knew how…but extraordinarily difficult to maintain over hours, with adrenaline flooding the central nervous system. She done it with a strength of will she didn’t even realize she had, because she had to fool Christian before she could save him.
She made her way to the front drawing room and watched Christian’s Audi slowly pull away from the circular driveway and disappear up the long gravel road. Then she turned and ran up the curved staircase, her heart pounding like a dr
um, every nerve on fire.
She checked the master bedroom first. Closets, desks, beneath the bed, in the bathroom. Nothing. She rifled through drawers in the library, she upended boxes that turned out to contain only files, she peered into cupboards and cabinets and the dark, dusty niches of the attic.
Nothing.
Room by room she swept the mansion, looking for anything deadly, any poison or bombs or strange-looking devices, anything that screamed I can kill you!
But she found nothing. She even searched Corbin’s room because he’d left with Christian, the housekeeper’s room because she was out shopping, and the groundskeeper’s room because he was off on the east side of the front of the property, mowing the emerald lawn. There wasn’t a single thing in the entire mansion that hinted at danger, at least nothing she was able to find.
The frantic search took over two hours. The sun had dipped below the horizon. At any moment, Christian would come back, and her window of opportunity would vanish.
Panicked, shaking with tension and about to burst into hysterical tears, she ran out the back door and looked wildly around the elegant patio, the rambling garden, the burbling fountain surrounded by a circle of uneven stones.
That’s when she saw the woodshed.
Dreary and decrepit, it stood off to her left, partially obscured by a thicket of pines. The moment she saw it she knew it was where she needed to go.
The hinges made an eerie groan when she opened the door. It was dark and dusty, filled with cobwebs, and smelled of damp wood and mold. There was no light so she stayed still a moment, allowing her eyes to adjust, and just looked around.
A cord of wood, stacked teetering along one wall. A bare dirt floor, a small rack of saws and tools, a large plastic chest near the back.
The chest sported a large, shiny padlock, obviously new. Unlike everything else in the shed, the chest was not covered in a thick layer of dust.
Ember’s heart began to pound even harder.
Big enough to fit a body in, she thought in mounting dread as she ran her hands over the smooth plastic lid. The realization that Christian might keep the key somewhere in the house, or even on him at all times, didn’t deter her from looking for it anyway. She felt under the edge of the lid, all around the bottom, strained her eyes for any small nook or cranny in the walls where one could hide a key. She looked everywhere, until the dirt floor finally revealed a clue.
In the dust were two sets of footprints. Her own, and one much larger pair. They crisscrossed and obliterated each other in some places, but there was one place her own prints did not go but the others did: to the rack of tools on the opposite wall.
Ember stood in front of the rack and just stared at it, every cell in her body screaming for her to hurry. On the very back of the lowest shelf, past the handsaw, ball-peen hammer, and a rusted, bitless drill, there was a rock. A rock without a speck of dust that sported a perfectly flat bottom.
A bottom that opened when twisted, revealing a tiny silver key.
Ember tossed the plastic hide-a-key to the floor and fit the key into the padlock on the chest. She opened the lid, peered down at its contents, and felt all the blood drain away from her face. Her mouth went dry and her pounding heart stuttered to a dead stop inside her chest.
She had found what she was looking for.
In retrospect, Ember’s plan wasn’t much of a plan at all. In fact, it could quite accurately be called a classic example of delusional thinking.
She wasn’t stupid; she realized what a piss-poor operation this was, but on such short notice it was really the only option available. As the cab slid away from the front gate of the mansion, she wished she were religious. Given the circumstances of the moment, prayer seemed apropos.
The cell phone in her jacket pocket rang and she gasped, startled, nerves frayed. She answered it with shaking hands, swallowing the hysterical sob that threatened to burst from her throat.
