Page 119 of Wicked Union

Grace breathed heavily in the receiver.

The elevators were on lockdown, and when this protocol was activated, only my keycard would work. So I jammed it into the slot on the wall to open the elevator doors. Once inside, I repeated the same process, and a panel opened, allowing me to enter my passcode.

“One hour,” I said as the doors closed, and the car shot upward toward the fifty-first floor. “Do you understand me, Grace? I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. But if you don’t hear from me, call Sonny. He knows what to do.”

“Is Drake okay?”

Before Drake left this morning, he said he had a bad feeling. He was in New Mexico with Tate doing a demo of Lovelace because the military wanted to use the AI to deploy weapons.

“I’ll find out.” Running as fast as I could up the stairs, I climbed to the fifty-first floor in record time, scanned my palm again, and opened the door. “I’m hanging up now. I love you.”

“I love you, too, Cole.”

I shoved the phone into my pocket and covered my mouth and nose with my jacket. The floor smelled of lingering smoke, most of which had been sucked up by the ventilation system.

I took a deep breath and raced down the corridor. Drake’s lab didn’t have a door. It was completely blown off the hinges and lying on the floor.

I poked my head inside the room. Nothing looked out of the ordinary. The supercomputer was untouched, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling glass with an independent power source and cooling system.

I took off in the opposite direction and marched into Drake’s office. Again, everything looked in order. None of this made any sense. Why didn’t they take the computers if they wanted Drake’s AI software?

Because they wanted Drake. They needed his brain.

His access and knowledge.

I dialed Drake, and no surprise, the call went straight to voicemail. Then, I tried Tate Maxwell since he was the head of security and got the same result. Only two people knew all of Lovelace’s storage locations. Drake and Tate. Even I wasn’t privy to that information.

Fuck.

Lovelace wasn’t the target.

It was Drake.

And Tate.

My stomach clenched at the thought of what my cousin would endure at the hands of The Lucaya Group. All Knights went through months of hell during initiation. It bonded The Knights in the same pledge class.

Tate was a Marine before he left to join Drake at Battle Industries. He could handle the torture and beatings they would go through at the hands of terrorists. But I wondered if I would ever see them again. And if they didn’t survive, what would I tell Olivia?

Fuck. No.

Don’t think about it.

I entered the lab and went straight for the glass-paneled room at the back of the space. Whoever attacked this floor couldn’t get past the layer of security.

I let the scanner read my handprint and retinas. Once inside the room, I typed the passcodes into the computer. I was then prompted for my handprint again, holding my palm to the device on the desk. A popup on the screen prompted me to stare directly at the red dot.

“Cole Marshall accepted,” the female voice said. “Initiating deactivation sequence in five, four, three, two, one.”

* * *

After a thirty-minute drive from the office, I pulled up to my house and didn’t even bother to turn off the Ferrari before I raced inside. Grace called on my way home to tell me her water had broken.

Running upstairs to the birthing suite, I didn’t stop until I was inside the room, breathless. My wife was in bed with her thighs spread, cradling her baby bump.

A pained expression crossed her beautiful face as our eyes met. “Cole,” she groaned. “You made it.”

“Of course I did.” I got on the bed beside her and kissed her forehead, wiping the sweaty strands away. “Nothing could stop me from watching you deliver Hale.” I squeezed her hand. “I’ll be here every step of the way. It’s okay, baby.”

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