Nothing. Nothing for a year so far. She’s gone.
Either my brother has her hidden her like he promised, or she is dead, buried or thrown in a lake to rot.
“Come here, you bastard. Let me cut you up so your mama can’t recognize you,” Owen says to the guard who has his gun aimed at Owen’s head.
I roll my eyes. He is so theatrical.
Jaxon moves stealthy behind the guard, a silver blade shining in his hand, and I lean back, getting comfortable as I watch Jaxon press the sharp metal into the back of the man’s skull. The guard falls to the ground and even from the screen, I see Owen’s jaw flex with annoyance.
“I had him! He was mine.”
“Shut up and stop playing around, Owen,” Jaxon says, stepping on the guard’s head with his boot. He wraps his hand around the blade’s handle and yanks it out. Jaxon wipes the blood on his pants, then tucks the knife back in its sheath.
“You have another three coming up on your right. They are running down the hall, and they are loaded, guys.” My brows pinch together when movement catches my attention from the other monitor. It isn’t Heaven and Grayson. There are more guards. “Fuck, guys. Forget the vault. We need to get out of here. There are more guards coming in the other direction. You’re six against two.”
Jaxon and Owen share a look, and Jaxon picks up the gun from the man he just killed and inspects it. “I think we’ll be alright; don’t you, Owen?”
“Oh, yeah.” Owen pulls his nine-millimeter from the back of his waistband and cocks it. “I love a good bloodbath.”
“You crazy bastards,” I say as they point their guns. Jaxon in one direction, Owen in the other. If Jaxon doesn’t come home from this heist, Quinn will never forgive me. She’ll kill me. My ear rings and I yank out the earpiece as the shots are fired. Gunfire lights up the computer monitor. Empty shells hit the floor, and smoke rises from each gun as the rounds are fired in rapid succession.
Then silence.
I shove the earpiece back into position and watch as Jaxon and Owen blow the smoke from the gun.
And all the guards are dead.
“Showoffs,” I tell them, and they look toward the camera in the upper left-hand corner, point, and then give each other a high-five. “Heaven, Grayson, do you copy?”
“Yessir’. We’re here and ready to open this vault. I’m fucking hungry. I miss Ingrid, guys. Those cookies were so good,” Heaven whines.
We all missed that crazy old bat. It’s a shame what happened to her. Ingrid was never supposed to exist, but Jaxon crashed Quinn’s wedding and met Ingrid there. The old woman had nowhere to go, and Jaxon had a soft spot for the elderly. He’d never admit it out loud, but he did. When we would go out to eat, he’d always sit with a lonesome old man or woman, seeing how their day was going.
Anyway, Quinn hated Jaxon because she thought Jaxon killed his sister when the man she almost married did. It took some time for Quinn to warm up to Jaxon, and when Jaxon got his revenge, in the process, Ingrid and Louis died. Louis was Jaxon’s driver, butler, pretty much everything.
It was a hard hit on all of us, and even though Ingrid was unexpected, she left an impression; that was for sure.
We all have an axe to grind. Next in line to sharpen it was me, but we might have to put my need for revenge on hold since I can’t find my brother or Gabriella.
The monitor plays everyone’s movements like a movie, and the guys meet up in the next intersection of halls before finally getting to the vault. I check the blueprint, then the wall, then the blueprint again.
Something isn’t right.
The vault is bigger on the camera. According to this newest version of the blueprint, there is supposed to be another wall. Something doesn’t feel right. My feet stomp to the floor of the van as I wrap my hand around the mic. “Guys, get the fuck out of there. That doesn’t match the blueprint. Something’s up.” Panic sets in. I flip through the pages to see if I missed something, but I didn’t miss. I never missed. Nothing looks out of place. “Get out of there, guys.”
“Why? It just looks like a bigger vault. Maybe they replaced the smaller one with this one. It isn’t a big deal,” Grayson says.
The vault is big, triple the size of the other one, the one I have the dimensions of in my hand. I have a bad feeling about this. “Jaxon, listen to me; my gut is telling me that you guys need to haul ass. Not walk, not jog—fucking run. Get out. I’m not wrong about these things, man. We have plenty of money. We can sacrifice this.” Richard would run. He’d be on the move again when he caught on to what happened in his underground warehouse. We would find him. We always did.
“Okay, Sebastian. Guys, you heard the man.”
“We didn’t come all this way to give up. We’re here! We aren’t going anywhere.” Owen places his hands on the wheel of the large vault. It’s made of ten-ton steel, and the only way in is with a code that changes every fifteen seconds, which I have on the screen. Nothing could bring down this vault. Fire, bullets, TNT—it was everything-proof.
Including us too.
A timer comes up onto my screen. One minute.
“Owen, way to go. Your stupidity has set off a timer,” I hiss into the microphone and furiously start typing to figure out a way to block the timer. A timer is never good. Things usually go boom after the clock stops ticking.
“Timer? For what?” He gulps with fear.
“Fucking seventy virgins. What the hell do you think? God, you can never listen.”
“I’m sorry! I didn’t think after all the shit we’ve been through, there’d another trap.”
Thirty seconds.
“Fuck, guys. Get out of there. I can’t stop the timer.”
“What do you mean you can’t stop it? You can stop anything!” Grayson yells at me, and Owen still has his hands on the vault.
“I can’t! Go. Get out!”
Twenty seconds.
Sweat beads across my brow, and my heart is pounding in my chest, a hammer against an iron nail. Bang. Bang. Bang. The salt burns my eyes as it drips in thick drops from my brows to my lashes. I wipe them off, my fingers flying over the keyboard, but regardless of my attempts, the timer continues ticking.
Fifteen seconds.
Owen let’s go of the vault wheel, and the timer stops. Heat recognition? Fuck, there is no way in hell we’re getting into the vault right now. I’d bet anything once that timer is activated, it never truly stops. The only way to see inside the vault is death.
“Get out,” I whisper.
The guys take a step away from the door, another and another.
The explosion cracks the pixels in the screen and the force shakes the foundation. The van rattles and the guys, fuck! They fly backward and hit the wall so hard, I know there’s was no fuckin way any of them survived it.
“Owen? Jaxon? Grayson? Heaven?” I call out their names one by one, but none of them respond. I press the heel of my palms against my eyes and shake my head in denial. No, this can’t be happening. They’re fine. They have to be. “Guys, stop fucking around and answer me!” I scream so hard my voice scratches, and spit flies against the microphone causing static. “Please,” I beg. “Fuck!” I roar.
Without my brothers, I am nothing. I have nothing.