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What had I done? I stunned myself thinking of the answer to that. Dr. Green and Mr. Blackbourne had said the same thing: stay out of trouble. Nothing that would get the cops after us. When we first started out, I had no idea. Then I was curious. Some part of me expected this to be a prank, or some form of training. Maybe part of me imagined the house belonged to Mr. Blackbourne. Or Dr. Green. Or some other friendly Academy team member Luke was sent to tease. That wasn’t the case. Now I was terrified. I had just broke the rules. I was going to be banned from the group.
What I didn’t understand was Luke’s participation and Mr. Blackbourne’s request. He would order the others to swoop in and steal from someone? Even if the camera belonged to them, breaking into the house was still illegal.
I held back my questions, unwilling to break the silence. Instead of watching where we were going, I dropped my head against Luke’s shoulder. I was happy he was safe. I worried, too, what the camera contained that made him have to go out in the middle of the night into something so dangerous in order to retrieve it. What if I hadn’t come along? If he had brought Nathan or Gabriel, they wouldn’t have been able to fit through the door.
Luke didn’t seem to need directions this time. We were soon in the backyard of the strange house he had borrowed. He shuffled inside, closing the door behind us.
I let go of his back, slipping to the floor. I dropped to my knees, out of breath as if I’d run the whole way instead of being carried. I gasped at a sudden sharp pain in my legs, making it hurt to kneel. I dropped back onto my butt. My legs were scratched and cut up.
Luke bent over, his hands on his knees, breathing heavily. He grinned down at me on the floor. “You look like you took on a cactus. And lost.”
I couldn’t believe he was making jokes now. I sucked in a breath, suddenly remembering the camera. I reached around, fingering at the waistband of my shorts and pulled out ... the cell phone Luke had given me earlier.
I stared at it, stunned. Had I made a mistake? I pawed at my top, as if I’d missed something. I’d given him his shoes, which had the button light and the egg. He didn’t give me anything back. I’d held on to the camera. I felt around the waist band some more. No. “The camera’s gone!”
Luke lifted an eyebrow. “What?”
“The camera. I ... did I drop it?” I curled my fingers around the phone, trying to retrace my steps. I’d given Luke the cell phone. The camera was supposed to be ...
Luke’s eyes brightened and he started chuckling. He tucked his hand into his back pocket and pulled out the black digital camera.
My mouth fell open. “How did you do it?”
“I felt it in your shorts when I was on top of you.”
“So you took it?”
“Without you knowing. I’d call it a personal best. First time I ever lifted something out of a girl’s underwear.”
I huffed, shoving at him to back away so I could rise to stand. “I didn’t want to leave it in my top when I had to jump from the window.”
“I can’t believe you jumped. I told you to run.”
“I was heading back the way we came in.”
“I meant run out the front door. The dude had a gun.”
I threw my hands up. I couldn’t believe him. I turned around, ready to walk out the door and make him drive back. It was late. I was a mess. I wanted to be between the sheets next to Kota and Nathan and not getting shot at while stealing a digital camera.
“Whoa, hang on there, short stuff.” He snagged my arm, but held me so he was checking out my back. Fingers brushed against my side. Pain seared through my back. I sucked in a sharp breath, remembering the cut from the doorframe. In my wild frenzy, I’d forgotten, but now the fresh pain was suddenly overwhelming.
“Aw,” Luke said. He poked more tenderly at the area. “Battle scar. And you ripped the shirt.”
I moaned, the scratch was starting to itch horribly and I didn’t dare rub at it because it hurt. “How bad?”
“You don’t need stitches, I don’t think.” Luke’s hand slipped around my good side and he guided me toward the inside of the house. “Come on. There’s got to be a medical kit here somewhere.”
“Whose house is this?” I asked him.
He gave a small smile. “Mrs. Fredrick’s house?” He said it like he was almost sure, but not totally positive.
“How do you know?”
“Because that’s the name on the mailbox out front.”
“How do you have a key?”
“There’s a lot to that question, and the others following it, that either aren’t important, or I can’t tell you.” He tried one of the doors down the short hallway. It opened to a bathroom. He patted the sink counter and pointed at me. “It’s my turn to play with Sang in the bathroom.”
“What am I supposed to say now when Mr. Hendricks asks me what I might know that would get you kicked out of the place?”
“You tell him everything Mr. Blackbourne tells you.”
I blew out a sigh.
Luke’s fingers curled under the lower hem of my shirt, slowly lifting up and away to expose my back. He sucked in a breath. “Aw, sweetie. You’re all cut up. The others are going to kill me.”
“You don’t think they’d be mad finding out I went with you even without the scratches?”
“If I brought you back without a hair in the wrong place, I might have not been yelled at too much. Now I’ll be scalped and my internal organs sold on the black market.” He found my hand bringing it to my shirt. “Hold it up. Let me wash it.”
He ran back to the kitchen to find paper towels so we didn’t ruin any of Mrs. Fredrick’s towels with my blood. He dug through cabinets to find medical supplies. He pressed hydrogen peroxide against the area. I bit my tongue, resisting the urge to complain.
“You know,” Luke said softly as he allowed the cut to breathe as the peroxide stung me. “You were pretty awesome back there.”
My lips felt glued together, but I peeled them apart. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“But we got out with the camera. What happened at that last part though? What was that loud noise? It sounded like you slammed
the drawer back or something, but I didn’t think you would.”
“The drawer broke,” I said. “I was pushing it when it tilted in the back like it fell off the rail.”
“You mean we got shot at because his furniture was shoddy? That whole place was a nightmare. That door to the office was swollen. You couldn’t open it all the way without it rubbing against the frame. I was lucky I brought you so someone could get in.”
“Luke?”
Luke ripped open a packet of gauze and started pressing it on me. “Yeah?”
I stared through the door at the hallway outside the strange bathroom. “Are we going to get the cops called on us?”
He started applying tape to hold the bandage in place. “No, sweetie.”
“Is that guy going to come after us?”
Luke sighed, pressing his fingers around the tape against my back, but more like he was massaging the area rather than just making sure it was sticking. “He doesn’t know you were there. He won’t come after you.”
“Will he come after you?”
“I don’t think so. I doubt it.”
“But he could?”
Luke gently took my elbow, turning me slightly on the counter until I was facing him. He smoothed his palms over my cheeks until I was looking at his brown eyes, eerily serious. “Sang, the camera was in a fingerprint lock box with a gun. Normal people don’t put cameras in lock boxes like that. Right?”
My cheeks heated against his palms. What did I know about normal? “I suppose.”
“So will you trust me when I say I was sent there to fetch the camera, because whatever is on the camera needs to fall into better hands than a loony who would fire a gun in the air trying to scare us off with his wife and kids in the house?”
“I thought he was shooting at us.”
“He didn’t see us. He didn’t know we were still there. He was angry and he was shooting at random, trying to spook us out like hunting dogs scaring out a fox. If I’d been someone else, maybe a robber with a gun who was trying to run away quietly, and he made the first shot, a robber might have shot back, and there would have been a fire fight.”
