AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I laughed. “What’s even weirder is I don’t feel any different.”
“I guess that’s good.” My twin hesitated and then knuckled my shoulder lightly. “You look after yourself in there, all right? I’m sure you can handle it. Treat it like it’s a video game. You’ve beaten enough of those.”
I rolled my eyes at him with a smile. “Thanks for the pep talk. I do occasionally venture out into the real world without causing any catastrophes.”
“I know.” His expression turned even more serious than was usual for Seth. “You’re the smartest guy I know, Ky. If anyone can get past these people, it’s you.”
He had to be itching to take on that responsibility himself. Seth wasn’t good at letting other people head into the line of fire while he hung back. I gave him a light nudge with my knee. “I promise to be careful and not do anything you wouldn’t do.”
That got me the chuckle I was looking for. “I hope you do a whole lot of things Icouldn’tdo,” he retorted.
The minivan slowed as we got close to the estate. “You’ll need to roll down the window and give the security camera a look at you,” Rose said. “Gabriel, park right inside. As long as we’re not here too long, the employees should buy that Frankford asked the taxi to wait for him.”
“Just popping in to pick up an important document I needed,” I murmured, as much to myself as to confirm to them I remembered this part of the plan. I was going to have to do a little talking. The trick would be keeping it to a minimum.
When we stopped at the gate, I rolled down the window on cue. My throat tightened as the camera whirred to point at my face. But no one came running out yelling about imposters. The gate hissed open, and we were in.
Rose turned to clasp my hand. “We’ll be right here waiting for you,” she said. “Grab whatever you can quickly and then get out of there.”
I gave her what I hoped looked like a confident smile, ignoring the pounding of my heart. “Not a problem.”
The thump of my feet against the drive sounded way too loud, but no one reacted oddly to that either. Move confidently, act like I owned this place, I reminded myself. Because as far as any of the staff who saw me knew, I did. I gripped the briefcase I’d stashed my tools in and marched onward.
The door opened as I reached the front steps, and my pulse stuttered. A tall skinny man I assumed was some sort of butler stood on the other side.
“Master Frankford,” he said. “We weren’t expecting you today.”
I pitched my voice low and gruff, as if I had a bit of a cold, and coughed a couple times for good measure. “Left something behind. Just popping in to grab it.”
He glanced past me to the taxi down the drive. My body tensed. But he just nodded and stood back by the door as I strode in, his expression bland. Hopefully Charles Frankford wasn’t usually the most gregarious of guys, because I wasn’t going to be making small talk while I was here.
I did have to appear to have some idea where I was going. “Has my office been cleaned recently?” I said in the same rough voice.
The butler’s gaze darted to the stairs. Okay, so Frankford’s office was on the second floor, to the right it looked like. That gave me a decent start.
“I believe so, sir,” he said.
“Good.”
I strode up the stairs without looking back, forcing my hand not to grip the banister too tightly. What would Frankford’s people even do to me if they realized I was an imposter?
Better not to think about that. So far, so good.
On the second floor, I found myself faced with an open landing lined with a few doors on either side. None of them screamedofficeat me. But no one else was around up here. I could do a little trial and error.
The first door I tried opened into a bedroom. The second, the knob jarred. My heartbeat kicked up another notch. Rose had said the office would probably be locked magically. Thankfully she’d given me a little tool to deal with that. Frankford would have had a bespelled key. I had a bespelled stick that was going to serve the same purpose.
As I glanced around, a cleaning woman ducked out of one of the rooms farther down the hall. I coughed into my hand as if I had a sudden tickle in my throat. To my relief, she scurried on into the next room over without a word to me.
I palmed the stick from my pocket and poked the end of it into the keyhole. The magic Rose had imbued it with shuddered through my fingers as it expelled into the door. The air quivered in turn. And the deadbolt rasped over. A smile crossed my face.
Frankford hadn’t bargained for a foe like my consort when he’d come after us.
I eased open the door and shut it behind me the moment I’d crossed the threshold. The office was all modern chic: glossy black shelving units and desk, bold geometric pattern on the rug. The desk was bare except for a small notepad and a pen holder, but an external hard drive sat on one of its side shelves. Ah ha.
I sank into the desk chair and popped open my briefcase on the desk. With the click of a couple of cables, I’d hooked the hard drive up to my laptop. I tapped my foot against the floor as it loaded.
Several of the folders I could see were password protected. With my fingers racing over the keyboard, I’d broken into them in a matter of seconds. But all I found were financial transactions that didn’t look especially incriminating. A bead of sweat slid down the back of my neck as I dug deeper into the drive’s files.
