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“Easy for you to say.” She laughed. “You got to have fun making the baby, but you didn’t have to carry him. Try having aches, pains, heartburn, and a million other symptoms for nine months. I will lose my mind if he doesn’t come soon.”
My assistant entered my office, and I raised my hand, telling her to give me a minute. Despite my request, she shook her head and entered the room.
I moved the phone away from my mouth and raised an eyebrow, suggesting she speak.
“Mr. Battle just called for you. It’s urgent. He said to get to the lab.”
I nodded. “Okay, I’ll be there in a minute.”
“No, he said now.” She bit her lip as if she feared for her job by telling me what to do. “He sounded upset before the line disconnected.”
“Thanks, Cindy.”
I shot up from the chair and rushed out of my office. “Hey, Grace. I hate to cut our call short, but Drake needs me.”
“Okay,” she cooed. “I’ll call if my water breaks or anything eventful happens with Hale.”
“Sounds good.”
Before I could hang up, an explosion above me echoed throughout the building. It sounded like a nuclear weapon detonated, and the structure was about to crack in half.
Grace gasped in my ear. “What was that?”
“I don’t know.” I power walked past the elevator bank and went straight to the end of the hall, toward Drake’s private elevator. I hit the button on the wall. “I have to go, baby.”
“Cole,” she whimpered. “Tell me the truth.”
“I think we’re under attack.”
A second later, a woman’s voice floated through the loudspeakers. “Activating Battle King Protocol.”
No!
“If anything happens to me, I will activate the Battle King protocol,” Drake had told me on the day I started working for him. “Lovelace will lock down all of my company’s buildings and homes. You’re the only person, other than Tate, with access to override the system.”
If Drake activated that protocol, it means he could be… No, don’t think about the worst-case scenario.
Even though Viktor wasn’t the leader of The Lucaya Group, it didn’t take the target off our backs. They wanted Drake’s tech. In the wrong hands, Lovelace was a weapon of mass destruction.
“Fuck,” I groaned, hitting the button on the wall repeatedly, but nothing was happening. It didn’t even light up. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“Cole, you’re scaring me.”
“Initiating sequence in five, four,” Lovelace said over the speaker.
I abandoned the elevator and headed for the stairwell, rushing down the hallway.
“Three, two, one,” Lovelace continued.
Metal bars inched down from the ceiling, caging the employees into their offices and conference rooms. People screamed and begged to let them out. Those in the hallway with me halted in place, unsure what to do. Then, a thick layer of bulletproof glass slid out from the walls, locking us inside.
“Grace, I have to hang up now,” I said calmly. “I need to deactivate the protocol. If you don’t hear from me within the hour, I want you to call Sonny.”
Bastian would have been my first choice, but he was in Italy with Alex and his brothers.
“Cole, what’s going on?”
“Baby, I don’t know. I heard an explosion.”
