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She swallows hard and her gaze drops before pressing her lips into a tight line. “I get it,” she murmurs. “I’ll have a list of our dead by morning.”
I nod, and with that, I turn on my heel and storm down the hall, my only focus getting Oakley back.
I weave through hallways and take stairs two at a time, making my way deeper through Empire’s underground system until finally barging through to one of our many control rooms. Sawyer, Dalton, and Cross have hacked into the city’s surveillance system to search for any sign of our girl. “What have you got?”
“Not much,” Cross says, bringing up Empire’s private footage and moving back from the screen to show me. “She was here shortly after the explosion. Cameras clocked her entering the tunnel from the north side. She was met at the door by James Langford and they seemed to have talked for a moment before she was brought in.”
Cross fast forwards, and I watch as James ushers Oakley through the tunnels. There’s a moment where James shoves her against the wall, and my hands ball into fists at my side, desperately wishing I knew what the fuck that was about. “What was she doing here?”
“I’ll give you one guess,” Cross mutters, the footage speeding by as we watch James lead her through the main bar, only for Oakley to knock the bastard out and take off at a sprint.
Dalton laughs, peering over to Cross’s screen. “Fuck, that gets me hard every time I watch it,” he says, adjusting his cock in his pants before focusing his attention on his own screen. But he’s not fucking wrong. There’s something so erotic about seeing Oakley fired up like this. Hell, it’s part of the reason I like getting under her skin so much. She’s fucking lethal when she’s mad, and it gets me worked up like no other woman has before.
It’s a real fucking shame I have to take her life. I would have enjoyed keeping her around.
Cross slows the footage, and I watch as Oakley takes off toward the cells, unease pulsing through my veins, knowing exactly what she wanted down in those fucking cells. “Fuck,” I grunt, clenching my jaw. I should have fucking known this is what she was planning, after all, she told me multiple times just how far she’d go to save herself and her father. “Where’d they go?”
Cross shakes his head. “See, that’s the thing,” he mutters. “They didn’t go anywhere.”
“What?”
He skips forward an hour and my brows furrow, watching as Oakley races back up the long tunnel, tears streaming down her face, that familiar crease between her brows telling me something went down in those cells. “Why would she leave without him?” I wonder. “She would have taken our lives just to save that bastard.”
“Something happened down in those cells,” Sawyer mutters from across the room. “Look at her face. The last time she looked like that—”
“Was when she knew what I really wanted with her.”
Cross nods. “Yep.”
“Fuck.” I drag my hands down my face and begin pacing behind the row of computers. “Where did she go after that?”
“That’s what we’re working on,” Cross says, exiting out of Empire’s private surveillance and opening the live surveillance, courtesy of the city. “We have her leaving here, only she doesn’t head back to Faders Bay. She never exited the tunnel from the north side.”
“Shit.”
“My thoughts exactly,” he says. “We’ve got her stumbling out of the south end an hour later, but she goes dark after that.”
“An hour?” I ask, my brows arched. “That tunnel is nearly five miles long.”
Dalton nods, looking impressed. “Nobody can claim that girl isn’t amazing.”
Sawyer rolls his eyes. “It’s the adrenaline. She’s fighting for her fucking life,” he mutters. “She would have run all night if she had to.”
Glancing back at Cross, I hope he’s got some good news for me. “Tell me you’ve got something after that.”
He shakes his head. “Nothing, but she couldn’t have got much further than that, not after everything else that went down tonight. We’ve been scanning the streets, 24/7 diners, everywhere, but this isn’t Faders Bay, man. Our resources are limited, and this town isn’t exactly throwing cash toward their surveillance.”
“Fuck.”
“She’ll show up eventually,” Dalton says, sounding fucking sick to his stomach at the idea of Oakley being lost out there, on the run from him. “She has to.”
Letting out a heavy breath, I stop pacing and grip the back of Cross’s chair, hanging my head as I try to figure out where the hell to go from here. “Keep searching the surveillance,” I tell Cross before glancing up at Dalton and Sawyer. “I want you two out on the fucking street. Search back alleys, dive bars, the fucking gas station bathrooms. Everywhere.”
Sawyer and Dalton nod in unison, getting to their feet, ready to spend the night searching the streets despite the hell we’ve already been through tonight. “And you?” Cross asks, glancing up at me from his screen.
