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Those meager skills had brought me safely to the backdoor of the large, sprawling estate. It reminded me so much of places I’d been before—especially the house in the mountains that my father had put me in before the wedding. Really, that was the worst of the places to remember. The huge, empty rooms, the tree line that felt as though it crushed me.
I swallowed down those feelings so I could focus on now, on what I needed to do. Getting in and over the fence was the easy part. Sneaking into the actual house was different. However, it seemed to me that security wasn’t as tight as I might have expected.
I hadn’t spotted any patrols, and even the cameras seemed poorly placed and easy to avoid. It struck me as something between confidence and arrogance, as though Pauline didn’t believe anyone would strike against her so didn’t concern herself with extreme measures.
The house was three stories from what I could tell, probably with an attic space as well. Colton’s words rang in my ears from old conversations, when he’d said that security measures were always laxer on the upper floors. People got far too confident in their safety and forgot how agile humans could be.
Of course, Colton scaling a three-story building was a big difference from me doing the same. Suddenly all the times I’d skipped the gym came back to haunt me.
A sound from inside made me jump, and I rushed to the side, ducking behind a large shrubbery that sat to the left of the door just a moment before it opened.
A man in a black shirt and a pair of sweatpants stepped out of the house, another younger man, beside him. “She’s got a meeting tomorrow,” the older man said as he pulled a vape pen from his pocket.
“Are you going?” the younger asked.
“Not this time. It should be pretty quiet, and she’s been wanting me to stick closer to the girls for some reason.”
“Some reason? Is there a problem?” The men walked down the stairs and to a small table and chairs a bit farther away. The door remained open.
Lazy, stupid security.If Hayden had been here, no doubt he’d given those two a piece of his mind about proper procedures when dealing with a client’s home. However, their stupidity was my gain, so I slipped into the darkness of the house while the useless bodyguards smoked outside.
The interior of the house was spacious and lit only by nightlights that allowed for a general glow through the living space. I kept my steps soft but quick, going for the stairs. Mansions were mostly set up the same, and living spaces were always on the upper floors. I also thought back to the map that Hayden had gone over, where Tor had listed the rooms and who stayed in them.
Pauline’s room is to the left, at the end of the hallway.I went to the left, light along the baseboards of the walls just enough so I didn’t trip over anything. Brighter light showed at the bottom of the door, soft music escaping as well. That suggested that even now, at three in the morning, she was awake.
So this was it. I grasped the handle and twisted it slowly, trying to avoid any creaking that could give me away. I needed her toseeme before making a move, or I might just get a bullet for my efforts.
I slipped into the room to find the woman whose picture I had seen on Hayden’s screen, just dressed down. Instead of wearing makeup and lovely clothing, she wore a basic rose-colored nightgown and her hair was tied up in a bun at the back of her head. A pair of reading glasses perched on her aristocratic nose, her gaze on the book. “I don’t need anything, thank you.” She spoke without moving her eyes from the pages of what she read.
I shut the door behind me, then kept my hands out to show I had no weapons. “Even a conversation?”
Pauline finally looked up, but didn’t so much as flinch. Instead, she arched one of her gray eyebrows, a famous motherly ‘just what do you think you’re doing?’ expression.
It had been a long time since I’d seen a face like that, and boy did it feel oddly nostalgic.
“If you’re here to hurt me, I suggest you think very carefully about the consequences.”
Despite those words being the ones coming out of her mouth, what I heard was, ‘make good choices.’
“I’m not here to hurt you.” I lifted my hands to once again prove I had no weapons, nothing to do harm to her with.
She closed her book quietly, then set it on the small table beside her chair. Even still, she didn’t rise.
Then again, she likely knew that standing wouldn’t help her position and doing so would only risk escalating the issue.
“So why are you here?”
I swallowed hard and forced out the truth, something I rarely had said over the past year. “My name is Mackenzie Williams.”
Pauline said nothing at first, dragging her gaze up and down my form in a slow perusal. “So you’re the one at the heart of so many problems? At least you’re pretty, I suppose.” She sighed, then gestured for the seat across from her. “If you’re going to be here, you might as well sit down.”
I did as she said, partly because I saw no reason not to. The chair was lovely, the cushion soft and feeling broken in, not stiff as though never used.
“My youngest daughter would sit in here and read with me some evenings. It’s been a long time since we did that, though. I’m happy to see her growing into her own person, but I do miss the time we spent together when she was little. I understand your mother passed away?”
“Yeah, my mom was murdered when I was eight. I don’t remember a lot about her.”
“You poor child,” she said, an honest sorrow in her voice. Perhaps it was her outfit, how dressed down she was, but she didn’t seem nearly as unapproachable as she had in the pictures I’d seen. “And you recently lost your father as well, did you not?”
