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Red’s number flashed on my screen as I walked toward my bedroom.
“Tell me you have something,” I snapped.
“Her phone stopped moving. I’m sending you the location now. I’ll send guards there, but you’re closer, sir.”
Coordinates flashed on my screen.
“I’m on my way,” I said.
“I can also notify the police.”
“I’ll do that,” I said, ending the call.
In a race to save Luna, I’d take all the help I could get, but I needed to time that carefully. I needed the ability to get into that building with no police stopping me, because I wasn’t going to be careful—I was going to do whatever was necessary to stop Franco from ending my only reason for existing.
My love is in the arms of a violent, sadistic enemy. What is she going through right now? What are they doing to her?
I stormed into my bedroom, into my closet, and pressed against the shelving unit on the far end that opened on hidden hinges.
The one my own staff was unaware of. Hell, even the contractors who helped me remodel this place two years ago were ignorant of its purpose; I made sure of it with a careful string of nondisclosure agreements, combined with carefully peppered use of contractors working on individual aspects of this job so no one had enough information to even think of what it might mean.
Imperative groundwork to protect my anonymity.
The covert door opened with a bounce, and I walked through it into the hidden secondary closet that sat behind it, knowing that if I didn’t get to Luna in time, I would spend every waking moment of my life hunting every single man who had anything to do with her abduction. And I would torture them slowly for weeks at a time until they begged me for fucking mercy.
Only then would I unleash the most excruciating method to kill someone and finally stop their heart.
I flipped a switch, and incandescent lights bathed the secret space that no one knew about in a golden radiance.
It was in here, in this second closet, that I kept my second skin, if you will—the black shirts, black pants, and the vests that added twenty-two pounds of girth to my frame. Vests I’d had custom-made to be light, resemble the exact muscles of a torso, and were, of course, bulletproof. The boots were custom-made, too, from overseas—taking my size ten foot and encasing it in a size-fourteen combat style with lifts to add to my height. All of which were counter forensic measures I’d deployed from day one to protect my identity.
After all, it wasn’t just me that I was protecting should I ever get caught; it was my entire family.
The Lockwood name, the company, and its thousands of employees could be at risk.
It was the fractured remains of my family’s hearts that needed the most protection—hearts that might shatter if they found out who I really was.
But I couldn’t think about that shit right now.
I suited up faster than I ever had before, my heart pounding out of my damn chest.
In the farthest corner of the closet, past rows of deceptive armor, another nondescript door called to me, its mundane wooden appearance disguising the secrets it guarded. When I opened it, I was greeted by the scent of damp earth, and a cool metallic kiss met my hand from the spiral staircase leading below.
Normally, excitement charged through me when I jogged down the steps to the basement that sat beneath this aging mansion and navigated the shadowy tunnel to my weapons room—the same room where I’d interrogated Franco’s man.
But this time, rage smothered my emotions as I threw a handful of knives and a gun into a black backpack and tossed it over one shoulder. I clenched my fists as I hurried down the smaller hallway that branched off this weapons room—the one that led to my underground garage, hiding the vehicle that I used to slip in and out of the city, undetected. The garage was not attached to the main driveway, of course. Rather, it spit out onto the other end of the estate, behind the blanket of trees, where anyone coming across it would presume the gravel road belonged to an old outhouse on this property.
In one fluid motion, I tossed the backpack into the vehicle’s passenger seat, its interior lighting up in response. I slid behind the wheel and awakened the engine, its low growl resonating with my own brewing storm.
Luna didn’t know what I was truly capable of. The news reports had only disclosed partial facts to the public—they hadn’t disclosed the gory details of the particularly gruesome killings committed by the Windy City Vigilante. But she was about to find out the truth.
That I had two sides to me.
The man.
And the villain.
CHAPTER54
