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After they avoided the cameras and crouched at a cellar door that creaked slightly and set her teeth on edge when Ian lifted it, they both froze. He rooted around in his bag of toys to pull out a can of WD40. Like duct tape, he’d always claimed it worked on everything. Two quick blasts of the lubricant on the hinges and it lifted with a silence she couldn’t believe.
He was good at this. Great at it, in fact. Part of her was proud. Another quite shocked that he’d brought her on such a potentially perilous mission.
On feet as silent as a cat’s paws, they took the stone steps into the basement, him guiding her so her wet soles didn’t slip. Pitch black closed in around her, the only illumination coming from the entrance behind them, feeble in its ability to light the space beyond the first few steps.
The place stank of mildew and rot. She tried to keep her mind from drumming up childhood fears of snakes, rats, and giant spiderwebs.
While those were easily tamed, the one where a deadly assassin lay in wait to kill them was not. Her pulse spiked, heart hammering in her ears. The image of the prison they’d put her in engulfed her. No rats or spiderwebs, but a similar crawling sensation swept through her bones, as if she were confined once more.
Her mind flashed to her birds. She was never sticking them in a closed cage again.
Her fingers trembled as she reached to grab onto Ian. She couldn’t make out his form in the darkness, couldn’t tell where to place her next footstep.
Her hand fell through open space. Where was he?
She tried again frantically. Touched nothing.
“Ian,” she whispered on a shaky breath.
A hand caught hers when she waved it in front of her. “I’m right here,” he told her softly.
She took a breath and pushed down the panic. When had she become such a wuss? He’d questioned her courage; now she was.
Compartmentalize!
“Grab on,” he said, shifting her hold to his coat and forcing her to grasp it.
Hanging onto him, she noticed he moved slowly, deliberately, finally flicking on a small flashlight.
The beam showed decades of old furniture, dilapidated storage boxes, shelves of forgotten tools, and miscellaneous items. There were plenty of spiderwebs, too, and a few insects that ran here or there, or were already dead, feet in the air.
Oh, so carefully, Ian took the wooden stairs leading to the first floor. He tried each, noticing which creaked or groaned before trying a different section or completely stepping over them. She mimicked his every move.
Her phone buzzed before Ian opened the door at the top. “Phones off,” he whispered urgently.
Dumb, dumb, dumb. Of course she should have done that. She removed it to do so and saw Rory had sent another text, this one with an attachment.
Hurriedly, she opened it, then held the house’s floor plan up for Ian to see. He scanned the photo and nodded, then made a slashing motion across his neck. She wasn’t sure if that meant he was going to kill Rory or he wanted her to kill the phone. Either way, she set the device to silent.
On they went, avoiding the study. The jingle of a commercial echoed faintly over the hardwood floors and up to the high ceilings.
Ian led her past antique tables and outdated furniture, positioning her in a nook off the front entryway. He pressed his lips close to her ear. “When I give you the signal,” he whispered, “I want you to rattle the doorknob and kick over the coat rack loud enough to get his attention. Once he’s out of the study, I’ll sneak in there and wait for him to return. Don’t let him see you until I call you in, got it?”
She nodded.Roger that.
When his voice came over the earbud a few minutes later, her pulse had spiked again and she found it hard to control her breathing.
But she did as instructed, rattling the big old brass knob as hard as she could and sending the tall, wooden rack, with a raincoat and umbrella still dripping from a recent outing, crashing to the floor.
For good measure, she picked up an oriental vase from the nearby side table and hurled it across the entryway. The additional act may have been unnecessary, but damn, it felt good.
Twenty-One
“Go,” he’d said to Vivi over the comm. Hidden in the shadows near the study, he felt his blood pumping in his veins the way it had the night he and Ranger had rescued her. Never in a million years would he have believed he would have brought her on a mission. But, here they were. “Engage distraction.”
He anticipated the metallic noise from the knob and the clatter of the coat tree hitting the floor. What he hadn’t expected was the sound of breaking glass.
His fine-tuned ears made him cock his head. Not glass—china. His mind instantly locked on the large vase he’d seen in the entryway—had his wife smashed it?
