Eric
I call Blake on my race up the apartment building stairs. “Get in touch with your man. I need to know my apartment’s secure and everyone inside with it.”
“Hold on,” he says, without asking why.
In the time it takes for him to reply, in the dead space that is my seventeen flights of stairs, I die over and over again. The idea that everyone I love could be in trouble, and that I let it happen, guts me over and over again; a blade for every floor I have to travel to get to them. My mind starts playing a series of numbers. They calculate the odds of me being set-up. The odds of Harper, Grayson, and Mia laying dead right now, which are too high. The odds of them being held captive at gunpoint. The odds that I can save them if they are kidnapped, which are too slim. I don’t like any of the numbers. I reject them all. There’s a reason Grayson and Mia aren’t answering their cells, that the numbers in my head fail
to offer me. It doesn’t matter that the numbers never fail me.
Blake finally returns to the line. “Eric,” he says, his tone grim. “Our man isn’t answering.”
Those words gut me all over again, as in it feels like I’m literally having my heart pulled from my chest as Blake adds, “Savage is on his way up and I’m sending back-up.”
“I’m about to exit to the hallway,” I say. “I’m going silent.” I disconnect and finish my upward charge and approach my floor, pulling my gun as I do, opening the door a mere crack when I want to explode into the hallway. I scan and find the floor clear, but there’s no man from Walker Security standing guard at my door either. Adrenaline and dread swell inside me and I shove open the stairwell door, exploding into the hallway and running until I’m at my door. Once I’m there I pull my key from my pocket and unlock the door. I then aim my gun and kick it open, to enter the foyer.
“Harper!” I shout, moving into the room and finding the living room empty, but no one there with guns or dead bodies either. “Harper! Grayson!”
“Eric!”
At the sound of Harper’s voice, it’s like an angel singing me out of the hell that the past few minutes have shoved me inside. And when she appears in the doorway that leads to my office, her dark hair in a beautifully disarrayed mess around her shoulders, that swell of emotions inside me from minutes before now includes relief.
“Oh God!” she exclaims, eyeing the gun, stopping in her tracks. “Why do you have a gun? What’s happening?” She looks wildly around the room.
It’s then that Grayson and Mia exit the office, both in safe condition. “Oh God,” Mia gasps, echoing Harper from moments before.
“Oh shit.”
That male voice draws my attention back to the office, where a man now stands, holding a gun. A man that I recognize as Smith from Walker Security. “Why the fuck are you not at the door and why is no one answering their phones?” But I know even as I ask the question. My office has crap for service. It always has. It’s like a cold spot in a room, haunted for about ten reasons no one but me has ever known.
“My phone didn’t ring,” Smith replies.
“I asked to talk to him,” Harper interjects. “I was desperate to reach you. I was driving everyone crazy. Grayson went and got Smith because he was trying to confirm that Walker had eyes on you to make me feel better.”
“Fuck,” I grind out, scrubbing my jaw, and lowering my gun, still focused on Smith. “Get an extra man on the door,” I snap. I’m agitated, still feeling the effects of fear for what I’d find when I got here. Still feeling that rush of adrenaline.
By the time the gun is in the band at the back of my pants again, Harper is in front of me, wrapping her arms around me. “I was so worried about you,” she exclaims. “So incredibly worried.”
She doesn’t even begin to understand what worried means right now. I cup her head and close my mouth down on hers, and I don’t give a shit who’s watching. I kiss the fuck out of her, drink her in, drug myself all over with her, and it’s a high I can’t get enough of. “We need to have that talk I promised you.”
“Yes,” she whispers. “We do.”
“Sounds like our cue to go home,” Grayson says.
I shift Harper to my side, but don’t let her go. “Keep Walker with you.”
Grayson nods in understanding. “Call me.”
“I will,” I confirm as Mia rushes to Harper and gives her a hug to add, “Call me, too.”
Smith and I exchange a look and I lean down and kiss Harper. “I’ll be right back.” I press my lips to her ear. “Wait for me in the bedroom. Be naked when I get back.” I don’t wait for a reply. Smith and I fall into step behind Grayson and Mia and when they exit the apartment, we stay inside the foyer.
“We both know you fucked up,” I say. “Don’t do it again.” I don’t wait for a reply. I move on. “I need to know where my father is right now. I need to know who he talks to or who he sees. And somehow, get a bug in his room, even if that means using room service to do it. Just make it happen.”
“We’re resourceful,” Smith assures me. “We’ll get it done.” He turns and leaves.
I lock the door and stick my gun in a table off the entryway. I have another upstairs. I want this one ready to say hello to anyone at the door that shouldn’t be here. Once it’s sealed away, I exit the foyer, and walk the path to the stairs, starting the climb; blood rushing in my ears, pulsing through my body, just thinking about touching Harper, holding her again, after thinking I might have lost her. A feeling I never want to experience again.
Harper appears on the second level, at the top of the stairs, waiting on me, still dressed, and looking like she’s ready to launch ten questions at me that I don’t want to answer right now. I catch her by the waist and walk her backward until we’re in my room where I shut the door, and then plant her against it. “You scared the fuck out of me.” That swell of emotion is back, pounding at my chest, radiating through my voice. “Don’t ever do that to me again.”