When Kyan pounced, it was so fast that I almost missed the move. One of his hands slapped down over the woman's mouth, stifling her cry and his other locked around her neck as he choked her out.
It didn't take him long to render her unconscious and I moved forward to tie her up, hidden beneath her desk where she wouldn't be discovered until we were long gone. My gaze fell on her lanyard for a moment as I memorised her name in case it would be of any use to me in future. Erica Mortensen. I have you marked.
Blake picked the paperback up from her desk entitled Warrior Fae, flipped it open to the last page and tore it out before scrunching it up and tossing it in the trash. Fucking savage. Not that I was complaining. She deserved to never find out the end of her book. If I had the time, I’d find a way to track down every copy in the world so that she could suffer forevermore without knowing how it ended. I wasn’t sure if there was any worse fate than that to bestow on someone.
Monroe, as usual, wasn't waiting for us and was moving along the corridor, cracking open doors and checking on the patients inside them as he hunted for our girl. I was guessing they were either sleeping or in no state to cry out in alarm at the sight of a masked man peering in on them, which was for the best. I quickly disconnected the alarm sitting on the desk in case any of them reached out and hit that red call button by their beds though. We didn’t need any of the guards posted downstairs to take it upon themselves to do another sweep of the building before their scheduled rounds in an hour.
I ignored the others and their haphazard methods of checking the place out as I quickly started searching on the computer at the desk, hunting down a list of patient records and frowning as I noticed the title for the clinical trials being conducted here. It appeared that they were working on a new form of cancer treatment, not a vaccine at all. But that couldn't be right. They had to be working on the Hades Virus. Tightness filled my chest and my knuckles paled as I gripped the desk. All signs had pointed me here when I'd hacked into my father's servers. It made no sense for that information to have been wrong. Unless he had suspected someone was on to him…
I banished the terrifying thought of what my father might do if he truly had realised someone was searching for Tatum and instead focused on the task at hand. That was a worry for another time. And as the motherfucker in question had managed to conveniently retreat to an unknown location which he wouldn’t even share with me, we weren’t even able to get our hands on him as a last resort. Which just meant that this had to work. It had to. I refused to consider any alternative.
I checked the list of patient names on the list and my upper lip peeled back as I read through them, obviously not finding Tatum's name anywhere but taking note of one patient who was only referred to with a number. If that wasn’t suspicious as fuck then I didn’t know what was. And it was exactly the kind of dehumanising bullshit my father would choose to entertain. If she didn’t even have a name, then he didn’t have to admit that she was a real person who he was hurting and possibly killing in pursuit of his own agenda. Not that I was delusional enough to believe he gave a fuck about murdering someone to advance his own interests, but this was precisely his style. Meticulous piece of shit that he was.
"Room thirty-nine," I growled, closing the computer down so that no one realised it had been used to find this information and turning to head that way.
Kyan had joined Monroe in searching the other rooms and I moved away from the two of them as they continued to open and close doors, stalking in the direction of room thirty-nine. Blake stayed tight on my heels, knowing full well I was the most likely to have tracked her down first and wanting to be there when I found her. I couldn’t fault him for that. We were all in desperate need of a reunion with our girl.
My heart raced as I closed in on the door at the furthest end of the corridor and I couldn't help but break into a jog at the thought of finding her there, of pulling her into my arms and looking into those bright blue eyes which consumed me. She was my drug of choice and I was hopelessly addicted. I needed my fill of her or I knew I was going to go insane.
Tatum Rivers was the one and only person who had looked upon this heartless monster of a man and somehow found a pulse thumping away beneath the vitriol and poison I wore as a shield. She'd seen the corruption and toxicity of my soul and had found something else there too. Something I'd never believed I even had and yet she'd discovered it all the same. I was her creature now whether she wanted me or not and she was mine too. My Night Bound. And I wasn't ever letting her escape me.
I reached the door and had to fight with every inch of self-control I owned not to throw it open as my fingers curled around the handle and I released a shaky breath. Blake laid a hand on my shoulder in solidarity and I nodded once before pushing it wide.
Inside the room, all was dark. The bed was nothing more than a hulking shadow in the centre of it. The machines which should have been monitoring vital signs deathly quiet.
"No," I breathed as a rock sank into my stomach, growing heavier and heavier, the weight of it threatening to drag to me to the deepest depths of the vastest ocean imaginable. I was drowning. Drowning in my grief and the knowledge of my failure yet again.
Blake wasn't so pessimistic as me and he found the light switch, flicking it on as he raised his weapon and pointed it at the empty bed.
My heart thrashed and pounded within my chest like a wild animal, caged and desperate, doomed and dying.
Above the bed was a whiteboard with various observations noted on it from vital stats to notes on blood extractions and the condition of the patient who had been kept here.
At the very bottom of the board were words that set my whole world alight with a desperate kind of agony as I stared up at them.
Patient deceased: 10:07am.
Resuscitation unsuccessful.
I stared at the clear declaration before me with my pulse spiking and the most debilitating fear rooting me in place for far too long. But my heart refused to accept the words that had been scrawled on that board. I just couldn’t.
"No," Blake snarled in refusal, echoing my own thoughts and turning from the room. He was taking much less care than he should have been as he raced along the corridor and started opening other doors, checking the rooms where other patients slept as he continued his hunt, clearly not accepting the facts as they’d been presented to us.
I stepped out of the empty room and stood waiting in the corridor for the other three Night Keepers to finish up their search, but I already knew what they would find.
“She’s not here and I don’t believe for one fucking second that she’s dead either,” I snarled, refusing to allow them to even consider panicking or giving into some useless form of grief.
“How can you be certain?” Blake demanded, his eyes wild with concern, a desperation in them that begged me to give him a definite confirmation which I couldn’t give.
“Because my father knows she’s too valuable to allow her to die so quickly. Besides, I’m not fool enough to believe something I haven’t seen with my own two eyes. She isn’t dead unless I see a body and if any of you even consider giving up on her then you’ll answer to me over it.”
None of them voiced any complaint to that. We were all equally determined not to believe in her death, so I forgot about the words which had been scrawled on that board and set my mind to continuing our search.