off center, as if someone had grabbed on to it or been knocked into it.
Con had a good idea of who that someone had been—Randolph Lancaster—and he didn’t need Jack or Scout for what happened next. Where he was going, their presence was a complication, not a help. He knew who had taken Lancaster, and he knew where they’d taken him: 738 Steele Street.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Cool and smooth in the gusting rain, hard and hollow like his heart, Monk climbed hand over hand up the old freight elevator at 738 Steele Street, an old-style contraption of iron and steel, of I-beams and bolts, a beast from the machine age. He’d seen the cameras trained on the alley below and had crawled the wall to avoid them. The building was old brick with lots of handholds for the strong.
The girl was out cold.
Balancing on a strut, he wiped the rain from his face and looked up to see lightning crackling across the sky. He’d taken a sheet off a clothesline on Secaro Street and wrapped it around Jane, securing her in a cotton cocoon. Slung over his shoulder, sodden wet and limp as a rag, she wasn’t giving him any trouble.
Somewhere inside the building there would be a safe place to stash her, a hidey-hole no one would ever find, a private place where he could come back to her when he finished with Farrel and Lancaster. She would be his prize then, his gift to himself, his warrior’s tribute.
Thunder rolled in after the lightning, and he kept climbing. At the seventh floor, the old elevator ended, and light shone from every window. With one blow, he could break the glass and enter, but when he swung over and looked inside, his breath caught for a suspended moment, and he stayed his fist.
Three—he counted the people in the high-tech office. Two for killing, the men, both dark-haired and heavily armed, and one for stealing and keeping, the one on the communications console—Skeeter Bang-Hart.
She was more beautiful in real life than in her photographs, unexpected, like the woman over his shoulder, a fantasy vision of long-ago nights, of rough city streets and the men who ruled them, and of the women who ruled those men. She was one of those women, pale of skin with a scar on her face and a Glock tucked under her arm in a shoulder holster. Her hair was long and silvery, her body lithe and strong. He could see the supple movement of her muscles beneath the thin material of her dress, and he was riveted by the sight.
He wanted her, the same way he wanted the girl in the golden dress, viscerally, like a heated need in his blood, and in an instant, he made his decision. If nothing else this night, she, too, would be his tribute, his by right of victory and plunder.
Tonight, he ruled the world.
The truth welled up inside him and filled his heart with desire and his throat with a howl he dared not give voice to—not if he was to fulfill his mission.
She would be his, though. He promised himself.
Grasping the sill and leaning back, he looked up the side of the building. The floors directly above him were dark and had balconies. He would enter from up there, secure both of the women, and go hunting for Farrel and Lancaster.
He took one more look into the office, at the woman, then swung himself over to the next handhold and began climbing higher up the side of the building, moving toward the balcony a few yards above him.
* * *
Skeeter stood in front of the comm console in the main office at Steele Street, frozen in place, listening to Hawkins on the radio. Zach and Quinn were with her, hearing the same damn bad news, and she’d routed it to Dylan down in the basement. Kid was scheduled to return to the office any minute to relieve Quinn—but Skeeter doubted if anyone was going to get relieved tonight.
“It was Monk. We’re sure of it.” Hawkins’s voice was calm and steady, but Skeeter’s pulse was racing. “Creed saw him cut through the neighbor’s yard. MNK-1 is fast, faster than Red Dog.”
Lancaster’s beast, the one who had twisted King Banner’s arm off and taken a bite out of it—geezus, it made her blood run cold, and the bastard had snatched Jane and taken off with her just seconds after J.T. had disappeared from Alazne Morello’s. SDF was losing on every front.