Queen of Quarantine (Brutal Boys of Everlake Prep #4) - Caroline Peckham Page 0,9

chasing adrenaline rushes. In fact, Blake had been perfectly single minded in his determination to get Tatum back into our arms. He had been by my side day and night while I used all of my connections and tactics to dig into my father's businesses and Serenity Pharmaceuticals in pursuit of her, wordlessly carrying out any and every task I'd asked of him to help speed up the process. So I could allow him the odd badly timed, non-amusing joke.

We climbed the stairwell at speed and paused on the top floor as I pressed an ear to the door, listening for any sign of movement beyond it.

Kyan took a pistol from his belt and Monroe drew his too. So far we'd managed to conduct these raids without killing anyone, purely to keep the investigations into the 'robberies' low priority and keep the police off of our tails. But the more places we hit, the higher the security was getting at the new targets. They didn’t know we were searching for our girl of course, but stories of the gangs breaking into medical research facilities and private hospitals all over the city to steal medicines were making them up their security.

Ideally we'd leave this place without getting blood on our hands, but if that was what it took then I wasn't against it. Besides, if our girl really was here then I had more than enough motivation to kill every last one of them if we had the time. But until we were certain, I wasn't looking to spill too much blood.

Nothing but the soft sounds of my brothers' breaths reached my ears as I listened intently for a full minute - ignoring Kyan's impatient growl - before cracking the door open.

The corridor was softly lit with night lighting and I spotted a woman in a nurse's uniform at a desk at the far end of the hall. Her back was to us and she was reading a book, seemingly lost in her own world. I took another moment to listen out for other sounds, but it seemed like she was the only member of staff nearby, and from what I’d learned in my research into this place that was to be expected. They kept one nurse on shift overnight and that was it.

Kyan slipped past me as I pushed the door wide and the rest of us waited as he stalked along the corridor, his eyes set on the woman as she stayed lost in her book, completely unaware that she was being stalked by a predator.

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