out of place. Everything looked like it had the day before. There was just a scent hanging over the room, like someone with a lot of cologne had come and gone hours ago, and the air filtration system was having trouble dissipating it.
The garage door opened behind me, and Jada burst in, calling me, “Baioretto!”
I turned to look at her. She was wild-eyed, pulling on her robe over a satin nightgown. Her feet were bare, and there was a desperate air about her that she was trying to fight, pulling on an act of calm over the worry.
“I need your help,” she said.
“Okay?” My frown conveyed my confusion.
“I…just…come on,” she said. She pulled me outside. I protested, trying to remove my shoe covers and gloves, but she had a vise-like grip on my arm, yanking me in the direction of the house.
“Jada, what the heck?” I said, finally getting enough balance to pull myself from her hold. I tore off my shoe coverings, gloves, and hairnet and shoved them into the pockets of the lab coat.
She darted her eyes around the yard and then entered the back door. I followed. Once we entered the kitchen, she handed me her phone.
It was a text.
UNKNOWN: Just a little something to ensure you’ll be home tomorrow morning.
There was a picture attached. The lab. My lab and the metal table with my water bath and microscope. The petri dishes were on the shelves with various heat lamps. The photo was tilted, angled so you could see below the main table. Taped to the underside was a square black box with a red light glowing like the eye of a demon.
“What is that?” I asked shakily.
But I already knew. Her father had warned us. Amateur labs had accidents all the time.
I forced her phone out of the case that was supposedly bugged, left the diamond-bejeweled cover on the table, and went running up the stairs to Nolan’s room.
“They aren’t going to do it,” Jada said on my heels. “They’ll only go that far if I don’t do what they say.”
“Jesus, do you think I can take that chance? Why would they even feel the need to do this? You said you were going back.”
“I…I posted a picture on my social media. I didn’t mean it like I wasn’t going back. It was a picture of one of the creams we made, and I said my life was going in a new direction. I just meant it as a promo for the company, you know?”
“Crap.”
I pounded on Nolan’s door. He opened it sleepy-eyed, shoving on his glasses and taking us in with a bleary look. He motioned us into the room.
I shoved Jada’s phone into his face. “They’ve planted a bomb. A bomb!”
“What?” he grabbed the phone, using his fingers to zoom in on the picture.
“Is it real?” I asked.
“Hard to tell from this angle. I can’t exactly see what it’s attached to,” he said with an annoying amount of composure. “We’ll have to get a closer look.”
Nolan took the phone and set it outside the door. An extra precaution.
“They’ll know if you do anything to it!” Jada stormed, pacing the room. “This is my fault. I wasn’t going to go back until tomorrow, but I’ll go back today. I’ll tell them to take out the device, and I’ll do whatever they want.”
“It’s too late for that. They’ll just leave it there for extra insurance,” Nolan said.
“We are not leaving it there. Take it out!” I demanded.
Nolan dialed his phone. “Malone, we’ve got an issue.”
He moved away to talk because Jada was still rambling almost incoherently. I finally focused on her enough to hear her say, “I’m sorry I involved you. I’m so sorry.”
“This isn’t your fault,” I said, fighting for even a tenth of the composure Nolan was showing.
He hung up and came back over. “We’re going to see if we can interrupt any camera feeds they’ve set up, loop it long enough for us to investigate, and disarm it. If we can’t, we may have to leave it.”
“No,” I said firmly.
“It’s either that or toss out years of hard work. When Dawson gets back with the shipment―”
“What shipment?” I asked.
Nolan looked chagrinned, like he knew he’d said too much. “Never mind. It’s just… We’re really close. Like, hours away from pulling this off. If it works, we’ll be taking out the largest criminal syndicate to have risen in this century,” he said.
I just stared, almost forgetting that we were actually talking about Jada’s family.