Dusk Avenger (Flirting with Monsters #3) - Eva Chase Page 0,103
properly, but I couldn’t shake my awareness of its weight on my head. I resisted the urge to tug at it and rocked on my feet instead, singing a little tune to keep my energy pumped up. “If I blow there will be rubble; if I slay there will be double. So come on my little foe.”
The elevator dinged, letting me out on the sub-penthouse floor. The blaze of light from the glaring panels set all across the ceiling made my eyes water. Strips of more fluorescent light beamed along the baseboards, and the seamless floor was polished like a mirror to reflect all of it. What the hell did a regular delivery person make of this funhouse hall?
It was a good thing we’d been prepared for this in advance. My shadowkind allies who’d snuck with me onto the elevator unseen would have been shit out of luck for darkness to conceal themselves in out here—if it wasn’t for the skill our night elf possessed that Omen had scoffed at.
Gloam could produce his own darkness. As I walked down the hall to the private elevator at the far end, a streak of shadow trailed along the edge of the floor, long enough to accommodate all my allies but so thin I could barely see it unless I looked hard. Here was hoping that meant it wouldn’t show up on the security cams mounted at intervals along the ceiling.
One of those cameras was pointed at the spot directly in front of the private elevator that only moved between this floor and the penthouse above. Our new friend had told us that one of the two guards always on duty would be keeping an eye on that feed at all times.
To catch that dude’s attention, I gestured wildly, setting my face in a fraught expression. Then, as if frantic to get my message across, I snatched a paper out of my purse and pretended to scrawl a message I’d actually written ahead of time. I held it up to the camera with both hands and a pleading gaze.
I MUST SPEAK TO ISAAC. IT’S ABOUT CARMEN. PLEASE!!!!!
Very important to add the multiple exclamation marks. Each one could serve as a little jab of guilt over my apparent desperation.
I held my breath. If the strangeness of my arrival and the message wasn’t enough to prompt the guard to wake up his boss and ask for guidance, and instead the guy came down to chase me off without checking in, the situation would become ten times more complicated. But our charmed guard had said that his boss didn’t like them taking their own initiative, and this time that worked against the head honcho rather than for him.
I waited there, holding up the sign and waggling it now and then, for long enough that my shoulders started to twinge from keeping them in position. Mr. Big Bad would have plenty to think about, faced with my message. How had anyone connected his real first name to the condo where he didn’t even let his direct employees identify him as anything other than “boss”? How had I found out about his long-ago fiancé? What could I possibly know about her that would bring me to his doorstep?
He might be wary, but we were counting on the questions eating at him too deeply for him to dismiss. He had no reason to suspect that this intrusion could have anything to do with the gore-and-fire-happy monsters who’d ransacked various laboratory facilities belonging to the Company in cities far away.
Finally, a thrumming sound carried through the wall. I lowered the sign, my body tensing.
The door opened to reveal not the silver-buzzcut, square-jawed guy our charmed guard had described as his boss, but a muscle-bound woman who looked only a little older than me. She pointed a gun at me, her other hand at a whip hanging in a coil from her belt, and jerked her head toward the shiny elevator car she was standing in.
“Get on. The boss will see you. No funny stuff—hands to yourself, avoid sudden movements. Understood?”
I nodded meekly. We’d expected the process of roping in the boss man to go something like this. I might have piqued his curiosity, but he’d want to indulge that curiosity in the comfort of his well-shielded home. The real trick was going to be convincing him I had a legitimate enough cause to get him out of that home and vulnerable enough for us to make our move.