Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 93727 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 469(@200wpm)___ 375(@250wpm)___ 312(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 93727 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 469(@200wpm)___ 375(@250wpm)___ 312(@300wpm)
“Rosemary,” he said, a smile in his voice.
“Mr. Boucher.”
“Please, call me Erik.” His eyes widened as Pop stepped up beside me. “Gary Whitlock.”
“Thanks for coming, Erik.”
“Your father is Gary Whitlock?” Erik said in what sounded like delight. “Gods.”
“Ambrose. Beau.”
“Good to see you, Gary,” Ambrose said with a nod. “This is my mate, Lucy. And that’s Beau’s mate, Reese.”
“You brought your mates,” Pop said carefully.
“We weren’t too excited for them to leave us behind again,” Reese said dryly. “Don’t worry. We’ll stay out of the way.”
“Reese is a hell of a shot,” Beau said reluctantly. “She’ll post up at a distance.”
“And I’m her security,” Lucy said proudly.
“Her spotter,” Ambrose corrected in amusement.
“Tomato, tomahto.”
“Pop’s going to be up on the hill,” I said, jerking my chin toward the high rise visible on the property across the road.
“Rosemary,” Pop snapped in warning.
“Don’t fucking start, old man,” I shot back, glaring at him.
I had three Bouchers to work with. I wasn’t above pointing out exactly why he couldn’t be down in the thick of things, and I think he knew it from the look on my face because he didn’t say anything else.
There would be hell to pay when we were finished that night, but I’d deal with that later.
Things weren’t moving quickly, and everything inside me urged me to start running for the house, but I shoved the instinct down. If we flew in there without a plan, we wouldn’t be able to help anyone. Whoever had broken through Uncle Dalton’s security team and made their way inside the house had to have been planning for a while.
The only comfort I had was that the safe room was nearly impossible to find unless you knew where to look, but that comfort was slowly fading away the longer those men were in the house and we were across the road. The longer they had to look, the longer they had to find the room, and while they didn’t have a way inside, they could easily burn the place to the ground around my aunt and cousins.
I’d drawn the layout of the house on a notebook that the Bouchers had brought with us, and we contributed and discarded ideas for a solid ten minutes before I threw up my hands in frustration.
“Nothing is going to work perfectly,” I spat. “I know what you’re doing.”
“What’s that?” Beau asked flatly.
“You’re trying to minimize any risk to me,” I replied, my voice just as flat. “Which is bullshit. I know what I’m doing, and I’m as immortal as the rest of you. So stop fucking around and let’s get in there.”
“There’s no way to know if your immortality has manifested yet,” Erik warned.
“Let’s call it an educated guess, then,” I countered. “My aunt called us—” I looked at my watch. “Thirty-six minutes ago. How much longer do you think they have before those men get antsy and start blowing shit up or find the safe room and start trying to figure a way inside?”
“We’ll breach in this lower window,” Erik said after a moment. “That goes into the mudroom, correct?”
“Laundry room,” I corrected. “It’s off the mudroom.”
He nodded. “Ambrose and Beau, you’ll go in from the back. Second story, third window from the right.” He looked at me.
“There’s an old oak on the other end of the house,” I said, pointing to where it was relative to my roughly drawn house. “If you use that to get onto the eaves, it’s an easy shot over to the window. That goes into Ian’s bedroom apartment. He always leaves that window open because he’s a hot sleeper.”
Beau eyed me.
“He’s my fucking cousin,” I reminded him.
Pop handed me a little pot of greasy paint. I thanked him with a nod as I opened it up and began to smear it over my cheeks.
“We’ll set Lucy and Reese up on the way through,” Ambrose said. “You’ll need to give us two or three extra minutes.”
“We can do that.”
“I’ll help my pop—”
“I think I can manage to set up,” Pop cut me off. He looked at Reese. “I’ll be on the eastern side. If at any point you think you’ve been spotted, lie flat. Don’t try to move. I’ll draw fire.”
“I can do that,” she said nervously.
“We brought Ghillie suits,” Lucy said with a nod. “We’ll be practically invisible.”
Erik tossed the notebook in the back of the truck as Pop let Thunder out of the cab, and without any more words, the seven of us split up. Erik, Pop, and I moved toward the eastern side of the property while the Boucher brothers and their mates moved to the west.
“Chance and Danny are out of communication?” Erik asked Pop.
“Went black an hour before Halle called me,” Pop confirmed.
“Any idea when they’ll come back online?”
“Another hour, maybe,” Pop replied. “Could be less depending on what they find.”