Page 7 of Nightfire

Panic keened in Chloe’s head as she slowly rose, hoping her knees would support her. It was a very real fear. Both her knees were complex creations of plastic and steel and they were as delicate as they were high-tech.

Everyone’s eyes followed her as she made her slow way across the lobby, which suddenly felt as huge as the Gobi Desert. The glass door ahead of her was so clean it glowed. How was she supposed to—ah. It swooshed open at some invisible command.

Inside the corridor, the feeling of luxury was even more powerful. The doors were shiny brass, with no door knobs, only built-in flat screens to the right. The rooms must be huge because it felt like she walked for ages down the gleaming parquet corridor simply to get to the third door on the right.

Here, too, she was met with a wall as blank as her head. She simply stood there, clutching purse and envelope tightly, waiting for the next step. Any thoughts or plans simply vanished from her head. She felt as if she were walking on some kind of uncontrollable path where she could only stumble forward and never turn back.

She stared at the shiny brass door, looking blankly at her reflection, mind emptied of thought for a heartbeat, two. Then there was a whirring sound, a click releasing some invisible mechanism, and this door too slid open.

Chloe stood, frozen, on the threshold. She’d been dreaming of this moment all her life, thinking she was insane because it happened only in her dreams.

When things remained as hopes and dreams you could decide how they turned out. And though not much in her life had turned out well, in her dreams this always had. It had always ended in laughter and joy.

Only in her head, though.

Which was notoriously unstable.

Chloe trembled. Stepping into this room might mean stepping into a new and better life. Or it might forever trap her behind the invisible but oh-so-real wall she’d lived behind all her life.

It felt as if her entire existence were hanging by a thread, by a step.

“Ms. Mason?” a deep voice said and she gasped in air. She’d been holding her breath for almost a minute without realizing it.

Across another vast room, two men were standing, as gentlemen did for ladies. One was Michael Keillor.

She didn’t want him there. Her business was exclusively with Harry Bolt and if her business ended badly, she didn’t want anyone else to view her humiliation. But a lifetime of training made her hold her tongue. She didn’t even remotely have the courage to ask him to leave the room.

The other man was…was Harry Bolt. Chloe eyed him hungrily. Much taller than Michael Keillor and almost, but not quite, as broad. Dark blond hair, light brown eyes. Familiar-looking eyes.

Her heart was slamming against her chest so hard she wondered if they could hear it.

Chloe was used to observing and interpreting body language, but there was absolutely nothing to read here. Both men were utterly still, both were utterly expressionless.

She had no way at all to gauge their feelings. No way to figure out how this would end.

Shaking, with a feeling of doom interlaced in her heart with wild hope, Chloe stepped into the room.

She’s scared shitless, Mike thought, glad that he’d horned in on this meeting. This Chloe Mason had specifically asked for Harry Bolt but once Mike had seen her in the lobby, he knew he had to be here, too.

Because this woman was clearly one of the Lost Ones. A woman in trouble, on the run from some violent asshole. And shit, it made him angry all over again that there were monsters in the world who could beat up on women.

RBK mainly dealt with corporate security. In the lobby waiting for RBK’s very expensive services, there’d been two CEOs and one head of security for a Fortune 500 company. Mike had read their files, knew what their problems were, and knew how to solve them.

Those three men alone probably represented about a million dollars in business this year for RBK.

Chloe Mason represented nothing, because RBK policy was not to accept money from women on the run. If anything, RBK often provided the women with a little nest egg to see them through that first difficult year.

On average, after the first year, they were safe.

After last night, Mike really, really wanted to make a woman safe. Wanted to help a woman, particularly a woman like this, soft and gentle and completely undeserving of the sick fuck who’d forced her to come to them.

This morning Sam was staying home with Nicole, who had bad morning sickness, so the corporate honchos would be divided between him and Harry. Stuff he and Harry could do with their eyes closed. All three of them had an instinctive understanding of security risks—their entire childhoods had been security risks—and they had been trained very hard and very expensively by Uncle Sam to learn how to deal with risks. It was a question of knowledge and reason.

But with their Lost Ones, the trembling and broken women who showed up on their doorstep because RBK was their last chance before falling into the abyss—when dealing with them, you used both your head and your heart.

Though the woman in the lobby had asked to see Harry, Mike instinctively knew she was his. He had to be the one to help her.

Not because she was beautiful, though she was. Astoundingly beautiful.