Rook Security Complete Series

by Camilla Blake

  Speaking of gas, on the way up to Queens she stopped for some at a gas station off of Atlantic. She figured she’d bring her dad some Oreos, since he liked those so much, and ran in after she pumped her gas.

  She grabbed some lemon lime seltzer too, something they both liked, and waited in line to pay the cashier who, in the normal Brooklyn style, was stowed away behind a nicked up bulletproof glass cage.

  “Where you headed tonight, beautiful?” said a man in line behind her, but Geo ignored him. As she did every single man who ever hollered at her. In fact, she didn’t even look up to see if she was the person he was talking to. She didn’t care.

  Tuning out men was one of her personal talents and unfortunately one that she had to kick into high gear almost every day.

  She only wished she could better tune out one man in particular. And as if she’d summoned him from thin air, her eyes landed on a photograph of him.

  He was on the cover of a tabloid that read Prince of Darkness: Moreau Davy’s ambitions to marry into the Royal Family. Underneath the headline was a picture of Moreau with his arm thrown around the shoulders of a blonde woman whom Geo didn’t recognize. Apparently she was a royal of some kind.

  The photo was blurry but it still made Geo’s stomach dip. It wasn’t the fact that he was whispering something in the woman’s ear that did it—Geo couldn’t care less what Moreau did or who he did it with. It was just the sheer beauty of him that made her stomach feel like she was on a rollercoaster. She hated that that was true. But there it was. The man was so ungodly beautiful, that even on a crummy black and white pap pic printed on newsprint, he damn near made her toes curl.

  He had black hair that was shaved almost to the scalp on the sides, then, in an extreme fade, the top waterfalled almost down to his chin. His hair was shiny and lush. It was a ridiculous hairstyle. But it was also hot. He was hot. He had a sharp jaw and a perfect nose and black eyes to match his black hair. His facial hair was perfectly architected to meld into the hair on his head and… ugh.

  She turned away from the photo and slapped her purchases onto the counter, shoving a five over to the cashier. She hated seeing photos of Moreau unexpectedly. When he was there with her in real life she had a perfect handle on how much of a douche he was. But when he wasn't around, she often felt an unexpected softness for him before she could kick the feelings out the front door.

  She shoved thoughts of softness and ridiculous hair and famous movie stars out of her head and paid for her purchases. She needed to be focused when she visited her father. If she wasn’t focused, if she was scattered or vulnerable, that’s when things got messy and Geo left feeling worse than when she’d arrived.

  Unacceptable.

  So, she spent the next half an hour in the car listening to two of her favorite sports announcers shit all over the Jets’ prospects for this year—surprise, surprise. When she got to the Ferndale Center, she parked in the back of the parking lot and quickly changed into a plain blue T shirt and jeans, banging her elbows against the steering wheel and making the horn honk by accident.

  She caught sight of herself in the glass doors of the center, before they automatically swung open for her, and Geo frowned at the reflection. With her hair up like this and her casual clothes, and the cookies and seltzer in her hands, she looked about sixteen years old.

  But that might have been the proximity to her father. Whenever she got around him she always ended up feeling like a kid again. Even though she was the one supporting him these days.

  “Hi, Loretta,” Geo called, signing herself in.

  “Hey, G!” Loretta swung around in her swivel chair and treated Geo to a toothy grin. “How are you today?”

  “I’m doing all right. And you? How’d your boy do on the LSAT?”

  “It’s not until next week, but I’ll keep you posted. I know you’re waiting to go out with him until he’s officially a lawyer. But you better be careful, girl, because he might not wait for you.”

  Geo grinned and Loretta grinned back. “I’ll take my chances.”

  Owen, Loretta’s son, was very sweet, and very nervous around women. The one time that Geo had met him, he’d knocked an entire pot of stale coffee onto his trousers and looked like he’d wanted to cry.

  Something caught Geo’s eye on the desk and she saw that Loretta had been reading the same tabloid that Geo had seen in the gas station. Jeez. She couldn’t go two feet without Moreau Davy breathing down her neck.

  “Careful with that crap,” she told Loretta, nodding toward the gossip rag. “It’ll rot your brains.”

  “I don’t care what Moreau Davy does to my brains,” Loretta responded, her bright red eyebrows waggling as she patted at her heavily shellacked hair. “It’s what he does to my other body parts I care about.”

  Geo couldn’t help but laugh.

  She didn’t tell anyone that she was one of Moreau’s personal bodyguards. She was pretty sure confidentiality was in her contract, but she wouldn’t have told anyone even if she’d been allowed. She barely tolerated him professionally. She had no desire to talk about him in her free time.

  But for one fleeting second, she wished that she could give Loretta the thrill of a lifetime and bring Moreau here to flirt with her. She’d seen Moreau in action, when his talents were set loose on an unsuspecting female, and the results were always nuclear. The man could apparently charm the tux off a penguin.

  Loretta had been nothing but kind to Geo in the years that she’d been coming here to visit her father and she’d have liked to show her appreciation in a big way.

  But yeah. As her eyes zeroed in on the grainy photo of Moreau, reality quickly set in. Bringing him here would mean bringing him within a hundred feet of her dad. At this facility. Which would mean that Moreau would know everything. And yeah. No. Not happening.

  Only Rook knew everything and he didn’t even know the half of it.

  Geo waved to Loretta and laughed at herself as she ambled down the familiar hallway. She corrected herself in her mind. Rook knew everything that she’d told him about her dad. Which was less than half of what there was to tell. But that was all she’d offered. Because it was enough to get him to agree to let her work herself damn near to the bone.

  And it was enough to get him to agree to the other, more embarrassing thing…

  Geo pushed the thought from her mind and knocked on the last door in the hallway. She pushed it open, wagging the cookies so he’d see her peace offering before he saw her face.

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Three weeks later, Geo woke with a start. It was pitch black in her room, just the way she liked it, and everything was silent. But the silence had a ringing quality to it that denoted a noise still echoing in the air.

  She sat up and dragged a hand down her face. An errant beeping sound from her phone immediately clarified what it was that had woken her up.

  She grabbed her glasses from the nightstand and jammed them on before grabbing her phone and reading the alert.

  She frowned and reached to the floor for her pants. The alarm system was remotely warning her that there was movement in the atrium of the bunker. It also told her that someone had input the security code in order to silence the alarm, but as she was supposed to be the only person in the bunker tonight, that warranted her getting out of bed to check it out.

  She jammed her feet into her combat boots, yanked a hoodie over her head and grabbed the gun belt she always wore at her hip. With a second more of thought, she grabbed her taser from her locked desk drawer and slipped her phone in her pocket.

  She would have loved to have had a little more time to put some contacts in, but her phone was alerting her that the motion sensors in the northernmost hallway were being tripped and she simply didn’t have the time.

  If it were the western hallway sensors that were going off, she would have thought it was Rook headed to his office, but the intruder was headed around the wrong side of the building for that, and besides
, if and when Rook ever returned to work after hours, he always shot her a text to warn her.

  Geo slinked down one hallway to the next, led to the intruder through the alerts on her phone. Originally trained by the army, Geo had never actually served. She’d had to come home when everything had first started with her father, but the training still stood. She held her gun like a pro as she turned the final corner and snuck, foot over foot, toward the glowing light in the office.

  She waited at the door, heard the tell-tale clicking of computer keys and knew she had to act. The information that Rook Securities protected on their clients was almost as important as the bodily safety of the clients themselves.

  She stepped into the triangle of light let free by the half-closed door and raised her gun, her eyes focusing quickly.

  “Freeze.”

  “Holy shit! Geo, it’s me.”

  Sequence faced her with his palms out. She blinked at him. He was wearing pink and blue pajama pants and a hoodie.

  If not for the scowl on his face, she might have mistaken him for Atlas.

  “What the hell are you doing here? And what the hell are you wearing?” she demanded.

  She lowered her gun and he lowered his hands. “Uh. Most likely I’m here for the exact same reasons that you are. And I’m wearing my damn pajamas because I got yanked out of bed just like the rest of the team.”

  Yeah, she knew for a fact they weren’t in the bunker for the same reasons. Only Rook knew the embarrassing truth that she hadn’t been able to afford her apartment anymore and had started living full time in her quarters here at the bunker. That was definitely not the reason that Sequence was here in the night in his pajamas. But apparently, Sequence thought the reason they were both here was obvious. She was missing something.

  She tried not to give her position away and pulled out her phone. If they’d been called here in the night, it would be on their group strand.

  She couldn’t get to the group strand, however, through all the new alerts on her phone. Two more cars had pulled into the atrium. And yup, there was the third. Every single team member of Rook Securities was in the house and Geo had no idea why.

  She was still standing in the doorway to Sequence’s office and exiting out of alert after alert when Atlas came bounding up. He skidded to a stop when she looked up at him.

  “Holy mother, did you drive here in those?”

  She blinked at him in confusion until she realized that she was, of course, still wearing her glasses. No wonder Sequence had given her such a strange up and down. These were not the fashion rims that had become so popular in Brooklyn. No way. These were the type of glasses a person wore when she was half a step away from being legally blind. These thick rimmed, heavy-as-hell glasses cut a ridge in her nose if she wore them too long. The lenses were a quarter of an inch thick and when someone looked into her face, her eyes became the size of garbanzo beans. Needless to say, they were not cute.

  And she never wore them out of the house.

  It was just that Rook was the only member of the team who was currently aware that the bunker was, in fact, her house.

  She shrugged in response to Atlas.

  Rook’s voice came from over her shoulder, she looked back to see Cedric hot on his heels as well. “Sequence, it’ll be easiest for us to meet in here since you’ll need your computers to work out logistics. Are there enough chairs?”

  Sequence nodded and pointed at the closet where he kept a set of folding chairs. His office was much larger than a normal office. It was lined on one side with twinkling, nighttime views out over the East River and the city. One side was completely monopolized by screens of every shape and size—as Sequence was their resident IT and digital security soldier. The other side of the room had a few long tables that Sequence often used to dismantle and rebuild security gadgets of various kinds. It was there that the team set up their folding chairs.

  Geo sat herself down and exited out of the very last of the alerts. She was finally clear to go to the texting strand where the crucial information surely was. She couldn’t remember the last time that every single member of the team had been called together in the middle of the night. She dimly wondered if they were going to have to go dark again.

  It was a service they offered to clients who were in immediate and imminent danger. The bunker, equipped with its kitchen and gym, game room, TV room, guest rooms and employee quarters, was more than set up for extended stays. When they needed to ensure a client’s safety at all costs, they bunked here all together. Sometimes for weeks or months at a time.

  If that were the case, Geo wouldn’t mind. She would be paid overtime and she was already staying here full time anyw—

  Her blood froze and grew spikes in her veins. Her eyes read and re-read the text that Rook had sent in the night and had apparently roused the other members of the team from their beds.

  Davy was in a car accident roughly 30 hours ago. He was badly injured. He’s conscious now and has requested to rehabilitate at the bunker. The press has not caught wind that he was involved in the accident. The circumstances of the car accident are suspicious and foul play is suspected. For this and many reasons involving his privacy, we are using the utmost secrecy to get him transferred here for his recovery. Meet at the bunker ASAP for preparations.

  Geo had absolutely no idea which part her brain should chew over first.

  Car accident.

  Badly injured.

  Foul play.

  Recovery.

  She was dimly aware that Rook was speaking but she couldn’t hear him. Even when she shook her head to clear it, still, sound was not making its way through.

  She simply couldn’t picture Moreau injured. He had that special something that so few mortals had. A thrumming energy that seemed to emanate from his very presence. He had a vital and vibrant life-force that captured everything and everyone in its wake.

  He was the Bermuda Triangle of celebrities.

  Injured?

  Cedric, sitting next to her, pushed a cup of coffee into her hand and one of their standard-issue iPads into her hands. “You look like you need the caffeine,” he whispered to her.

  She wasn’t sure if he was referring to her glasses or the blank, frozen expression she was certain was glued to her face.

  “All right,” Rook said once everyone had their iPads. Sequence was still sitting on the other end of the room, clicking away at his keyboard, apparently following different marching orders than the rest of them.

  “I’ll start off by saying that Davy is all right. He’s expected to fully recover. However, he suffered a concussion, broken ribs, a hell of a lot of bruising, and a broken leg. He almost bled out before the ambulance got there.”

  Geo swallowed hard as she felt her stomach rise in her throat. She wasn’t a crier, never had been. But occasionally, something that really affected her caused her to toss her cookies. She took a mechanical sip of the coffee in her hand and hoped she could keep it together.

  “He’s undergone surgery for his leg already and will be able to fly in the morning. He’s already arranged for several nurses to live here with him. And Sequence is working on clearing them for the bunker.”

  “Why here?” Geo rasped. A cross-country trip post-car accident and surgery didn’t make any sense to her. He apparently had a huge home in the hills, why wouldn’t he stay in Hollywood and recover there?

  Rook blinked at her for a second, like he was surprised that she didn’t already know the answer to that particular question. When he spoke, Geo got the distinct impression that he wasn’t telling the entire truth. “Because of the circumstances of the crash. It may not be safe in California for him right now.”

  “What happened?” Atlas asked.

  “Long story short, his brakes were cut.” Rook’s grim expression alone was enough to shrink Geo’s blood vessels down to withered husks, but his words certainly did the trick on their own.

  “Someone tried to kill him?” Geo asked, she’d n
ever know where she got the air to ask that question.

  “It seems that way.”

  “Where the hell was his security? His driver?” Cedric asked, uncharacteristic notes of anger in his voice. Cedric was generally extremely calm, unruffle-able. But Moreau was not just his client, he was his friend.

  Rook sighed. “Whether they fucked up or they were genuinely tricked, it’s unclear. They’ve clammed up tighter than a rusty lock.”

  “No surprise there,” Atlas scoffed. “Their star client almost gets assassinated and suddenly they’re real sparse on the details. Fuck. I never liked those penguin-suited douchebags.” Atlas, too, was uncharacteristically upset, his fingers tugging at his longish blond hair.

  Geo had to agree with him. She’d never liked Moreau’s West Coast security team. They’d always seemed like a lot of muscle and not enough brain to her. Once Moreau had told her that one of the members of his team had resigned because he’d gotten offered a part in a movie and she’d almost choked on her breakfast. Someone wasn’t in personal security until an opportunity in show-biz came along. You were in personal security because you believed in it. Because your clients mattered. Because the world was a dangerous place.

  Shit. She should have said something then. She should have told him to fire his team and get better people.

  “He was driving?” Cedric asked.

  “Yeah. It was just a thirty-minute drive between his house and where they were filming his latest project. He’d foregone a driver, apparently, and was on his way home. Another cast member was driving along behind him when he took a curve too fast and careened into the valley below. It was good luck, or else he might have been down there God knows how long before someone noticed that his car had jumped the guardrail. Anyways, the cast member also knew who to call to keep the press at bay, so it’s barely been reported on. He isn’t linked to it yet and we’d like to keep it that way.”