by Leah Wilde
I pulled it on and found that it fit me almost perfectly. I laughed and looked at myself in the mirror.
“He probably got this before he realized who I was,” I told my reflection. “But I am not mad at it, not in the least.”
I zipped it up and tucked my hair down the back. I changed shoes quickly, leaving the long gown on. It was black, and it covered me all the way down to the ground. The hoodie covered my head, my arms, my face, and my hands. There was a good chance I could escape through the darkness to get my bag and hurry back without being spotted.
I loved good chances.
I met Kleo’s driver at the gate and grabbed my bag. We didn’t speak. He just handed it to me out the window. I threw it over my shoulders and hurried back inside. For so many security guards, it was really easy to get past all of them. I was kind of disappointed in that, but it also meant there weren’t going to be very many delays in getting this done.
Back in his room, I pulled up the floorplan on my phone.
I zoomed in and looked for any special doors or passageways I hadn’t found in exploring the home.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I said aloud as I found it. There was a panel in the kitchen, the one room where there were almost always staff members. “That makes sense,” I added. He didn’t want to leave the doorway unguarded.
I opened my pack and pulled my clothes out, ditching my dress and hoodie on the bed for a tight black long-sleeved shirt and black pants. I slid my black shoes on and grabbed my gloves. I pulled the black cap over my head.
My phone buzzed while I check my bag for the rest of my gear. I had a small handgun and a few other things I could use. I had a chloroform bomb in there as well. It was a small metal container that had enough condensed chloroform in it to knock out several people in a room after just a couple of minutes.
I looked at my phone.
Driver is outside waiting once you get it, Kleo said.
On my way in now, I responded.
I slid my phone in my bag and grabbed my chloroform bomb. I threw the pack back over my shoulders and left the room. I hurried downstairs to the kitchen to find two staffers hanging out talking. It seemed like it was always the same two.
I had to come up with a distraction to get them out of the kitchen so I could locate the panel. I ran into the living room. At the base of the stairs, there was a small sculpture standing on a white pedestal. I shoved it and ran back by the kitchen. The sculpture hit the floor and skidded across the marble before hitting the large window looking out to the back yard.
Somehow, it sounded like the sculpture didn’t shatter when it hit the floor. The window, however, wasn’t so lucky. It shattered, and I could hear the glass raining down from it onto the marble.
Both of the staffers left the kitchen, and I hurried in behind them, checking the walls until one gave. I pulled the hidden door open and slid into the top of a stairwell. I could see down into the basement, where there was a large concrete room with two guards standing in front of a metal door.
I tossed the chloroform bomb onto the floor between them. They both jumped back and looked at it, then up at me, but by the time they saw me, the chloroform was already leaking out and getting to them. I covered my face with a thick cloth and hurried down to the door.
My method of keeping the chloroform back wasn’t fool-proof, so I only had a couple more minutes than the guards before it affected me.
The door had a simple lever system in place for the dead bolts. All I had to do was spin the knob in the front to unlock it. Once the bolts slid back, the door just opened pretty much on its own, and just in time, too. The chloroform was starting to get to me.
The bomb I had used wasn’t a standard chloroform bomb. It was more like a chloroform cocktail, but it was so strong that a glass bottle wouldn’t have held it. It was also strong enough that I had to get the hell out of there before it got into the vault with me.
I stopped right in front of the Golden Diamond. It was in a glass case sitting on top of a podium. It stared at me with its beautiful golden color. I couldn’t believe I was standing right in front of it. It was a myth, a legend, but there it was. It was the largest cut diamond in the world. It was priceless. We could ask anything we wanted for it.
The next largest gold diamond was nothing compared to this massive gem. In fact, some Golden Diamond stories claimed that the Jubilee Diamond had been cut from the original, but I had met the Jubilee Diamond in person, and it was nowhere near as beautiful. They weren’t even the same color. The smaller diamond was almost brown. The Golden Diamond was pure gold in color.
“You and I have a lot in common,” I told the diamond in front of me. “Neither one of us can sit still for very long, huh?”
If I had been superstitious, I would have probably thought it was fate that someone as nomadic as I was had finally set her hands on a diamond as nomadic as the Golden Diamond.
I hoped that one day, my journeys would make me a legend just like the diamond.
“Not if you don’t hurry up,” I told myself, coughing into the cloth over my mouth.
I pushed the glass out of the way, and it shattered on the floor. I snatched the diamond and stuffed it into my bag. It was time to go. I was starting to get woozy form the chloroform. It was the strongest bomb I had ever used before.
That, or this was the most beautiful gem I had ever stolen before, and it had actually distracted me from my escape. I hurried back up the stairs and opened the hidden door into the kitchen.
I left it open while the staffers in the living room were still dealing with the broken glass. With any luck, the chloroform from downstairs would drift up and knock them out as well when they came back into the kitchen.
I was finished, and it was time for me to get the hell out of there. I ducked out of one of the side entrances to the house, just as I had when I snuck out to get my bag. I ran along the wall to avoid detection. I pulled my cap down over my face to hide my fair skin from the light, keeping myself completely in the shadows.
Once I reached the gate, I ducked through, just like before. The passenger side door in the unmarked car opened. There were no lights on it. I hurried over to it and jumped in.
“Let’s go. He’ll be home soon, and it won’t be long before they figure out what just happened to them.” I pulled the diamond out as the driver pulled away.
“That’s it?” he asked.
“That is it. Oh, keep your lights off. I think I see him coming.” I glanced in the side mirror on the door. Sure enough, I saw his motorcycle’s headlight as it approached the driveway. We were far enough away that there was no way he saw us in the darkness.
Once the lights from his bike disappeared through the gate, I signaled to the driver to turn his lights on.
“Kleo is going to be so proud,” I said, coughing.
“Text her and let her know you got it,” the driver said.
“No,” I smiled. “I think I’m going to wait until we show up with it and surprise her. What do you think?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Surprising her seems risky, you know?”
“Good point.” But, for me, surprising her wasn’t a bad thing. I couldn’t explain my relationship with Kleo to anyone else. I got away with things no one else could do.
Then again, my relationship with my boss wasn’t the only special one out there. There was also my relationship with Hawk, and I had just wrecked it for the diamond in my hand. I was about to turn the diamond over to my boss, and I would have neither one of them then. It seemed kind of foolish in hindsight, but there didn’t seem to be any turning around.
Hawk was probably getting off his bike to find what I had left behind at his place. There was a broken window in the living room and a piece of art that may or may not have been destroyed in the process. But there were also a couple of guards who had been knocked out, and the chloroform fumes were probably still pretty potent in the kitchen as well as in the stairwell on the way down to the vault.
<
br /> He was going to go into that vault to find that I had betrayed him, but he had to know it was coming. He had to know that I had been trying to set him up the whole time. I had used sex to get in, and once I was in, it was only a matter of time before everything else got set into motion. I couldn’t allow myself to feel too bad because Hawk had to be smart enough to see some shit like that coming.
Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had done something horrible by screwing him over.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Hawk
My feeling of dread increased the closer I got to the house. I just knew that I was going to pull up to find something terrible had happened while I was in the meeting with the guys at the clubhouse. When I pulled up, everything looked normal at first. There was a vibe, though, that I picked up as soon as I passed through the gate. I tried to chalk it up to paranoia, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was some kind of panic in the house.
I didn’t park the bike in the garage. Instead, I stopped at the front door and hopped off. I hoped everything was okay so that I could go ahead with my plan to finally get rid of Felicity, like I should have done as soon as we finished sleeping together that first night.
“Mr. Renner!” One of my guards was shouting from the front door. He had his gun drawn. Something had gone down while I was at the meeting.
I hurried up the stairs and followed him into the house.
“What’s going on?” I asked as I saw the broken window in the living room with several armed guards standing around it to watch the new entrance and exit.
“We’ve got quite a situation here, Mr. Renner,” my guard said.
“Call me Hawk, and drop the mister shit,” I told him. “Where’s Felicity?”
“She’s gone, sir,” he said efficiently.
“Let me guess. She took the diamond with her,” I said, exasperated.
“I’m sorry?” He didn’t know about the diamond.
“Dammit, man,” I cursed.
I walked hurriedly to the kitchen, to the hidden panel leading downstairs to the cellar and the vault.
“Whoa! What is that?” I took a step back and covered my nose and mouth.
“Someone set off a chloroform bomb downstairs,” he told me. “I haven’t been down there yet.”
“Come on, man. Grab a couple of gas masks from the fucking pool house and let’s go downstairs, dipshit,” I snapped.
“Yes, sir.” His boots crunched on the glass as he walked through the now-open window to get outside.
I stood in the doorway to my kitchen and stared at the open door leading to the cellar. I knew what that open door meant. It meant I was too late. She had already stolen the damn Golden Diamond for Kleo. She was probably halfway to Kleo’s hideout by now. It meant I was an idiot who had fallen for a piece of ass and dropped my guard, losing three billion dollars! It meant that my security had been violated, and that every jackass who worked for me was going to be fired when this was settled.
It also meant it was time to find where Kleo’s hideout was and track her down to get the diamond, or Felicity, or both, back. I couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid, but damn, she was good in bed. I regretted every minute of it, though.
My reputation was going to be irreparably damaged by this fiasco, and that was the hardest part of the whole thing to swallow. This meant that some girl got one over on me by sleeping with me a handful of times and rocking my world. Oh, I was done with women after this, I vowed.
“Where the hell is my gas mask?” I called out.
“Right here, sir,” a muffled voice said next to me. It was my guard with his gas mask on.
I snatched mine out of his hand and put it on over my head. We walked downstairs into the cellar. He had his gun drawn, and I just had a gas mask.
“This bomb was strong enough that I’m surprised she didn’t get herself, too,” I said. “I can smell it through the mask, and I know it’s dissipated some since she set it off.”
“Definitely,” my guard agreed.
He rushed over and checked on the passed out guards to make sure they were breathing and alive.
“They’re okay,” I told him as I walked into the vault through the open door. I could already tell that the Golden Diamond was gone. Its glass case had been knocked over and lay shattered on the vault floor. The podium sat with nothing on top of it.
“Want to help me get them upstairs?” the guard asked behind me.
“Yeah,” I answered absently.
I was staring at a missed opportunity to make three billion dollars. I was staring at a symbol of being duped by some chick. That was really all she was. She was just another girl, like all the rest, except that Felicity Tarren was really good at what she did.
“She got the diamond,” I told my guard as I walked out to help him lift one of the guards and carry him up the stairs.
“I figured she did,” he said, “but once we get these guys upstairs, they might be able to tell us exactly how it went down.”
“Sure,” I agreed. I didn’t give a rat’s ass one way or the other. I could have already told him exactly what had happened. Felicity had broken the back window to distract the staffers who guarded the hidden door. Then, she had tossed her chloroform bomb into the cellar. It leaked out enough to knock them out pretty quickly, and she went in behind them to steal the Golden Diamond right out from underneath me while I was at the damn meeting where the guys were telling me exactly who she was and what she was up to.
I helped drag both of the guards upstairs where my staffers started working to revive them. I didn’t need to hang around to let them tell me what I already knew.
“Look, I’m going to go ahead and start working on getting the diamond back and finding Felicity,” I told the guard who had helped me.
“Okay,” he said.
“If they have any special insight other than the fact that she used a chloroform bomb to knock them out, call me. Otherwise, I’m handling it.”
I turned to leave and pulled my phone out. I called Rex.
“Yeah,” he answered.
“Are you guys still at the clubhouse?” I asked.
“You know we are, man. We weren’t going to go anywhere until we heard back from you,” he answered.
“Good. I’m on my way back out there. Make sure everyone is ready. We’re going after Kleo and Felicity.”
“You’re fucking kidding me,” he said. “She got the diamond?”
“She sure did, while we were talking about it at the meeting,” I told him.
“Hey, I’m sorry, brother.”
“It’s not your fault, Rex. I was just too cocky, and it bit me right on the ass. We should have hidden it somewhere safer, but now it’s time to track her down and get it back.”
I could hear Ace in the background asking it was time to get Forsaken.
“Tell the Hammer it’s time to get Forsaken,” I said, laughing as I said it. I didn’t like the idea of letting the guys get nasty with Felicity involved, but if the idea of breaking out some of our old tactics lit a fire underneath all of our asses, it definitely wasn’t a bad thing.
“Do we need to get some of our street members in?” Rex asked.
“No, we should be able to handle this on our own.” I stood next to my bike while we talked.
“Look, we’re talking about Kleo. Let me get a couple of guys like Ace out here with us, okay? We might need a little more muscle, a couple of guys who don’t mind raising a little hell and hurting somebody when it needs to be done.”
“Whatever you think needs to be done, Rex. I’m hopping on my bike right now.” I hung up the phone and stuffed it into my pocket. Other than my colors, I was still wearing the clothes I’d worn when I took the thief out to eat.
I couldn’t think of anything better to be wearing when we caught her ass and took the diamond back.
****
Felicity
Once again, I was escorted to Kleo’s office by one of her security off
icers. I never noticed how similar Hawk’s mansion was to hers until coming back in there after spending so much time at his. They were very similar in design, and I couldn’t help but wonder if they’d had the same architects and crews working on them.
She was beaming when I entered her office. She quickly waved off her guard and told him to close the door when I entered.
“Do you have it?” she asked immediately after the door closed.
“It’s right here,” I told her, pulling it out of my bag again to show her.
I held the Golden Diamond up for her to see it. It was more beautiful every time I looked at it.