by Eve Langlais
A quick check of his own device also showed a no-service sign.
“What are we going to do?” she huffed, panic making her breath fast.
“We?” A second ago she’d never wanted to see him again, and now she expected him to come to her rescue. The Iceman would tell her to solve her own problem or negotiate a price.
But in this moment, he was Mathias, the man who’d fallen for the woman with the never-ending sweaters. He wasn’t cut out to be a hero, and yet she needed one. “I’ll need a weapon.”
“Don’t you have a gun?”
“Two, actually. Both are in the car,” he admitted, trying to ignore the hot shame. What kind of assassin didn’t have a weapon on his body? A distracted one with the blood in his dick instead of his head.
She blinked. “You don’t have a single weapon?”
“I wasn’t expecting shit to hit the fan at an office party. Your boss, Hugo, is known to travel with a bodyguard. I expected to be frisked coming in the door.” Only an idiot would have shown up armed, so he’d left his toys in the car. Why not? The Christmas party provided the public venue he needed to hand over the gift and hopefully get away clean. Rich people didn’t need the unsavory attention of cops or the media.
“Maybe we can find one somewhere.”
“What do you mean, find one? Your father is Roarke, a known knife master. As his daughter, shouldn’t you always be armed?”
“I am not a fan of violence.” Her nose wrinkled.
“Do you know how to fight?”
Her shoulders rolled. “You’ve seen my body. It was made for lounging, not fighting.
Indeed, it was. Soft and sweet the way he liked it. And also in danger. Since he only had himself to count on, he’d have to be clever. He also needed to focus without worrying about her.
“Stay here,” he ordered.
“What are you going to do?”
“Prove I wasn’t lying when I said I cared for you.”
“By what, going out there and getting yourself killed?”
“Would you actually care?” He held his breath as he waited for a reply.
She shrugged. “Maybe a little.”
“Only a little?” he cajoled.
“I’m still mad at you,” she exclaimed hotly.
“Think of me saving your dad and your friends as an apology then.”
“My dad still won’t like you.”
“I can live with that,” he muttered. So long as she changed her mind about him. “I need something to fight with. I don’t suppose you know of a hidden gun stash?”
“There’s a panic room built into the closet in the master bedroom, but I doubt the previous owner’s left any weapons.”
“I wonder if I can make it to my car and get my guns,” he mused aloud.
“Won’t shooting them draw too much attention?”
“Got a better idea?” he asked.
“Hear the song playing right now?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“That’s ‘Holly Jolly Christmas,’ which reminds me of how the mistletoe on the main floor was hung.”
With invisible fishing line, strong enough to act as a garrotte, and it just so happened there was a spool of it in the craft room.
Armed with that, a few knitting needles, and beads—and feeling a bit like that kid in the Home Alone movie—he climbed into the laundry chute in the master bedroom bathroom. A tighter fit than he liked, but he’d traveled through worse.
It helped that Blake gave him a long, hot kiss and said, “Be careful,” before he went down.
“I intend to.” Because if he could be her hero and save them all, maybe they’d be spending Christmas together in bed.
He inched down the laundry chute, hands and feet spread so he didn’t slide. Lucky for him, it had an opening on the main floor.
He shoved at the hatch just enough to spy on the situation. The mudroom appeared empty, the doors to it shut. Three in total. Garage, backyard, and swinging panel into the kitchen.
Easing out of the chute, he put his ear to the kitchen door and listened. Heard the faint strains of Christmas music and not much else.
He eased it open enough to give him a peek at the kitchen sink and part of the island. He did not have a line of sight on the great room where people were being held, nor any idea how many elves were involved. He’d not kept count of the staff wandering through the party, but he knew it was more than four. Fuck, now that he replayed the faces he’d seen, more like eight. A gun would have really helped those odds.
Over the Christmas music still incongruously playing, he heard the distinct sound of someone throwing up, which led to some yelling.
“That’s fucking disgusting!”
Mathias took a chance and peeked around the corner of the mudroom door and was in time to see Joleen as she lifted her head from the vase she’d puked in. She weaved on her feet and still looked green as she barked back, “Don’t you dare be pissed. You’re the one that drugged us.”
The guy in elven green and red tassels didn’t seem swayed by the argument. “Get your ass outside if you’re going to ralph. And take your puke bucket with you.”
“Fuck you. You carry it.” Joleen’s head snapped, as she did nothing to avoid the slam of the gun into her jaw.
Having watched many a fight, Mathias could tell she’d expected the blow and exaggerated the result. She hit the floor on her knees, head hanging, moaning, “I think I’m going to puke again.”
“Get her outside! Now!” barked the leader, looking incongruous with his curly-toed slippers. Since there were only two exits from the house, Mathias quickly ducked back inside, hugged the edge of the door, and waited.
When he heard the grumbling approaching, he hoped Joleen knew better than to react if she saw him.
Her gaze remained straight ahead, as did her captor’s. He never even saw Mathias, but the asshole who thought it was okay to ruin a party felt the string as it went around his neck. Mathias cut off any sound he might have made, pulling hard and twisting.
Joleen whirled, dropping into a fighting stance, proving she’d not been as sick as she faked. Only when the body hit the floor did she whisper, “Where’s Blake?”
“Hiding upstairs.”
“Got a spare gun?”
“That’s the only one.” He pointed to weapon still held in the dead man’s hand and asked, “How many targets?”
Joleen snared it. “Four that I know of still inside. But from the way they were talking, we can expect a few outside.”
He grimaced. “I’ve got two more guns in my car, but I’m parked at least twenty yards from the house.” Because they’d arrived last.
“Meaning we might be spotted and the trash inside might start shooting.”
“Will they?” he asked.
She rubbed her jaw. “It only takes one to start.”
Then the mass hysteria snowball effect would hit and there could be a bloodbath. “What do they want?”
“Only fifty million dollars.”
His brows shot up to the stratosphere. “Fuck, they aren’t aiming for small change.” But they’d picked the right party to hold hostage. The guests could probably scrape that amount together. “Do you think they’ll walk away if they get it?”
Joleen shrugged. “Maybe.”
Maybe wasn’t good enough. Not when Blake was counting on him.
“We need to thin them out.”
“You have a plan?”
“Yeah, but one of us is gonna get a little chilly.”
Chapter Fourteen
Down through the chimney, dropping a gun, to take out the assholes ruining the fun.
Rather than wait inside the bathroom, Blake chose to head for the panic room to see if its emergency line still worked.
It didn’t.
Apparently, the elves had been busy, and one had snuck upstairs to cut the line. They’d obviously planned this for a while and sprung the plan into action the moment Ariel hired
the caterers, but were they thieves of opportunity? Or the same kind of killers that had invaded her house once upon a time and murdered a young mother?
She would rather die than lose someone she loved again. For all she knew, everyone was already dead. What if she was the only one left?
Huff. Pant. Huff.
Panic, quickening her heart, dampening her palms. It had been awhile since she’d had to do her breathing exercises. It took years of therapy before she could sleep without nightmares and stopped flinching every time she heard a noise at the door.
Undone because, once more, she was a victim of senseless crime.
Her father was in the midst of it. As were so many of her friends. And her lover had gone to deal with it.
Could she really be a coward who hid rather than acted? But what could she do? She’d not been joking when she said her body wasn’t made for fighting. Despite her father’s best attempts, she’d failed even the most basic self-defense lessons. Lacked the killer instinct. Tended to hyperventilate and freeze when scared. Just like when she was a little girl.
History was doomed to repeat itself because she never learned how to take someone’s life.
She paced the small panic room, the door shut but not sealed. It didn’t hold much. A pair of chairs. A table. Cupboards, which, when opened, showed bottled water. Packaged snacks. A useless phone bolted to the wall, and the safe, currently closed. But she knew the combination unless Hugo and Ariel had already changed it.
For some reason she keyed in the numbers, and it clicked as it unlocked. Pulling it open, she stared. Not at the rubber-banded stacks of cash but the gun inside. Just a single revolver, but she pulled it out. Could she use it?
She’d probably punch herself in the face again if she tried. Her father had tried to warn her about recoil, but the first time she fired one at the range, she still screamed and hit herself when it went off.
She never went back. Guns equaled death. She almost put it back in the safe, only to pause. She couldn’t use it, but she knew people downstairs who could. The problem being, how to get the gun into their hands?
Pop.
She jumped at the single gunshot, almost dropping the revolver on her foot. Not the time to be clumsy.
Bang.
“Argh.” The gunfire and yelling came from outside the panic room, whose door she’d yet to close.
Had Matt gotten his hands on a gun? Was he the one who’d cried out?
The lights in the house went out abruptly. She froze in place, heart pounding. She couldn’t let fear control her. She crept out of the panic room to the bedroom door and peeked out. Heard voices.
“No one goes outside. Not until we’re done here,” someone barked.
She dropped to her knees and crawled to the edge of the wall, where it met the railing that overlooked the great room, and listened out of sight as the same guy demanded, “Transfer the fucking money now or else.”
Hugo’s voice remained calm, if thick, as he replied, “As you can see, I’m trying. We’re having connectivity issues.”
She dared a glance. Candles burning in the room allowed her to see the guests crowded in front of the fireplace. Many of them slumped. A few sobbing. The waiters, a handful scattered throughout the room and armed with guns, still wore their ridiculous elf costumes. It added a sense of surrealism to the scene.
“Maybe if my friend over here takes your wife for a walk up to your bedroom for some playtime you’ll figure out a way to fix it,” threatened one of the attackers.
“Lay a hand on me and you’ll lose it,” Ariel challenged, the words slurred with bravado and eggnog.
“Shut the fuck up.” A different fellow leveled his gun on her. “Let me shoot her. Maybe then they’ll stop being so fucking mouthy.”
“Why not pick on someone more your size?” blustered her dad.
Pride filled her that he would stand up for what was right. Fear, too, because courage didn’t make him impervious to danger.
“Mind your fucking business.”
“Or what?” Daddy surged forward, brave as the day he’d saved her. Maybe he could—
Bang.
She put a hand to her mouth and held in a cry as her father crumpled, holding his leg.
No. Not again. Time to stop screwing around. She had a gun but lacked the ability to hit anything from here. She’d never make it down those stairs unnoticed, and while the laundry chute remained an option, she feared either getting wedged in the space—because for all she knew Mathias was stuck in there—or slipping and accidentally shooting herself.
The glow of the fire in the hearth caught her eye. The home invaders had their hostages clustered in front of it, giving her an idea. Probably a really bad one, yet she didn’t see any other choice. She had to act. Daddy was bleeding. Matt was missing. More people might get shot.
She bundled the gun and some water bottles into a pillowcase she stripped from the bed and emerged onto the balcony overlooking the steep incline down to the lake. She wasn’t going down but up. Seeing the fireplace gave her an idea.
She slipped off her shoes to give herself better traction to stand on the wide black metal railing with its clear glass panel. Praying she wouldn’t slip, she reached for the roofline. Lucky for her, it sloped, and the railing gave enough height she could grip the roof and hike her knee high enough to kneel on it. Then the other. She’d looped the pillowcase with her stash on her belt. It dragged behind her as she crawled.
The asphalt shingle roof proved rough and icy. Too cold for just a dress. She could have used her boots or mittens but had no time to waste. She’d be a hell of a lot chillier if she were six feet under.
She quickly scrabbled up the peak of the roof, the tips of her fingers numb from the cold. A good thing because she had a feeling they were being scraped raw. The big chimney smoked, the fire in it burning happily. Meaning she couldn’t just dump a gun down that chute. That never went well in the movies. She had to extinguish it first.
She pulled out the water bottles she’d brought along. Uncapping them all, she set them on their side so they could pour down. Immediately the thin smoke thickened, a dark, billowing mass that brought a tickle to her throat and a sting to her eyes.
She couldn’t stop now. She uncapped and dropped the last few bottles but for one. The last was quickly poured over the pillowcase. Hoping the gun could handle getting wet, she wrapped the pillowcase around it, and then she sent it down the chimney. Fingers and toes crossed someone would notice and use it. Praying even harder it didn’t go off and accidentally shoot someone she liked.
Eyes streaming, she sat on her butt and began scooting to the edge of the roof. Don’t slide. Don’t fall.
When she got to the spot where she’d climbed up, she flipped onto her belly and shimmied until her legs dangled. Pushing a bit more dragged her dress up, meaning her ass was exposed and her cheeks chilly, because those snowman panties were cute, not practical.
But she was almost safe. Just a bit farther.
“Fucking cunt!” was the only warning she got before she was yanked from her perch and slammed into the balcony.
Chapter Fifteen
Winters, the Iceman, sensed something was wrong that day. So with a smoking gun, he took off at a run, ready to blow a fucker away.
When the fireplace began to smoke, it was just another clusterfuck of things that had gone wrong since Mathias went down the laundry chute.
It didn’t start out that way. After taking out the guy in the mudroom, Mathias and Joleen had quickly devised a plan. She’d take the gun and provide a distraction outdoors, drawing some of the attackers out of the room, while he did something about the power. Unfortunately, it didn’t go as planned.
The leader of the elves—who really should have dressed as Santa if he was calling the shots—didn’t fall for it. The Boss kept his gun and indoor henchman—whom Mathias mentally nicknamed Bucky, Snauzer, and Fatass—focused on the guests.
The Boss—who’d obviously be
en spoiled as a child given the tantrum he was throwing—was losing his shit because Hugo claimed he didn’t have internet to do what they wanted. The signal was pretty shit up here. How long before the thugs stopped asking and started hurting?
Pop. Snap. “Argh!”
The noise from outside penetrated the music, and The Boss lifted his head like a hound getting his scent.
“Want me to go check and see if Joe is all right?” Bucky asked.
Joe was not. Joe was currently sleeping with the laundry in the basement.
The Boss shook his head. “He probably just shot that puking bitch. Everyone stays here. And you stop dicking me around. Give me my money.”
“I’ll do it,” one of the guests offered, looking pale and sweaty.
Idiot. If Hugo couldn’t connect, neither could he. But it might take a few minutes before The Boss realized it.
Mathias moved back to the mudroom. Slipping into the laundry chute, he took it down one more level to the basement, avoiding Joe’s face when he arrived in the bin at the bottom.
Unlike the rest of the house, the basement was bland and unfinished. Stone block walls, cement floor. The furnace hummed as it pushed hot air, trying to keep ahead of the cold outside. His goal was the electrical panel.
Time things got even more confusing. The longer they stalled the home invaders, the better chance they had of the guests snapping out of their semi-drugged state and able to fight.
He flipped the main switch, and everything went out. Lights, the furnace, every single electrical hum in the place went dead, and in that quiet he heard nothing.
Which he found more ominous than anything. He’d expected yelling at the least, a bit of panicked shooting at the worst.
Nothing.
It took him a moment to adjust his eyesight, and even then, he walked arms out until he reached the stairs. As he was climbing, he heard a gunshot.
Fuck.
He moved quickly, listening for only a second before slipping into the mudroom. As he put his ear to the swinging door to the kitchen, it suddenly opened and clocked him.