A scandal with Mr CEO

Chapter 27

The elevator doors slid shut with a soft hiss, and suddenly the world went silent.

Not completely silent. I could hear my own breathing, too fast and too shallow, and the mechanical hum of whatever machinery kept this box suspended between floors. But the alarm, the shouting, the chaos, all of it vanished the moment those doors closed.

I was alone.

No, that wasn't right. I was trapped. Antonio had put me in here, pushed me like I was luggage he needed to store somewhere safe while he dealt with whatever was happening upstairs.

My legs gave out.

I slid down the wall of the elevator, no, Antonio had called it a box, and that's exactly what it felt like now, until I was sitting on the floor with my knees drawn up to my chest. The lobster I'd eaten churned in my stomach, threatening to make a reappearance.

Bad guys, he'd said. This place is going to be filled with bad guys.

What did that even mean? This was a penthouse. A fancy, ridiculous, over-the-top penthouse in one of the nicest buildings in the city. Bad guys didn't just show up at places like this. They existed in movies, in video games, in the kind of stories my sister Lily loved to read late at night with a flashlight under her covers.

Not in real life.

Not in my life.

Except my brain, traitor that it was, decided this was the perfect moment to start showing me a highlight reel of every strange thing I'd noticed about Antonio Russel since I'd stumbled into his life. The way his men moved like shadows. The way Luke's voice changed when Antonio was near. The way Antonio himself could go from almost-human to ice-cold in the span of a heartbeat.

The way he'd held that knife.

I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed my palms against them, trying to block out the image of his knuckles, white-knuckled around the handle. Trying to block out the memory of how natural it had looked in his grip.

Please don't kill anyone, you'll make me scared.

Had I really said that? Like I was asking him not to track mud on the carpet? Like killing people was something he could just choose not to do, like skipping dessert?

The elevator shuddered.

I froze, my heart slamming against my ribs so hard I could feel it in my throat. For one terrible second, I thought the box was going to drop, plummet down however many floors it had taken us to get to this secret hiding spot and smash me into nothing.

But it didn't drop.

It just shuddered. Once. Twice. And then,

Gunfire.

I'd heard gunfire before. In movies, obviously.

Once from three blocks away when I was walking home from a late shift and heard pops that I told myself were fireworks even though I knew they weren't. But I'd never heard it like this. Never heard it through something, muffled but unmistakable, like thunder trapped inside walls.

Upstairs.

The bad guys were upstairs. Antonio was upstairs. Luke was upstairs. All those men with guns who'd flooded the dining room were upstairs.

And I was here, in a box, with nothing but the taste of expensive seafood and the growing certainty that I had made a terrible, terrible mistake.

Not a single word Kiara. Don't even try to get out of this box cause you wouldn't be able to. Not until I come back for you.