The Original Crowd (A Whole New Crowd 0.50)

I noticed Gentley had been checking out my outfit, but it wasn’t from lust. I saw the note of surprise in his eyes.

All professional and shit, I said, “Yeah, I just gotta wind this rope quick.”

“You got everything?” Tray moved to my side.

“I think so.” And I did. I grabbed two small karabiners, a lethal looking knife, my rope, and anything else I could carry on my body that I’d need to break a lock…or if anything came between me and Grayley. He was down there and I was going to get him out. There was no other way around it.

“We go on your count,” Tray murmured, for my ears only. Gentley had moved a few feet away, enough to give us a modicum of privacy.

“Tray,” I murmured.

“Yeah?”

“Are you—” I would be fine. I knew how to handle myself, how to disappear and reappear, but Tray was coming in from the river. That meant a whole lot more open spaces than I’d have. I could hide in the nook and crannies in the school. But Tray’s way was a lot more dangerous, he’d be an easy target for any marksman.

“I’ll be fine,” he whispered, reassuring me for the umpteenth time. And he had, over and over last night, but it wasn’t enough to reassure me.

I really didn’t care that he had two guns on his body. Or that his brother had been a DEA agent, and his father the chief of police. I didn’t care that he’d been trained, at an early age, to handle himself and any gun he’d come across, or that he could probably out maneuver most SWAT teams.

A sniper’s aim was still a sniper’s aim.

He kissed my forehead and whispered again, “I’ll be fine. I’ve done this before, just focus on getting in there and finding your friend, alright?”

I grabbed his chin and kissed him hard on the lips.

When we broke apart, I saw that Gentley was watching and he looked annoyed. “Can we get going?”

Tray threw a walkie to him and asked, “You know what to do?”

“Yeah, yeah. Watch the parking lot and if a new crew shows up, I’m supposed to call you.”

“Channel eleven-twelve. Taryn and I are both on that channel, but the volume will be on vibrate so you’ll have just SOS us or something. Long, short, short, short, long is the code, alright?”

If it had been under any other circumstances, maybe one where we weren’t about to enter into a building without knowing if we’d be walking back out, I would’ve taken Tray down right then and there. The guy was just hot, all authoritarian and lethal. Plus he had a nicely tight body with muscles that contracted even when he breathed. Holy fuck.

“Taryn,” he barked my way.

“Yeah.” I know, I know. Distracting myself with sex wasn’t going to chase away the foreboding feeling that I felt in my stomach. It was the same feeling when we’d driven by that car accident. But holy God, there was no way I’d let that feeling overpower me and keep me from getting inside today.

Suddenly I was overfilled with urgency and adrenalin. I needed to get inside that building. I needed to take that fucker down. Now.

“I’m going in,” I announced and was already off, sprinting over the ditches and through the football field.

We’d decided the night before we’d hit the school early, really early, and we’d move in when they probably wouldn’t expect it.

I was coming in from the school’s backyard. Past the football field, the tennis courts, the swimming pool, the outside volleyball and the basketball courts. Behind the courts, there was a back door that the janitor’s used for their own entrance. They usually came and went at their own freedom, so the chances were pretty unlikely

that Jace would monitor that door closely. I pulled out the PRS-500 and coded in Geezer’s decoder. Thumbing through the various locales and buildings, I found the janitor’s door and the security code came up: six, two, three, four.

Entering it on the keypad, the light switched to green and I slipped in.

From a burglar’s point of view, it was somewhat of a let-down, but I still had plenty of doors to get through yet.

I knew the camera surveillance had been upped since my last break-in, so the first vent I found, I hoisted myself up and through it. From there it was cake. Kind of, except for the fact that I ran into two small cameras placed in the venting shafts. What moron would want to watch fucking wind blow in a vent? That’s right, a psychopath who I used to care about and one time thought I had loved.

Fuck him.

Each camera I came across, I merely bent my head and moved past it. The venting shafts were completely black. I was dressed in black, so only the whites of my eyes could give me away. Problem solved—I didn’t look up and kept my nose to the metal as I inched forward.