I keep my strides long and purposeful. Neal, who is much shorter than I am, has to practically trot to keep up with me. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I think it’s weird how you showed up on the scene after getting pinched working with Sin and me. Are you here for revenge?”
I don’t even bother looking at the guy, keeping my tone bland. “I’m here for the money, Neal. That’s it.”
He makes a scoffing noise. “Got my eye on you.”
“How about keeping your fucking eyes on the job and we’re good?” I growl.
We’ve reached the block Throb is on and without another word to me, Neal peels off to the left and heads for the alley behind the nightclub.
I continue walking down the sidewalk near the edge of the street as Throb comes into my line of sight. There’s a lengthy line of luxury cars parked there, all through the valet service. I reach in my pocket, pull out a tiny silver orb, and press a button on the side. Nonchalantly, I drop it so it perfectly rolls off the edge of the curb and under a black Mercedes G550 parked right in front of the club. Veering off, I head toward the entrance.
I don’t even bother getting in the long line that feeds out the front door. Instead, I pull out a fifty-pound note and hold it up to the doorman. Eyeballing the cash, he gives me a curt nod to let me know it’s okay to skip the line. He pockets the money without an exchange of words.
Once inside, I grab a drink and sit at the edge of the bar. I engage in some brief flirtations with a woman there, but I let my eyes continually scan the crowd. A pregnant woman in a black, formfitting dress comes out of the woman’s bathroom. With silky dark hair down her back, she’s rocking four-inch heels despite the fact she appears ready to give birth at any moment.
No one seems to think it’s odd there’s a pregnant woman in a dance club since no one seems to be paying her any attention.
That’s good.
Because that’s Sin under that wig and rounded belly.
I have to admit… she’s fucking sexy pregnant. I’d often thought about her growing large with my child, and I wondered how beautiful she would look. Now, I know I wasn’t wrong in those fantasies.
Sipping my drink, I talk to the woman beside me. I grit my teeth when a man breezily flirts with pregnant Sin. The idea of it is absolutely abysmal, and I want to bust his face open.
But I have a job to do. I check my watch, calculating that a big commotion should be starting soon.
And then it happens.
There is subtle motion at the entrance. The doorman comes rushing in, looking around frantically. Once he finds the closest security guard, he starts telling him something while his hands flail about. The security guard blinks in surprise, then starts to move through the crowd until he reaches the man who guards the hallway closest to the back office. He tells him something with animated hands, which causes that guard to take off running to where Jason Brandis presumably is since I don’t see him out in the club.
The guard blows right past Sin, who is still letting the man flirt with her. She doesn’t pay any attention to what is going on.
Not five seconds after the security guard disappears into Brandis’ office, he comes flying back out with Jason Brandis on his heels. Both men appear panicked.
Brandis is still as cautious as I would have expected, though. He pulls his office door shut behind him, then rattles the knob to make sure it’s locked. In the times William had cased the joint, he’d noted the man never left his office without locking it behind him. We hadn’t expected that to change, and it doesn’t foil our plans. We came prepared to deal with a locked door.
Roughly, the security guard and Brandis push through the dancing crowd, which appears oblivious to anything being amiss. Within moments, they are out the entrance of the nightclub and I start moving toward his office.
As I clear the edge of the dance floor, Sin stands and makes up some excuse to the man she’d been talking with, moving into the hallway ahead of me. We’re blessedly alone for a few moments as her hand moves to her small clutch purse and comes out with a lock-pick gun. My body is hopefully obscuring enough of her, but we both move with confidence as if we have the right to be where we are. Brandis is stupid enough to have nothing more than a standard keyed lock on his office door, so he deserves it when Sin deftly glides the lock-pick gun into the lock and pops it.