“It’s Maya,” I told the alpha dangling upside down above me.
He drew himself upright without using his hands. “Answer it.”
I was already swiping. Only, it wasn’t his sister—my sister?—whose voice came through the speakers. Instead, it was a male voice, the words so muffled I couldn’t make out his identity.
“Put down your weapons.”
“I don’t have any weapons.” That was Maya, also muffled. It sounded like she’d placed the call while her phone was stashed about her person, layers of clothing blocking sound waves.
Something smacked against her cell phone. Then a different male voice observed, “She’s clear.”
If I had to guess, Maya had just been patted down. The cell phone must have been ignored since it wasn’t immediately dangerous…or at least so her captors thought.
“A wolf,” continued the original voice, “doesn’t travel alone with no defenses.”
It was the way he said wolf that clued me in to his identity. He’d twisted the word so many times when referring to my own nature. When referring to what he knew was his biological daughter’s hidden nature.
My teeth sharpened inside my mouth and it was all I could do not to growl. Even from eight feet away, I could smell Orion’s identical reaction.
Because Maya had been captured by the very man I’d been raised to consider a father. Julius LeBlanc.
Chapter 15
“You really think my alpha won’t track me?” Maya said, snapping me and Orion out of the protective rage that had momentarily consumed us.
Track. She was telling us that the backup device we’d intended to plant in Gabi’s work shoes was still on her person. In other words, even if Maya was taken far enough away so Orion couldn’t use the pack bond to find her, we could simply open the app on his phone and figure out where she’d gone.
Assuming Julius didn’t seize that phone while we listened and realize what Maya was up to. My finger hovered over the end-call button, held back from tapping only by the grunt of pain that emerged from the speakers.
I didn’t know Maya well enough to identify the cry as hers, but Orion’s reaction confirmed my guesswork. He began prying at the doors to the hallway with his bare hands…no, with hands that ended in lupine claws. A sliver of light shone through the crack, then disappeared as he jolted, lost his balance, wobbled over inky blackness…
He was going to fall. I clenched my fist around the microphone, hoping that was enough to keep Maya’s captors from hearing as I called up to him. “Orion!”
For an endless moment, he swayed over darkness. Then his hand shot out and closed around a cable running up one side of the elevator shaft. Head bowed, he spoke to his own feet, feet that were once again grounded on the ledge. “I lost Maya from the pack bond.”
Which is when the elevator dinged beneath me. “Penthouse,” the robotic voice inside informed nobody.
Could we hope the programming was merely waking back up and remembering its original destination? Unlikely after such an extended outage. No, Julius intended to use the elevator to move Maya, which presented a whole slew of problems. Not least of which was anyone on the roof of the elevator getting smooshed at the end of the ride.
Beneath my feet, the car began moving. The ascent started slow, lifting me closer to the ledge Orion had worked so hard to get to. And he reached out his hand toward me, offering to assist my balance as I stepped across the gap to join him. That would deal with the smooshing problem at least.
But I couldn’t take the step. Right now, Julius assumed Maya’s backup had no clue she’d been taken. If the elevator arrived at Gabi’s apartment lacking a ceiling panel, she’d be searched, the tracker removed, her safety compromised.
No, we needed the element of surprise at our disposal. Especially if Maya was unconscious or…
I refused to finish that thought. Instead, I forced myself to end the phone call that had gone eerily silent. Then I hopped down into the car, unsurprised when the thud of heavier feet on the ceiling suggested Orion had undone all of our earlier work and joined me.
“Ambush from inside the elevator?” he asked, his upper body angling down through the opening.
I shook my head while punching every button on the keypad. “Too many weapons at their disposal. Too few at ours.”
The better move would be forcing Julius into the more ambushable stairwell, or at least keeping his guard down so we could strike later. Stopping the elevator was an integral step in making either of those eventualities happen. Unfortunately, my efforts with the keypad were having no effect.
No surprise since Gabi had smugly informed me years ago that penthouse access superseded calls to all other levels.
Giving up, I began struggling to hoist the ceiling panel up through the gap it had come out of, using only one hand since I was reluctant to release the phone just in case I was wrong and Maya was able to place another call. If we couldn’t stop the elevator, we needed it to arrive empty and apparently undamaged…
Then Orion was beside me. He turned the unwieldy panel at a diagonal and tossed it through the hole in the ceiling. Which left me trying not to notice how many floors had already flown past.
Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two. There were mere seconds left. I had to accept that Maya wasn’t calling. That the uncertainty of her survival couldn’t impact my current actions.
Emptiness tried to curl inside me, but I swallowed it down while dropping the phone back into my pocket. Tried to act like a wolf who lived only in the moment as I accepted Orion’s leg up before helping him fit the ceiling tile back into place.
Now it truly was pitch dark in the elevator shaft. The distance above us was unknown, air whipping past my face and the mental image of steel girders at the top impossible to ignore.
Recklessness tugged at me. Maya was in danger. Maya might be my sister. We needed to do something…
There was a sweet spot between acting like a wolf and foregoing all planning. So I used the phone’s flashlight mode to illuminate the walls surging past but I didn’t bother looking up. There’d be time. There had to be.
“Two ledges from now,” I warned Orion, giving him time to work his head around what I was suggesting but no time to argue. “If we’re fast, there’s space to push ourselves flat against the inner door and let the elevator pass.”
“Good thing we had a very light lunch,” Orion rumbled, taking my hand in his.
There was no hesitation as we stepped off into darkness together. For one split second, though, I thought the elevator was going to grab onto the clothing I’d tucked around myself and forgotten to secure. But Orion’s arm pushed me flat against the cool metal of the door to the hallway. He’d placed himself between me and danger, the slow rise and fall of his breathing as palpable against my back as the whoosh of the elevator as it flew by.
Then it was gone. Orion released me and began prying at the door that steadfastly refused to open. Above us, the wheeze of the elevator slowing was followed by the whoosh of doors and the tap of boots on metal as someone—Julius?—stepped inside.
Not just Julius. There were at least three sets of feet up there. Did one set belong to Maya, or had she been slung over a shoulder? I refused to think she might have been left behind, blood pooling around her as she lay on the floor of Gabi’s apartment, dying or already dead.
