Chapter 1
I use to love the night, I would stand on the roof of our barn, just me and the stars against the inky blackness, where all my problems could just float away for that one small moment. Now, it was just a reminder of how far I had fallen.
Reminiscing did me no good, not since I had met Jason 2 years ago and for the second time in my then 17 years everything had changed. Now night time was when I worked.
I was a thief, not by choice but out of survival. If I didn’t do what Jason told me to do, he’d kill me. I’d seen him do it before, according to him they weren’t pulling their weight and had refused to do the job he ordered them to do because it was too dangerous, that was enough for him to order their death, just one job refusal. No one had refused a job after that, no matter how dangerous it was. I had regretted agreeing to join his crew from my first job assignment.
He’d found me sleeping on the streets, starving and cold in the middle of winter, he’d said all the right things, offered me everything I needed, a roof over my head, warm blankets and clothing and food, three meals a day and in return I just had to join his crew. A bunch of thieves living of what they could steal, when I’d told him I didn’t know how to steal he’d not been deterred, said he’d trained a lot of his crew and he’d do the same for me. He was smart, 3 months of training and shadowing others, 3 months of somewhere to sleep, blankets, clothing and of course the all important food and water. I hadn’t understood when some of the others gave me pitying looks, I thought Jason was a god having saved me from the streets. Oh how I was wrong! You worked for the things he gave you, but having had 3 months of being provided for without working suddenly I found myself owing Jason - just like everyone else did - and that’s when I realised, once you were in with Jason and his crew, there was only one way out.... death.
Damn it, I needed to keep my focus on the job, i hadn’t been staking out the place for the better part of a week to mess it up now. I knew the floor plans - Jason always acquired these before a job - the property was huge, 10 acres of woodland surrounded a three story mansion, complete with a high brick wall surrounding the entire land, presumably to keep people out.
Ground level had two large rooms probably for entertaining, a large kitchen with an adjoining dining room and of course the foyer with its large sweeping staircase that lead upstairs to the first floor, with 8 large ensuite bedrooms plus two smaller unidentified rooms that weren’t my priority. The second floor only had 5 ensuite bedrooms, with an additional two that were double the size of all the other and finally a small office, tucked away furthest from the stairs. It was the stairs that had given me the biggest confusion as from the floor plans i’d been given it appeared that they were at opposite ends of the building, meaning i would have to walk the length of the first floor to access the second. I guess the idea was that it made it harder for someone to break in and access the office. There was very little information on the basement which gave me concerns at the thought of having to go there, since normally the basement also doubled as a torture chamber, I was glad i wasn’t having to venture down there!
The place must have been magnificent once upon a time, but it clearly hadn’t been cared for in a while. The place just looked abandoned now, what with the weeds growing up the side of the wall, broken statues in the garden and long, unkempt dead grass, I couldn’t imagine this place holding untold riches!
Still Jason’s orders were concrete, you didn’t say no or question him on a job, ever!
So here I was, waiting to break into a place that was seriously creeping me out. For the past week I had staked it out, only to find it wasn’t actually abandoned. I had watched an elderly woman and middle aged man leaving at 10am every morning, they’d be gone for about 2 hours. Even when they had returned with a trunk full of shopping, it had taken them 20 minutes for the gentleman to get everything into the house by himself, the elderly woman had attempted to help despite seeming much to frail to lift anything safely and was quickly sent inside by her companion. I didn’t understand the need for that much shopping if only the two of them lived there.
If it was just the two of them who lived there after all?
