His Son. Her Secret.

Chapter 29

Both women jumped violently. Beth’s pulse exploded. Her hand instinctively flew toward the tiny knife strapped against her thigh beneath the dress before she realized it was only a shattered bottle.

A drunk man near the bar immediately started apologizing while employees rushed over with towels. Around them, people barely reacted. Somewhere to their left, a group of women erupted in laughter at something on one of their phones, leaning together and nearly knocking a glass off the edge of their table. Then the DJ shifted the track into something slower and heavier, and the crowd absorbed the change without missing a step.

Beth slowly exhaled. “Jesus,” she muttered.

Belle pressed a hand against her chest dramatically. “I just saw my entire life flash before my eyes.”

Beth rubbed sweaty palms against her dress. “See? This is what I mean. We’ve probably accumulated enough karma to never find good men.”

Belle laughed. “Okay, that part might actually be true.”

Beth's gaze drifted toward the corridor again. And then, without quite deciding to, she thought about Kaleth in the lobby. That small upturned face, the way he'd lifted his hand toward the glass like he'd seen her standing there on the street outside. Like he'd known.

She knew he hadn't. She wasn't losing her mind entirely. He was two years old, and she had been seated in a car forty feet away behind tinted glass, and there was no version of events in which a toddler had recognized a woman he'd spent less than a week with.

But she'd felt it anyway. That irrational, bone-deep feeling of being seen. And she'd thought about it approximately six hundred times since.

She thought about Santiago adjusting Kaleth's jacket without looking down. The automatic, practiced ease of it, the way his hands seemed to know what to do before his mind had registered the need. She'd watched grown men fumble with their own shoelaces, and here was this man, this supposedly ruthless and untouchable man, buttoning one small button on one small jacket with the focused gentleness of someone for whom this particular child was the only thing in the world worth being careful about.

Her father had never once… She caught herself. Picked up her glass. Took a drink. Stop it, she thought. Stop doing that. Beth closed her eyes for a second and exhaled.

"Okay," Belle said quietly, watching her and drawing the wrong conclusion. "You need to breathe."

"I am breathing."

"You are white-knuckling a glass of soda in a club while dressed like that. You look insane, by the way. The dress is doing a lot of work, and your face is undoing all of it."

She glared, probably proving her friend right. "Belle."

"We said half an hour. They've got less than fifteen minutes to go." Belle's voice was steady, sure. And low. "You can survive that long, can’t you?"

Beth nodded. Of course, her friend thought she was all wound up because of the job, and Beth wouldn’t dare correct her. So, with a deep breath, she loosened her grip on the glass.

But there was the other matter, and she thought about telling Belle everything about the dark car outside Santiago's building. She'd been watching him, and someone else had been watching too, and she'd spent three days trying to decide if she was paranoid or if her instincts, the ones that had made her follow a sound to a basement in the first place, were trying to tell her something.

Maybe Belle could do a search, and then they would know if there truly was any danger. She opened her mouth. And that was when the fire alarm screamed.

It hit the room like a physical thing. One second, the music was a wall of sound, and the next it was swallowed whole by the alarm, this flat, piercing wail that cut straight through the bass and the chatter and the laughter and left nothing in its place except chaos.

In the next instant, the lights changed. Emergency red bled into the strobing violet. The crowd lurched. Beth was on her feet before she'd consciously decided to stand, her hand already reaching for Belle's arm, her eyes already moving. Looking for the door, corridor, and exit signs.

Belle grabbed her wrist. Their eyes met. Beth was certain the other woman had the same thought she was having: Avi and Mal are still back there. Beth's stomach dropped like a stone.

***

Was this how roaches scattered when the lights were turned on? Beth mused with a little humor despite the situation that threatened to choke the air out of her lungs.

At least five minutes had passed since the fire alarm had started blaring like a signal for the end of the world. People scattered in every direction, not really paying attention to where the exits were located, and there were some who actually just stood frozen as though they couldn’t process what was happening.

Thankfully, the club’s staff and bouncers were on hand to bring some form of order to the madness.

The bouncers didn't hesitate to push people in the right direction. That was the thing about men built like architectural features, they didn't need to. They simply materialized at the edges of the crowd and began moving people toward the exits with the calm, immovable certainty of men who had done this before and would do it again and felt nothing particular about it either way.

Beth moved with them, her hand locked around Belle's wrist. The heels made it almost impossible to move fast, which answered her earlier question. But then there was also the matter of the crowd that pressed in on them from all sides.

Two steps. Stop. Two steps. Stop. Arg! Well, at least there was no scent of smoke in the air yet, Beth noted, although it was possible she couldn’t catch it with how saturated the air was with the smell of perfumes, body odor, and spilled drinks.

Physical contact was unavoidable at this point. Someone's elbow poked her in her ribs while someone else's hair blew into her mouth. Still, she kept her eyes forward and her grip tight and did not let herself think about the back corridor where Avi and Mal were.

Not yet. At least,

Outside, the night air hit her like cold water. The crowd spilled out onto the pavement in an uneven flood, clustering in anxious groups, phones already raised. A woman near the door was crying for some reason, but Beth wasn’t interested in finding out.

Once they were out of the direct flow, Beth turned and took in the entrance of the club. To her surprise, she saw that two bouncers had positioned themselves at the entrance, their arms crossed. They weren’t allowing anyone to rush back into the club for any reason.

To the side, a man in a suit was on his phone saying, “I don't know, the alarm just went off.” in the weary tone of someone reporting to someone else who would be displeased by this information. Probably the owner of the club? The maybe criminal-affiliated owners Beth and the others had come to steal from tonight. s**t!

Beth swallowed hard, then pulled Belle further away, all the while her eyes tried to scan the crowd for two familiar faces. By the time they stopped moving, it was obvious Avi and Mal weren’t among the gathered crowd. "They're not out yet," she whispered, heart racing.

"I know." Belle was already on her phone, one hand pressed to her other ear to block out the noise. She waited. Her expression didn't change, which was either a good sign or a very practised bad one.

In the distance, sirens could be heard, and they were getting closer, which only raised Beth’s panic. What if the police and firefighters found the women inside?

"We can't be here when they arrive," Beth said. She didn’t need to spell it out who she meant.

"I know that too." Belle lowered her phone and typed something instead.

Beth scanned the street again. To her surprise, if she didn’t know better, she would have said it all looked normal. From the parked cars. A couple arguing near the curb. Even the group from the club laughed like the whole thing was an adventure, snapping pictures of each other with the building lit up behind them. Absolutely normal. But that’s when another detail registered.

Beth’s narrowed eyes focused on the building that housed the club. It looked fine, and all the lights were on and bright. She didn't see smoke. Didn't smell it either, and a glance at the roofline and top windows confirmed that there were no flames spilling out, ready to consume the entire place. Huh?

The buzz of Belle's phone snapped Beth out of her thoughts before she could give the matter more brain matter.

Belle looked down at the screen. She cursed under her breath a second later.

"What?" Beth said, impatience lacing the word.

Instead of answering, Belle turned the screen toward her. There was a single line of text from an unknown number: Ran out of milk.

Shit! Beth knew what that meant. The job had failed. Again

Beth closed her eyes for exactly one second.

Then she opened them, took Belle's arm, and said, "Walk." Because they needed to get the hell out of there and find out what the f**k had happened.