Unlocked (20 page)

Trey's mouth parted in a snarl and he flung the gun upwards at me, his arm trembling. "You take that back," he hissed. "You take that back! He'd understand. He'd be proud I finally stepped up and did something. He wasn't the sort of man who let other people walk all over him, and neither am I."

"So what is all this then? Revenge? Kill a few group members and make yourself feel better?"

The smile returned to Trey's face, but it was off somehow, crooked, like I was looking at a reflection of it in a splintered mirror. "A little, maybe. But there's more to it than that. That's the problem with the group now. You don't think grand enough. Besides, I'm not the one you should really be talking to about revenge."

I cocked my head. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Well, as much as I'd love to take all the credit for everything, I have to confess I didn't do it alone. I had a little help from someone who had a slightly more personal stake in all of this." He raised his voice. "You can come in now, babe."

My eyes darted to the door just in time to see a woman step through.

"Hello, Sebastian," she said.

My jaw dropped. It had been years since I'd seen her, but those perfect features and golden locks were unmistakable.

Liv.

For about ten seconds, nobody spoke. She merely smiled, radiating satisfaction while my mouth worked wordlessly. The sight of her made me feel like I was falling, like everything else was zipping past around me. My stomach heaved, my skin prickled, my lungs seemed frozen in my chest. A million thoughts crashed through my head. For a few moments I was actually certain I was dreaming.

"You're alive," I said finally.

Liv let out a little giggle. "As observant as ever, I see." She seemed to have actually dressed up for the occasion. Between the long black gown she wore and the elegant clutch under her arm, she looked like she'd come directly from some kind of fancy charity dinner.

I took a step towards her, my arm twitching forward ever so slightly before I stopped myself. "I saw your body."

"You saw
a
body. Some poor girl they found in an alley in The Cross. OD'd, from memory. A bit of decoration, some creative police reporting, courtesy of Trey, and poof," she made a fist then popped it in front of her, "I was dead."

I felt like my eyes were about to pop out of my head. Turning away, I forced them closed. "Do you know what that did to me?"

Her voice was impossibly cold. "It hurt, I imagine. I hope it did. After the way you left me, you deserved to hurt." She had the same callousness to her demeanour now that Trey did. It changed her. That feminine allure was still there, but it was hardened, tempered by years of bitterness. Two people with huge chips on their shoulders; in a morbid way, they made the perfect couple.

"I left to protect you, Liv." I gestured to the room. "To protect you from all of this."

"I didn't want your protection," she spat. "I wanted you. But apparently that was too much to ask."

I had no idea how I was supposed to be dealing with this. I'd never been so confused in my life.

"So now you're with him?" I asked. "You can't have me, so you take this insecure, traitorous little shit instead?"

Treys snarled and lifted the gun once more, but Liv raised her hand. "Easy, Trey."

She turned back to me. "Yes, I'm with him. After you left, it felt like the world had ended. I gave up my life for you, Sebastian. My dreams. Everything. And then you dropped me without so much as an explanation. When I ran into Trey one day, I was desperately looking for a friend, and at first, that's exactly what it was. But soon enough it turned into something else. He was there for me when no one else was, and so I was there for him too."

She shot Trey a smile, but even that seemed to lack true joy. I wondered how much of their relationship was real and how much was simply fuelled by spite. "Unlike you, he's not afraid to be himself with me. He doesn't treat me like a child who can't handle the truth. He told me who he was, who you were, the way you all treated him, and soon it became clear that our goals overlapped. I realised what we had to do."

I glanced at Sophia, hoping the sight of her would steady me a little. She looked almost as surprised as I felt.

"Well, it looks like you succeeded," I said heavily. "You've got me. Whatever it is you want, Sophia has nothing to do with it. You can let her go now. This is between you two, me, and the group."

Sophia let out a high pitched squeal and shook her head rapidly. I loved that she wasn't willing to leave me behind, but I wasn't going to let her throw her life away for my sake. I'd cost her so much already.

"Well, isn't that touching," Liv replied, her voice dripping with scorn. "Trey told me you two had fallen hard for each other." For the first time, she turned her attention to Sophia. Walking closer, she dipped a hand under her chin, stroking it with one finger. Sophia tried to pull away, but Liv's grip closed around her face, angling her head upwards. Every fibre of my being wanted to stride over there and tear those hands away but, somehow, I restrained myself. We were still poised on a knife's edge. All I could do was watch as Liv appraised Sophia, envy and hatred blazing in her eyes. "To be honest, I'm not sure I see what all the fuss is about."

She turned back to me. "You want us to let her go? Well, that's entirely up to you. Let's see exactly how much you love her." She nodded to Trey.

"It's simple really," he said, gesturing to the Alpha computer terminal at the end of the room. "You log me into the system, we release her."

"I don't understand," I replied. "You want council access to the network?"

He grinned. "Remember what I said about thinking big? No, council access won't be enough I'm afraid. I want the main international database. My employers want access to everything."

"Your employers?"

He spread his hands. "The Syndicate. You don't think we hired all those men ourselves, do you? No, we've had a little support. Once I told them what we could bring to the table, it wasn't difficult to convince them to give me a position in their organisation. A s
enior
position."

So The Syndicate
was
involved. I shook my head. The level of betrayal was beyond anything I could have imagined. Trey was quite happy to destroy the entire group, all two thousand years of history, to feed his desperate ego. And Liv, my God. I knew I'd hurt her, but I never dreamed she'd be capable of something like this. Then again, one look at her and it was clear that the woman I'd fallen in love with was nowhere in sight. All that was left was a bitter parody.

I needed to focus. Something he'd said didn't make sense. "Only the current Archon can give you that kind of access. You know that."

He gave a little laugh. "This isn't the time to play games, Sebastian. What do you think we've been doing for the last two years? We've been working out who runs the show. We couldn't see the actual orders of course, but you might be aware that Liv is a little handy with a PC. She actually managed to get a few bits of software piggybacking on your system, while you two were still together, so between that and my basic Alpha access, we've been able to build a pretty accurate picture of the way information in the group flows."

I felt a glimmer of hope, the tiniest hint of light at the end of the tunnel. "And you think it comes from me?"

Trey nodded. "Until a few weeks ago, we had it narrowed down to three. You, Simon, or Charlie. At that point we decided it was more effective to just ask. After giving the others a little more... incentive to tell the truth, they still denied it. Which just leaves you. I have to admit, I was pretty pissed off when you managed to find Sophia the first time. That set us back several weeks. Not to mention Ewan's little stunt." He gestured to the room around us and smiled. "But I guess it all worked out in the end, and that's what counts."

I let my shoulders sag a little, trying to play along. "And what do you get out of all of this?" I asked Liv.

"Oh, my aspirations aren't nearly as grand," she replied. "Revenge will do me just fine. I'm so glad it turned out to be you. We had our suspicions, even from the start, but we couldn't rely just on those. Now we get to take care of everything all at once. It's so much neater this way."

"And if I refuse?"

"Then we kill both of you, drag you over, and swipe your thumb on the scanner anyway." Her voice was ice cold.

"So why not simply do that to start with?" I asked. "Save yourself all this hassle?"

Liv's expression twisted even further. "I'd rather you were alive to watch it happen."

She'd obviously intended to sound like she was talking about the downfall of Alpha, but the way her eyes narrowed fractionally and darted to Sophia as she spoke said it was more than that. I suspected that the moment I gave them what they wanted, Liv was going to have Trey shoot her in front of me and let me watch her die. My group and my girl in one single move. The ultimate payback for the pain I'd caused her.

Judging by the expression on Sophia's face, she realised the truth as well. Whatever flimsy mask of self-control she'd been maintaining so far had crumpled. She looked absolutely terrified. My mind was madly scrabbling for a way to let her know that we weren't totally out of the game. We were only going to have a tiny window of opportunity and I needed her to be ready, but anything I said would tip our hand. And then it came to me.

"You promise you'll let her go?" I asked.

Liv smirked. "Cross my heart."

My death, on the other hand, was apparently a given, but I'd anticipated that the moment I walked through the door.

I nodded slowly and began moving over to the computer terminal. Trey followed, gun trained on my chest. "Don't try anything clever. I'm going to bring up the root Alpha portal, and you're going to swipe your thumb for access, then back away. Understand?"

"Yep."

He opened the program. "All yours."

I reached out, and then paused with my thumb over the pad. "You know this is really sweet," I said, gesturing between the two of them. "A real Cinderella story."

A look of confusion crossed both their faces, but I wasn't really paying attention to them. I was staring at Sophia. For a second, she looked perplexed too, but then her eyes lit up as she recognised the safe word she'd picked the first time we were together. Bingo. I tried to draw a line between her and the floor with my eyes, and she gave a tiny nod. It would have to be enough.

"Whatever. Get on with it," Trey said.

I took a deep breath, and pressed down.

And the room was plunged into darkness.

There were two brief cries of surprise, and then the crack of gunfire, but I was already diving to the right. Unfortunately I wasn't fast enough. Heat exploded through my arm and I stifled a scream. It was just a graze along my bicep, but it hurt like hell, and blood was already seeping through the ragged slash in my sleeve. I forced the pain away. I couldn't think about that now. If I went down, so did Sophia, and that was not an option.

A few more bullets slammed into the darkness around me, one passing close enough that I could feel the wind of it on my face. I scuttled along the floor, fumbling blindly for the edge of the desk and pulling myself around it. I hadn't been sure it would work. I'd heard rumours about what happened when someone without authorisation tried to log into the central database, but nobody had ever been stupid enough to try. As I understood it, the whole system, lights, door locks, computers, was now locked down, and an alert had gone out over the network. In a few minutes, Alpha would be showing up here in force. Of course we still had to survive until they arrived.

For a moment I thought that perhaps Sophia hadn't understood my message, but a split second later there was a loud crack, the sound of wood splintering. She'd thrown herself to the ground.

"What the hell, Trey?" It was Liv's voice, and there was a tremble running through it now.

He let out a howl and fired blindly again. "We checked everyone. It had to be you. It had to!" He sounded as though he was talking mostly to himself.

There was a distant commotion outside. No doubt Trey's guards were trying to leap to his defence. But with the system down, all doors into this room had sealed themselves. They weren't getting in any time soon.

Trey had gone quiet now, apparently realising that sound was everything when you were fighting in the dark. Sophia, however, was still audible. Judging by the noise it had made, the chair had broken when she fell, but she still had to extricate herself from the remains. If I didn't distract them, it wouldn't be long before they found her.

It was incredibly disorienting being in pitch darkness. My mind's eye knew roughly where I'd landed, but with no point of reference I felt lost, like I was swimming in a sea of nothingness. I groped behind me where I thought the bookshelf should be, but all I snatched was empty air. I could still hear Sophia struggling to my right somewhere.

"Trey?" said Liv again.

"Quiet," he hissed. His voice had moved now. It was in the centre of the room. I was running out of time.

Finally, my hands found something solid, the leather spine of a book. I slipped it from the shelf as quietly as I could and then hurled it towards where I'd last heard Trey. I don't know if I struck anyone, but there were two startled screams as the book collided with something, and another bullet zinged into the furniture to my right.

I threw several more, sliding softly along the ground, never staying the same spot. Judging by the yelp of pain, at least one of my projectiles hit its mark, but it wasn't enough. At best I was just delaying them by a few moments. Trey had stopped firing now, knowing the muzzle flash gave him away. I debated simply charging the area where I'd heard him cry out, but I doubted he was staying in one place
,
either. All that would do is make me an easy target.

I wracked my brain for a way to locate him in the darkness. His mistake had given us a chance, but he still had the advantage. He was armed and I was wounded. Even through the endorphins flooding my brain, my arm was burning like crazy. It wouldn't kill me, but I was already feeling woozy and light-headed. I needed to end this soon.