Page 76 of Stolen By the Billionaire
She rolled her eyes. “So, we’re secure, right?”
Blaze inclined his head toward the bathroom door. “Negative. Get dressed in this bathroom.”
“Are your reinforcements not—trustworthy?”
He mulled over the implications of whether Rogue Security’s mercenary operators were trustworthy. “They’re intense.”
Understatement. Some of them tended to stay in theaters of operation as much as they could, having developed a taste for war and forgotten civilized habits.
Sarah padded into the bathroom, her pale feet silent on the dark wood floor, and closed the door.
If Rogue Security hadn’t already taken up positions around the house, Blaze would have stood guard over her while she changed, but the house was secure.
Texts from Magnus and others had assured him that they’d found no additional signs of entry on the exterior of the house, and Blaze had tracked the infiltrators on his video surveillance to make sure all were accounted for and had exited the house.
There was no reason for him to act like a growling Doberman.
. . . So he would not.
He gingerly tested the bathroom’s doorknob, making sure it was locked, and then called out, “Come upstairs when you’re done,” before he jogged up the staircase to answer the door.
The walls of the house’s foyer and front door were glass. The architect had wanted to create a seamless transition to the patio outside, or whatever.
Even though the glass was shatterproof, the lack of cover still made Blaze twitch. He’d never felt comfortable living in this sieve of a house.
Three men stood in the dim, scattered light from the backup security floodlamp outside in the night.
Blaze strode to the door and pulled the unlocked door open. Damn, he hoped Rogue’s tech personnel rebooted the security and electricity soon.
Blaze knew two of the men from his several operations with Rogue Sec after he’d resigned from the SEALs, and the other was recognizable as one of Rogue’s computer specialists from his perennial black hoodie and leather gloves, even on the warm June night. From the stiff way the hacker stood, Blaze figured out who he was. “Jensen, Savoie, and Borysov, thank you for coming. I was surprised anybody was in Chicago when I called.”
Magnus Jensen walked into the house. “Perimeter secured. Power will be restored shortly.”
Jensen wore a charcoal gray suit that made his icy gray eyes more menacing and did not begin to approach how truly dangerous he was.
Aaron Savoie was next, wearing black fatigues, and looked exactly like the mercenary-for-hire he was. “Four o’clock in the morning, Robinson? Really?”
He grinned, which meant a partial lift of one side of his taut mouth. “Sorry about that.”
Savoie’s eyes darkened. “How bad was it?”
This was not the time for Aaron Savoie to get angry. “Four armed targets gained access to the interior. I subdued two in order to move the package to a safe area. All four exited as per surveillance footage.”
“And they weren’t just opportunistic looters in a blackout?” Savoie asked.
His jaw clenched. “Only my house lost power. The package is a target of an organized crime syndicate. A hit team abducted her yesterday at her farm in Iowa, but I retrieved her. Tonight was the second attempt. They would have shot her in her bed.”
They’d been lifting their guns at where she lay in his guest bedroom when he’d tackled one, driving that target’s body into the other, and disarmed and fought them barehanded until they escaped his grip and retreated.
Savoie nodded. “How did they gain entry?”
“The electrical system has a two-second delay before the backup generator kicks in. The system is state-level tech,” meaning the technology in his house was on par with what a nation-state would install, not a hobbyist job. “During the pause, the security system was hacked so it did not reboot.”
“That’s a lot of technology. Which organization?”
“The White Russian syndicate, as far as I can tell.”
Savoie swore in Hebrew, Mandarin, and English and gestured at Blaze’s glass walls. “And you brought a White Russian syndicate target into this house?”
