Chapter 106: THE PARTY
KEISHA’S POV
"What happened?" Callum was in the doorway before I had finished putting my coat on, his eyes going straight to my face with the look he had when something was wrong and he already knew it.
"Nadia." I said breathlessly. "I need to find her right now."
He was already stepping inside. "What’s wrong with Nadia?"
"Eliora." I whimpered. "The new hire at the office. Her whole resume was fake — all of it, none of her qualifications are real, she has two criminal records for assaulting colleagues and Nadia is with her right now at a club on the boundary road and I don’t—"
He already had his phone out. "Dane." He said the moment it connected. "Track Nadia’s contact. Boundary road." He ended the call and looked at me. "Let’s go."
We moved fast.
Two guards appeared from somewhere and fell in behind us and I didn’t ask. I just kept pace with Callum who was moving fast and we were in a car within two minutes with the engine running before either door was properly shut.
"Everything." He ordered as soon as we were driving. "Tell me everything."
"She trained as a baker." I said. "Three years. She faked the inter-pack correspondence experience, faked the certification number, fabricated the reference contacts entirely." I held Dane’s message on my screen. "Both assault records were colleagues who were given opportunities above her. She targeted them. Both times."
"And Nadia was given Eliora’s work." He muttered.
"The supervisor reassigned it." I said. "Right in front of her. Called Nadia better."
He said nothing. His jaw tightened and I watched it and said nothing else.
Dane called back in three minutes. Location confirmed. The club on the boundary road. He was already heading there.
We pulled up to a venue that was spilling noise and people onto the street.
Callum moved through the entrance and the crowd parted for him in that way it did without him saying anything. I stayed close and the guards fanned out as we worked through the main floor looking for either of them.
Nadia wasn’t there.
I scanned every corner, every table, every cluster of people near the bar and the dance floor.
"She’s not on the main floor." I shouted.
"Eliora." Callum said. "Find Eliora first."
I turned.
There.
Near the far exit on the left side, moving with her head down and her bag clutched to her chest, not dancing, not stopping, just cutting through the crowd toward a door at the back that led somewhere that wasn’t the main club.
"There." I pointed with a shout.
We went after her.
She pushed through the back door and the noise dropped immediately and we were in a corridor, darker, quieter, attached to a building behind the main venue that smelled like dust and old wood and nothing good.
Callum held up a hand so we slowed and Dane appeared from outside with two guards and Callum split them left and right without words while we went straight.
There were rooms off the corridor. I pushed doors open one by one. Empty. Empty. A storage room. Empty.
"Here." A guard’s voice called from further down.
We went fast.
Nadia was on a sofa in a back room with her head dropped to the side and her eyes closed.
Oh fuck.
I crossed to her immediately and grabbed her shoulder. "Nadia." I shook her. "Nadia, wake up."
Nothing.
I looked at the table beside her. A glass with something at the bottom that wasn’t normal residue.
"She’s been drugged." I informed them.
Dane was already there. He checked her pulse, checked her breathing, looked at me and nodded once — she was alive, stable — and then got her up onto his back with the ease of someone who had done this before and looked at me.
"Go." Callum said to him.
I helped get Nadia’s arm properly over Dane’s shoulder, held the door as Dane moved with her and I watched them go and then turned back to Callum.
"Eliora." I reminded him.
"She came back this way." He nodded and he was already moving.
We went further down the corridor and through another door and out into a wider space at the back of the building — a loading area, empty crates stacked against the walls, a single hanging light — and Eliora was there.
She had stopped running.
She was standing in the middle of the space and she was smiling and that was the thing that made my stomach drop before I had processed anything else, the smile, the expression of someone who had decided they were the one with the advantage.
Three men stepped out from behind the stacked crates.
Oh shit, they were large. Not pack members — I could see it immediately. They had the look of people hired for this specific purpose rather than people who belonged to anything.
Eliora looked at Callum, then at me and then back at Callum. "I was wondering when you’d catch up." She said pleasantly.
"What did you do to her?" Callum said.
"Nothing too much." She said. The smile didn’t move. "She’ll live. I’m not interested in killing anyone. I just needed her out of the way for one night." She tilted her head. "She got everything I was supposed to get. That supervisor looked at her like she was sent from above and I’d been there two weeks doing my best and nobody—" She stopped, composed herself, the anger visible for a second and then smoothed back over. "Anyway."
"Step aside." Callum said to the men.
None of them moved.
Eliora looked at them and then back at Callum. "I’ll pay triple." She said. "For whoever hurts him." She looked at the men. "Don’t hold back."
I looked at Callum beside me.
He looked completely calm.
I thought about Eliora’s confidence and wondered whether she was being stupid or whether she genuinely had no idea who she was looking at.
One of the men rolled his shoulders and stepped forward.
I thought— this is going to go very badly for him.