Page 17 of Burning Secrets

Focus on the lock, work the pins, just like he’d learned.

Maybe it’d started with what if he hadn’t decided to skip dinner and offer to take an extra surveillance shift, giving him a small—very small—window to break into Viper’s office and root around.

If you can locate the warehouse, that would go a long way to shutting down this bioweapon.

Yeah, and the sooner he could breathe again.

Footsteps in the main area, and he stilled, but they walked by, probably on the way to the latrines out back.

He crouched, kept fidgeting with the lock.

From the main room, conversation lifted, loud, raucous, crude. And maybe he didn’t really miss dinner. He couldn’t stomach another round of moose stew.

The door creaked open, and he scurried into the room, shut the door, and pulled a flashlight from his pocket.

The map on Peyton’s wall had jogged a memory. Back in their first camp, a map had hung on the wall of Howards’s office.

He shone a light on the table shoved against the wall, the one Viper used as a desk.

I’m tired of this, boss. I’ve been embedded for over a year.

Maybe he’d go further back to Rio’s great idea to insert him into the SOR like he might be one of these thugs. He’d been so—too—idealistic back then.

Focus.

The light fell on a couple schematics. Looked like a plane, maybe. And another—a grid with a colored pattern, starting dark in the middle, lighter at the edges.

Footsteps outside, and he cut the light. No windows in this room, but that also meant no escape.

If Viper found him in here, snooping around, he’d beat him until he talked—which he wouldn’t—and then he’d kill him. Slowly.

Maybe let Jer do it.

Oh, he hated this place.

No, if he were peeling back the what-ifs, it would be the moment his stupid cousin, Aaron, had suggested a joyride in Ben Barrett’s 1994 T-roof Corvette.

He closed his eyes, listening to the footsteps stop. Outside the door. Voices.

“He’ll be here in four days. Just sit tight until then. No moves until the big guy gets here.”

The doorknob rattled, and Crew searched for a weapon. Maybe the straight chair and, yes, Rio’s crash course in personal defense, not to mention Crew’s short stint in lockup, had taught him a few things, but?—

No. He was going to die.

And it was going to hurt.

And he’d never get a chance to say goodbye. To tell JoJo that…yeah, okay, ever so briefly, life hadn’t felt so dark.

Maybe not dark at all.

A curse. “Forgot my key.”

He blew out a breath as the footsteps left. Then he crept to the door, opened it, and rolled into the dark hallway.

No one standing sentry, and he nearly stopped breathing. Instead, he found his feet, headed to the security office, and slipped inside.

Turned back on the camera to the office—no harm, no foul—and maybe no one would notice the missing minutes.

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