Page 1 of Game of Love
Chapter 1
Xander
Just like a shadow,I slipped in the crevice between the narrow path that snaked across the hallway without anyone noticing.
I scanned my perimeters doing the standard sweep of my surroundings. There were a lot of passageways in Pablo’ssecret hideaway.
Secret and unkempt is what I would call it for the dust and dirt on the walls of the alcoves and passageways, old pipes and dangling wires.
Water dripped down the wall across from me and dampness hung in the air.
Still, there I loomed in the background, doing what I did best. Staying hidden…
Could I call it that?
I thought even I could give myself a little more credit than simply calling it ‘staying hidden’.
But that was my life in general.
It was more a case of being off-grid.
In reality I was supposed to be dead. Dead for the last five years now.
I preferred calling it off grid. It was less morbid to think of it that way.
So mostly I was off-grid to the world.
This little heist though… not so much. Maybe just the first part.
Getting into the facility that Pablo Fernandez had set up here would have given anyone a solid run for their money. Me not so much.
Getting what I came in for was a whole other story, along with getting outwithwhat I’d come for.
That was where I had to give the man credit and fair dues.
I slipped in like a shadow, located the object of my mission, and took about five minutes to deduce that I wouldn’t be able to simply take the object I’d been hired to steal—a.k.a a computer chip—without going unseen.
There were too many guards milling around. Too many I hadn’t seen prior to entry for the simple reason that good old Pablo had a device that screwed with anything that attempted to hack his internal CCTV.
Screwed with in the sense that if you were a small time hacker you wouldn’t have been able to do shit. However, guys like me and mine could still get in but we could not see everything we wanted to see.
The important thing for me was, I saw what I needed to see in terms of the object. Everything else was just details I’d have to work around.
Wesley, who was my eyes and my partner in crime, cautioned me on this little problem. He said I might run into a few unsavory people. I just didn’t know at the time of cautioning that afewmeant a lot.
No problem.
It was just my personal preference to have some element of shock when I went on these little excursions.
All thieves had something. Something they wanted to be renowned for. Some left a calling card, others left some kind of mark.
I liked to get my shit done before anyone realized what had actually happened and leave no trace.
In and out, like it never occurred.
Like a flicker of a shadow.
That was what they used to call me when I was an agent. Really though… I was a thief.
