“I’ve already found my happiness,” I murmur. “We can’t let him take it away when I just fucking got her.”
“So what’s the plan?” Brian prompts.
I shake my head. “We haven’t gotten there yet.”
“Speak for yourself, bro,” Seth says, his face now buried in his laptop he pulled from his bag he grabbed on the way out the door, and I’ve never been more grateful for his prodigal brain in all the years I’ve known him. “The lovely Heather here is going to enter through the gate and park in the employee lot, pointing out which door of this monstrosity is the one closest to the girls’ dressing room. She’s gonna go in like she normally would, and if anyone stops to question her, she’ll make up an excuse about how she was just running late but was there to work. After making her way to the dressing room, she’s going to let us in through the door she pointed out, and first and foremost, we’re going to find Astrid.”
I nod, agreeing with that plan. “Hopefully that’ll be the end of it. We’ll get in, get my woman, and get out. Done. And she’ll never fucking step foot in there again.”
“But that doesn’t take care of Ra—”
My head whips around to face Brian, and I indicate with my eyes toward Heather, reminding him she doesn’t know we’re more than just a security team. His jaw snaps shut and his nostrils flare, and I know he wants to talk about what will happen with Randy, but we need to keep quiet about that until she’s out of the car.
Seth fills the silence. “If she’s not in the dance club, we’ll have to search for her. The place is fucking gargantuan, so in order to find her fast, Heather, we’ll need your help showing us the most likely places she’ll be.”
Heather speaks for the first time since we got in the car. “If she’s not in the dance club or in the dressing room, the only other place she would be is upstairs in Randy’s private room. It’s down the left corridor, the very last room on the right. But I don’t know how y’all would be able to sneak up there. Even us girls can’t go up there without being escorted, and the stairs are guarded like freaking Ft. Knox.”
Brian cracks the knuckles of his giant hands, all our eyes turning to him to see the wicked smirk he has on his face. Getting into places he’s not welcome is Brian’s forte, which is highly entertaining to watch on a normal day that doesn’t involve the safety of my woman, because he’s so fucking big. Bigger than even me. At 6’8”, the man is a goddamn giant, but he’s as stealthy as a cat and can take down a roomful of enemies before they even realize he’s among them. He’s not just the muscle of the team; he’s equal parts brain and brawn. “You leave that to us,” he assures her.
“What about security at this place?” Corbin asks. “We going to have to worry about surveillance while we’re going through the gate and back door?”
Seth’s fingers fly over his laptop’s keyboard. “Luckily, Brian’s Spidey senses went off on this place a few weeks ago. We had no idea it was a business. It just rubbed him weird that these people showed up night after night at what looked like someone’s residence. So we’ve been tapped into their surveillance system for a while now. At the moment, I’m recording the empty hallway between the dressing room and the door we’ll be coming through, and then I’ll replace the feed on the security’s monitor in a loop, so they won’t see it when Heather lets us in.”
Heather visibly relaxes, her body sinking into her seat and her knuckles not so tight around the steering wheel. “Thank God,” she breathes.
“I need a map of the place,” I hear Brian tell Seth quietly, and he must pull one up on his laptop, because suddenly both Brian and Corbin’s heads pull toward Seth’s in the middle of the back seat, and I watch the three of them mumble amongst themselves as they point to different locations on the screen. If I weren’t an atomic bomb of anxiety waiting to explode at the moment, I’d find the image of them funny, but instead, I’m just grateful as fuck I have these men on my team.
Soon, we’re pulling up to the gate of A Secret, and Heather rolls down her window and punches in the code. The gates open, and she pushes the button for her window to rise back into place as she follows the driveway that takes us to the parking lot around the back of the mansion. She parks on the far end of one row and points out a door between two tall trees. “That’s the door. It’s always locked from the outside.”