Cataclysm (Four Horsemen #4)(3)

“What do you want? I was asleep.”

“Is Scarlett with you?”

“No, why would she be? She’s spending the night with Francis.” His eyes darted over to me. Then his expression changed. “Why isn’t she with you?”

Drake’s expression grew grim, but he ignored Prescott and strode towards West’s door, slamming his hand down on it twice. It took less than thirty seconds for the door to be wrenched open.

“What the fuck do you want?”

West looked ready to go to battle, even if he was also only in his boxers.

“Scarlett.”

“What about her? I thought she was spending the night with Frankie.”

It was then I finally allowed myself to panic. To truly feel the dread curling in my gut.

“She’s not with you.”

“No.”

“Fuck.”

West stepped out and looked at the three of us, his irritation morphing into concern.

“What is going on?” Prescott asked, putting his hands on his hips.

Drake didn’t respond. His hands clenched and unclenched at his sides as if he was trying to control his reaction to learning Scarlett might be gone. Hell, I knew it in my fucking bones. She wasn’t here.

“We are not going to jump to conclusions. She could still be here.”

“Drake, what the fuck is going on?”

I rubbed my arm before deciding I wasn’t going to stand here and hash it out with them. We needed to find out what happened. And we needed to do it now.

“She went to see Drake on the roof an hour ago and was meant to come back to me. Drake said he sent her down to bed twenty minutes ago. So excuse me if I want to jump to fucking conclusions,” I ground out.

Then I was moving towards the stairs, heedless of the fact I wasn’t fully dressed. Nothing was more important than finding her.

“You can’t go around the building dressed like that,” Drake called after me.

“Get me some fucking clothes then,” I shouted back, taking the stairs two by two.

Scarlett would have left the roof by the stairwell. Only very few people had access to it. You had to have the right code to open any of the doors. Of course, in an emergency, they would unlock. There was another stairwell in the building, but this one was for our personal use.

I shouldered open the door, walking into it and looking around. Drake hadn’t noticed anything untoward, but maybe he hadn’t been paying attention. I walked up the first flight of stairs, trying to see if there was anything different. I don’t know why I was so sure she was gone. My body felt her absence. It was as if I was attuned to her on some cellular level, which was fucking crazy. When you grow up with coincidence like the circumstances of our birth, it made things like fate and destiny seem real. Feel fucking real. I didn’t care if it was crazy. I fucking knew.

“Francis,” came Drake’s voice.

“I’m up here.”

“We should check the security footage to see where she went.”

“Where’s Pres and West?”

“Getting dressed.”

My eyes searched the stairwell, but I couldn’t see anything out of place. Quietly cursing to myself, I searched up the next set of stairs. Drake had closed the roof door. I wasn’t going to check outside. There was no way she was still up there.

I made my way back down the stairs and found Drake with a pile of clothes in his hand.

“Put this shit on and we’ll go down to my office to pull up the security feeds.”

Taking the clothes out of his hands, I hurriedly pulled on the t-shirt and shorts before following Drake down to our office floor. We walked along to his office. The place was silent. No lights were on, just as we’d left it earlier. He sat down at his computer whilst I stood next to him.

It took him a few minutes to get into the security feeds. West and Prescott joined us as Drake brought the feeds up on the screen. He found the cameras in the stairwell and rewound it back until we could see Scarlett entering from the roof. We watched her walk down the first set of stairs. As she approached the second, a body slammed into her. They wore a hood. We couldn’t see their face and their back was to us.

“Do we have another angle?” I asked as the person put a hood over Scarlett’s head and looked like they jabbed something into her neck.

“Yes,” Drake replied, fiddling with the screen and bringing up the camera covering the next part of the stairwell.

We still couldn’t see who it was, but what they’d done to Scarlett was clearer. They’d covered her mouth with their hand and stabbed her with a needle.

“They fucking drugged her,” West ground out.

I glanced at him, finding a furious expression on his face and his fists clenched into balls at his sides. Anger was simmering in my veins too, but there was worry there too. Worry for our girl.

My eyes went back to the screen. Scarlett had stopped struggling. The person picked her up in their arms and carried her down the stairs, disappearing from view.

None of us were going to state the obvious. Someone had taken her from us. Again. Fucking stolen her. Again.

“How the fuck did they get into the stairwell? No one should be able to do that,” Prescott said, waving his hand at the screen.

“We need to check everything surrounding the stairwell from the last hour and a half. And I mean everything,” Drake said, ignoring Prescott’s question.