Ruby Fever (Hidden Legacy, #6)(13)

My first priority was to get medical treatment for Linus. My second was to hide his condition. And if Linus was conscious, he would tell me to reverse the order of the two.

Leon jogged down the stairs, saw Linus, and stopped. “Okay. That’s a hell of a thing.”

“Anything?” Alessandro asked him.

My cousin shook his head. “No. No signs of teleportation either. Looks like whoever it was killed Pete and walked out the door. I’d like to know how they managed that with the siege protocol active.”

The lockdown would’ve kicked in the moment Linus triggered it from the inside of the vault. He wouldn’t have risked taking Styxine unless he was in immediate danger, so he got into the vault, hit the siege panic button, and injected himself as soon as he could. Even if whoever killed Pete had immediately turned around and sprinted out of the house, the turrets would’ve gotten them before they ever made it to the gate.

“Also, I found this.”

Leon held up a Ziploc bag with a black DA Ambassador, a state-of-the-art .40 pistol from Duncan Arms. Pete’s gun.

“Where did you find it?” Alessandro asked.

“Behind a column by the front door.”

There was no reason for Pete’s gun to be there. He always had it. It rested on his nightstand when he slept. Someone must’ve killed Pete, picked it up, and then hid it behind the column before going out the door.

When the siege protocol was up, Linus’s turrets would ignore people with special clearance, but they would still fire on them if they carried a firearm. The attacker knew exactly how the system worked.

“The intruder had to have special clearance,” I said. “Like Alessandro and I.”

“Linus was betrayed,” Alessandro said.

“Who do you think?” Leon asked.

I shook my head. “We can figure this out later. Right now, we have to get him out of here.”

Linus couldn’t die. He just couldn’t.

“The house is a fortress,” Leon said. “Instead of risking transporting him, let’s just get a medic here.”

“I had to end the siege protocol to get into the vault and to let you in. Once the system is disabled, only Linus can reactivate it.”

Leon stared at me. “Define ‘disabled.’”

“Right now no door in this house can be locked. Doors that are already locked will remain locked, unless someone manually unlocks them, but the front door, the gate, the vault, everything that we opened, can’t be relocked. The turrets are off-line. The surveillance cameras are off-line. We are deaf, blind, and defenseless.”

Linus had no human guards aside from Pete and Hera, who was currently out of the country. They were his last line of defense, one he almost never used. He relied on his automated defenses instead, and right now all of them had about as much firepower as lawn gnomes. We were sitting ducks.

“Why the hell would he do that?” Leon asked.

“Because if he isn’t here to reactivate the system, he is either dead or incapacitated,” I told him. “He anticipated other people entering the house, like Warden personnel, paramedics, and law enforcement. Reactivating the system would be too dangerous. It could end in a bloodbath.”

Alessandro straightened. “Leon, take the lead. I’m going to carry Linus to the garage, load him into one of those suburban tanks he likes, and get him to the Compound.”

“Yes, let’s do that, before some random passerby strolls in to loot the mansion,” Leon said.

Above us something thumped.

A pair of semiautomatic handguns leaped into Leon’s fingers almost on their own. He moved to the right, behind the workbench. Alessandro scooped Linus into his arms. A USB drive clattered to the floor. I grabbed it. It was slick with blood. I put it in my pocket and wiped my bloody fingers on my T-shirt.

Alessandro carried Linus to the left, outside of line of sight from the doorway, gently lowered him to the floor, and flattened himself against the wall by the vault door. I crouched behind the workbench. From here I could see the stairs, but a person coming down the stairs wouldn’t notice me right away.

The sound of unhurried steps echoed through the empty house. The notes of a familiar melody floated down. A man was coming down the stairs, humming the “Triumphal March” from Aida in a well-trained baritone.

Leon turned to me and mouthed, “What the fuck?”

The humming grew louder. A pair of long legs came into view, followed by their owner. He was in his late forties, with wavy dark hair sprinkled with grey and cut in a politician style, neat and unoffensive. His features were handsome in that generic adult-male-in-good-health way. He wore a grey summer suit.

He landed on the last step and stopped, looking into the vault.

“About time you got here, Ms. Baylor.”

His voice sounded perfectly generic. No regional accent, no hint of origin. He would have been at home on any major news program.

“I was beginning to think I would have to carry the old man out myself. Needs must, I suppose.”

Alessandro frowned.

The man took a step toward the vault.

“That’s far enough,” Alessandro said.

The man’s eyes widened. “Sasha! You’re here too. Fantastic. This will simplify things.”

The man stopped and stared straight at us. Flames licked his chin. His face caught fire.