Bitter Bite (Elemental Assassin #14)(86)

Bria and I quietly went down the stairs to the second floor. Once we were on

the landing there, I leaned over the side of the railing and peered down. Sure

enough, a guard was stationed in the stairwell on the first floor, leaning

against the open door, thumbing through screens on his phone, totally bored by

his assignment.

I motioned to Bria to draw back, then made two Ice picks and unlocked the door

on the second-floor landing. I winced at the snick of the door opening, and

Bria and I scooted through to the other side and eased the door shut behind

us. We flattened ourselves against the wall, out of sight of the strip of

glass in the door, and waited, but the guard didn’t come to investigate.

“We’re stuck,” Bria said. “We can’t get past that guard without letting

everyone in the lobby know that we’re here.”

“Yes, we can. We just have to be a little more creative. This way.”

The second floor was mostly offices and cubicles, reserved for some of the

investment bankers and their assistants or rented out to real-estate and other

companies that had extensive dealings with the bank. I stopped a moment,

orienting myself, then went over to the opposite side of the building, pushed

through a wooden door, and stopped. Bria slipped in behind me and looked

around at the urinals, stalls, and sinks.

“Um, Gin?”

“Yeah?”

“What are we doing in the men’s bathroom?”

“Making our own elevator shaft.”

Bria gave me a strange look, but she followed me to the back corner of the

bathroom.

“I spent a lot of time studying the bank’s blueprints when I was trying to

figure out how to mock-kill Finn here. All the bathrooms are located on this

side of the building, stacked right on top of each other, which means that we

’re directly above the men’s bathroom on the first floor,” I said.

“Someplace that Santos isn’t likely to be, since he’s down in the basement

vault. So we get through the floor here, and we can get down to the lobby.

After that, we’ll see what’s what and go from there.”

Bria nodded. “Let’s do it.”

We both knelt down. The floor was the same beautiful gray marble as in the

lobby, but it wasn’t nearly as thick and had been cordoned off into three-

foot squares fitted together. I reached for my Stone magic, and a cold silver

light flared to life on the tip of my right index finger, burning as brightly

and steadily as a blow torch. I leaned forward and traced my finger along the

marble seams, using my power to crack the stone.

Bria came along right behind me, her finger glowing an intense blue with her

own magic, driving her elemental Ice down into the cracks that I’d created

and widening them.

We repeated the process over and over, cracking the marble with our combined

magic until we were able to hook our fingers down into the broken stone and

start lifting out chunks of the floor. We worked quickly and quietly, careful

not to crack too much of the marble at once. The last thing we needed was for

a piece of stone to fall down, hit the floor below, and make enough noise for

someone to come check on things.

It took us the better part of fifteen minutes to make a jagged hole that was

big enough for us to drop through. I went first, with Bria behind me. We

landed on the bathroom floor below, raised our weapons, and waited, wondering

if anyone had heard or sensed our magical jackhammers, but a minute passed,

then two, then three, and no one came to investigate.

I had taken a step toward the bathroom door when a smear of red on the floor

caught my eye. I stopped and pointed to the stain, which was in front of the

largest stall door. Bria nodded and raised her gun. I tiptoed forward and

opened the stall door.

A giant was inside, his knees tucked up under his body and his arm flung over

the toilet as though he were about to puke. The pose was so natural that for a

second, I thought he was actually alive. Then I noticed his empty, sightless

gaze and the black hole in his forehead still oozing blood. Given his gray

uniform, he must have been one of the real guards, killed when Santos and his

crew had taken over the bank.

Bria tiptoed forward and eased open the next stall door, then the one after

that and the one after that. Bodies filled all of them, stacked on top of one

another like rolls of toilet paper. There were six in total, all dressed in

guard uniforms.

Santos must have eliminated the real guards first thing, so none of them would

make any trouble or trip a silent alarm while the heist went down. Then he’d

replaced them with his own crew, dressed in the uniforms that Dimitri had

gotten them, so the folks from the armored-truck company wouldn’t know the

difference as they handed over all the exhibit jewelry. Smart. And brutal.

There was nothing I could do for the dead guards. I just hoped that Finn hadn

’t met the same fate, but I shoved the cold worry down into the bottom of my