10. Rook

10

ROOK

M y presence ignited everything. What started as just a stream of people running down the hall quickly descended into all-out chaos. Those who weren’t tearing posters and plaques from the walls were prying open paint cans and splashing every color imaginable on every surface they could reach.

I noticed pretty quickly that despite the rainbow of paint splashes, red was becoming a dominant color, and I didn’t need to spend too much time working out why.

And Kitty was right in the middle of it with her hand on the fire door, letting all of these people inside. I closed the gap between me and her within seconds and roughly grasped her arm while she stared at me, dumbfounded.

“Well?” I snapped. “What the hell is going on?”

“W–What are you doing here?” Kitty stammered, her eyes wide like saucers.

“I’m doing my damn job. You think I wouldn’t notice the second you vanished from that room? They told me the bathroom, but I checked there, and you were nowhere to be found. I was about to raise the alarm when I heard the footsteps and came to check. Not that I need to explain myself.”

I glanced pointedly from Kitty to her hand on the door, and she immediately let go as if the red door had turned molten hot and burned her. She curled her hand into a fist and pressed it against her abdomen.

“Hey, man,” drawled the tall, greasy-looking man next to her. “It ain’t what you think.”

All the confusion over Kitty snapped to anger the second I looked that man in his eyes.

“And how the fuck do you know what I was thinking?”

“She was just holding the door for me because I asked—” He didn’t get to finish his sentence because he reached for Kitty as he spoke, so I threw my entire body into him and slammed him up against the wall.

“I don’t know what shit you’re trying to pull here,” I snarled as the man wheezed underneath me, “but if you try and touch her one more time, I’ll break so many bones in your hand that you’ll be begging to be arrested.”

“Rook!” Kitty grabbed my elbow and tried to pull me back. “He’s a friend.”

“A friend?” My head whipped around to look at her, and slowly, I started to piece together what was happening here. Before I could reach a concrete conclusion, though, screams and yells exploded at the end of the hall as the gaggle of people located the meeting room.

“Shit!” I had no choice but to release the greasy bastard who took his moment of freedom and sprinted off down the hall. Snatching the radio from my waist, I tried to contact the head of the security team. “Anders, what the hell is happening down there?”

“We’re evacuating. Get out of here. Have you got eyes on—get the fuck off me, you rat—have you got eyes on Little Bunny?”

“ Little Bunny ?” Kitty almost looked offended.

“Take it up with your mother,” I snapped, then returned to the radio. “I’ve got her.”

“Good. Go!” As the call died, a sudden influx of gunshots echoed down the hall and Kitty jumped. She clutched tightly at my arm and her face paled.

“Guns?” she gasped.

My anger faded, overridden by the urge to protect Kitty. I wound one arm around her shoulders and started guiding her out the door she had been holding open.

“Warning shots,” I replied. “You can tell by how evenly spaced out they are. With that many people, they’re likely trying to scare most of them away from your parents.”

“My parents,” Kitty whispered, stumbling beside me.

I hurried her toward the car, but after her second stumble, I changed tactics and swept her up into my arms. It was faster to run with her this way, especially when the front door to the building burst open and those people scared by the gunshots came spilling out. They tripped over themselves down the steps in their desperation to get away. While it was visibly clear that many of them were scared, all I saw was a potential threat to Kitty. We were a much easier target compared to the mayor and his entire security team.

“Kitty, I need you to hold on,” I instructed. She was doing a bridal pose in my arms, but in order to run faster, I needed more freedom. As she murmured out her agreement, I slid her over my shoulder to a fireman’s carry and sprinted down the path toward the car.

Once I was close enough, I hit the keys to unlock it and then placed Kitty in the passenger seat.

“I can do it,” she said when I reached for the seatbelt. I left the clasp in her hand and slid over the car’s hood to the driver’s side. I made it into the car and started the engine just as a few stragglers from the crowd noticed we were there. As they came toward us, I slammed my foot on the accelerator and we tore away from the curb.

“Oh, my God.” Kitty was panting and struggling to get the metal clasp of the seatbelt into the lock.

Keeping one eye on the road, I reached for her hand and gently guided the clasp into place.

“Thank you,” she murmured. Kitty sat back. Her chest was heaving, and several loops of her braid were coming loose. As she stared straight ahead, she ended up pulling out the bauble at the end of her braid and quickly unwinding all the strands. It seemed to be a way to calm herself down, so I let her continue as I drove and managed my own anger.

That fucker had nearly put hands on her. And he was a friend? I knew all of Kitty’s friends, but there were only a handful. None of them were that tall guy, to my recollection. Who was that guy, and why was Kitty holding the door open for them?

I chose the scenic drive back to the manor. It was the safest choice in case any of those fuckers tried to follow, and it gave us time to process. Kitty finished with her braid, and as she tousled her hair, I realized that this was probably my first time ever seeing her with her hair down.

Since I’d met her, she always had her hair scooped into various braids. When I’d asked her about it, she’d explained that it was just easier to tie everything back because she loved her long hair. She just hated having hair strands in her face. It was windy here, so that was likely a common occurrence.

Replaying that conversation in my mind as Kitty slumped back in her seat calmed me further, and I flexed my hands slightly against the steering wheel.

“Kitty.”

“What?” she snapped slightly, then she bit her lower lip.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Did they hurt you?”

“No, of course not.” She folded one arm across her middle and toyed with a loose thread on her skirt with the other. “I lost my shoes, though.”

I glanced at her, then down her legs to where her bare feet sat on top of one another. I hadn’t even noticed. “What happened to your shoes?”

“I took them off and then dropped them when you tackled that guy. I never had a chance to pick them back up.”

“Were they expensive?”

“Yes. But I have others. Honestly, they were more pain than they were worth. A bad choice for today.”

“Why?”

I felt her eyes on me but she remained silent. As we drove, the radio on my hip crackled into life and Anders’s voice drifted through. “Rook?”

“I’m here,” I said as I pressed the button. “What’s the situation?”

“You have Little Rabbit?”

“Affirmative.”

“Good. Mayor and his wife are safe but shaken. We’re taking them to the police station, then back to the manor. The team caught a few of the assholes, so they’ll be spending Christmas in the lock-up,” Anders explained. “I want check-ins every half hour until we reconnect, understand?”

“Got it.”

The radio clicked once more and silence fell. Kitty lifted her hand and toyed with her lower lip, then she looked across at me. “Do you think anyone got hurt?”

I met her eyes for a few seconds, then turned the radio back on. “Anders?”

“Yup?”

“Any casualties?”

“A few broken noses, but that’s it. Nothing else. Why?”

“No reason. Heard the gunshots and wanted to make sure they were on our side.”

“Ah, yeah, that was us. Scared away the stupid ones, but the foolish still pressed in.”

“Alright, thanks.”

“That’s a relief,” Kitty murmured, and she pressed back into her seat.

“So,” I said, deciding this was the perfect time to get the truth. “Do you want to tell me what the hell is going on?”

“What do you mean?” Kitty asked, and I could hear the lilt in her tone. She was playing dumb, but I wasn’t going to stand for it. She was involved in this somehow.

“Well, for one, I caught you with that crowd, holding the door open for them. And another, that stranger you called a friend? Kitty, it’s my job to know all the people you’re in contact with, and he isn’t a friend.”

“Well… acquaintance is a better word,” Kitty said.

“Stop dancing around the truth and tell me straight, Kitty. What level of involvement do you have with those people?”

“What makes you think I’m involved?” Kitty snapped, and she straightened up in her seat. “Maybe I was just passing.”

I gripped the steering wheel. “How did we go from a confession of feelings to lying?” I ground out, staring hard at the passing tree line.

Kitty sucked in a breath and fell silent. From the dip in her brow, she seemed to be debating with herself and I no longer had the words for her. If she was going to lie to my face, then I couldn’t trust her.

And if I couldn’t trust her about this, then what else couldn’t I trust her about?

“Okay,” Kitty said eventually, and her voice was low. “I did let them in.”

“Why?” I exclaimed. “Do you know how dangerous that was?”

“Yes!” Kitty sighed deeply. “Look, I mean this as kindly as I can, but you’re not from around here, okay? I grew up with these people. This town is my life. I’m watching my father destroy it for money and his misguided desire to bring this place into the future. He’s destroying the livelihoods of my friends. There’s been more closed stores in the past six months than there has been in my entire twenty-six years living here.”

Kitty’s voice trembled slightly.

“I’m so vehemently against this deal and he doesn’t see it. I tried fighting with him, arguing and showing him the damage he was doing, and I’ve come up short, so when I heard there were protestors, sure, I got in touch with them.”

“You’ve been helping them?” I asked slowly, working to make sure I understood exactly what she was confessing to.

“Yes,” Kitty said softly. “I’ve given them information in the past. You remember the fire at the place on the edge of town where they house all the machinery?”

I nodded. That fire had been terrible but oddly contained. Despite being right on the edge of the forest, the flames only damaged the construction vehicles.

“Well, I helped with that, trying to delay the timeline to give people more time to organize. And so I gave them the address of the meeting because they asked for it.”

“And you let them in.”

“Yeah. That night when the alarm was tripped at the manor?”

Tension rippled down my spine. “The night you and I…?”

“Yes.” Kitty shifted in her seat to face me. “Don’t get me wrong. Everything that happened between you and me? I wanted it to happen. It was going to happen. I hadn’t been planning on confessing my feelings so soon, but I’m glad I did.”

“But…?”

“But the alarm was tripped by Anton. The guy you tackled. He was here to ask me to let the protestors in. I think they’re trying to either scare my father or scare investors into thinking this deal is too much of a hassle. And I agreed because my dad just doesn’t listen.”

I understood her to some degree. She was right, I wasn’t from around here, but I could see at a glance how much this deal was harming this town. And at Christmas, a time when people were supposed to be forgetting their worries and embracing family. Instead, they were facing unstable land, dying businesses, and a mayor who didn’t care.

“Do you see how dangerous that was?” I said.

“Yeah…” Kitty puffed out her cheeks. “But who knows, maybe it will work.”

As I mulled over her confession, one thing stuck out to me and my gut twisted. “Kitty, if you’re working with these protestors, then the threats against you and your mother, are they fake?”

“No.” Kitty sighed deeply. “They’re real.”

“What? Why?”

“Anton is my connection. To everyone else, I’m just a rich bitch. Not all of the protestors know I’m on their side.”

Shit.

It was a revelation to learn just how passionate Kitty was about saving her tow, but that didn’t change the single most alarming thing.

Those threats were real.

Which meant someone out there, whom she could accidentally come into contact with, had a very real desire to hurt her.