Free Prey (Copper Mesa Eagles Book 2) by Roxie Noir, Amelie Hunt Page B

anyway, then marched back to the door that separated the offices and the labs, holding her badge to the pad that unlocked the door.
    The light flashed red.
    Katrina blinked, then frowned. She held her badge up again, but after a moment, the light blinked a forbidding crimson.
    I got in here twenty minutes ago ,she thought. Something is really, really not right .
    Katrina stared at the closed, forbidding door for a moment.
    Then she turned and marched for the offices again. First she went to her own, grabbed her keys and wallet, and shoved them inside her bra. She didn’t know why, but she was afraid she’d need them.  
    Next she went down the row of offices and tried every doorknob. The executives were supposed to keep their doors locked, but they were also supposed to keep their passwords secret and she knew that half of them had them written on post-its stuck to their monitors.
    It wasn’t long before she got lucky and Chuck Engleman’s door opened for her. She made quick work of his desk drawers, finding exactly what she needed: an extra badge. The execs could never be bothered to keep track of theirs.
    As a last-second thought, she also took a lighter and jammed it in her bra, next to her car keys. It wasn’t comfortable, but it would have to do.
    Pulse racing, she went back to the door. Chuck’s spare badge opened it, and Katrina crept in, but the hallway was empty. She took a deep breath and walked to the last door on the right, hoping that Chuck had stairwell access as well.
    He did. She stepped in and carefully peered down the two flights of stairs.
    No movements.
    Katrina walked on, holding the cold metal handrail for dear life. At the bottom was another door. It had no window, and she pushed it out just enough to check that this hallway was also deserted.
    She had only been downstairs, in the cold storage section, once or twice before. It was dark, gloomy, and — unsurprisingly — cold, two stories underground, the hallway made of bare concrete with fluorescent tubes lighting the way above.
    Katrina stood very, very still. She listened. There was the constant hum of the server room, somewhere in this hallway. She listened harder.
    Over the hum, she thought she could barely make out voices. The concrete hallway ended in a T-intersection, and sounds echoed around so much that it was hard to tell where they came from.
    The voices raised. Now they sounded like muffled shouting.  
    Katrina’s feet moved on their own, walking down the hall to the intersection at the end, then to the left, following the voices. She was certain that if she was caught she might be worse than fired, but she could only think of Zach. He could easily take on any of those three men in a fight, but she doubted they’d fight fair.
    There was a door in the wall. By some small miracle, it had a window in it, and Katrina stood on her toes and looked in.
    It was Zach. He was wearing some sort of hospital gown and he was strapped to a table. Pete and the other two men stood around him, Pete making wild hand gestures. Sweat ran down his face, but on the table, Zach seemed mildly concerned at best, blinking and staring at the ceiling.
    I was right , Katrina thought. Her blood ran cold. They drugged him.
    She turned away from the door and tried frantically to think . Somehow, she needed to get the three men out of there, and then she needed to rescue Zach.
    A plan formed in her mind.  
    It’s not a very good plan , she thought. But it’s something .
    Back down the concrete hall, she pulled open the door to the server room, its hum filling the air. As she walked she pulled her wallet out of her bra and opened the money pouch.
    It was mostly full of receipts. For the first time ever, she was glad that she’d kept them.
    Katrina took the receipts, crumpled them tightly together, and jammed them into a tiny crack between two big, humming servers, among as many cords as possible.
    Then she got out the lighter and set them on fire. She held the