Free Stepbrother Protects (His Twisted Game Book Six) by Chloe Hawk Page B

instantly slid
up my spine.   Something was
wrong.   Cole would never leave all
the lights off – there was no way.
    We’d had an unspoken agreement ever since
we were younger – never leave the house completely dark.   If you left a room, if you were the
last one up at night, you always made sure to leave a light on.   That way, if Gordon were to decide he
wanted to start something, at least there wouldn’t be any surprises. It didn’t
always work of course –Gordon would turn the lights off if he found we’d
left them on, screaming and yelling about the electricity bill.
    But we tried.
    Which is why I knew something was wrong
when Cole’s apartment was completely dark.   A heavy stillness had settled over the space, and I got that
same premonition I would get sometimes, right before something was about to go
wrong.   I’d honed my instincts over
the years, and I was usually right.
    I flipped switch in the hallway, and the
living room flooded with light.
    I gasped, my hand flying to my mouth.
    Cole’s apartment had been ransacked.
    The couches had been stripped of their
cushions, the end tables upended, the television smashed, an angry spider web of glass bleeding out from the middle of the screen.   The kitchen drawers had been emptied,
and pots and pans were haphazardly strewn about on the shiny hardwood
floors.   The espresso machine had
been unplugged and tipped over on the counter -- dark black liquid dripped from
its tiny steamer.
    My heart began beating fast, the blood
pumping rhythmically through my body.   I listened carefully, trying to figure out if
whoever had done this was still here.   But there were no sounds – in fact, a creepy kind of stillness had
settled over the whole place, letting me know I was alone.
    I knew I should leave.   I knew I should walk downstairs and
call the police, tell Graham what had happened, have him pull the security
tapes.   But I didn’t know whether
or not Cole would want me to do that.
    I wasn’t sure if he’d want the police
involved.
    I remembered what he’d said – that
the FBI was after him, that he didn’t know if Jeffrey had turned on him.   I remembered the way the police had
questioned me when they came to see me at Cole’s office, how they acted like
Cole was some kind of criminal.   I
thought about the man who’d followed me, the one who’d tried to gain access to
Cole’s apartment.   He didn’t seem
like the kind of man you’d want to call the police on.
    No.
    I couldn’t call the police.
    At least not without talking to Cole
first.
    I took a deep breath and began walking
gingerly through the carnage.
    I was reasonably sure that whoever had
been here was gone.  
    But even so, I picked a butcher knife up
off the kitchen floor and went through the apartment room by room, making sure
I was really alone.   The whole
place had been trashed.   Cole’s bed
had been stripped and the mattress had been slit with a knife.   Most of the clothes in Cole’s closet
had been ripped into shreds.   My
clothes had been ripped as well, the expensive fabrics hanging in tatters from
the hangers in my closet.
    But it was Cole’s office that had gotten
it the worst.
    His file cabinets had been completely
emptied, folders and pages scattered and thrown around the room until it looked
like there had been a paper blizzard.
    It was the last room I checked, and when
I was done, I fell to my knees.   Now that I knew no one was here, that I wasn’t in any immediate danger,
the adrenaline that had kicked in and kept me moving had started to
dissipate.   I curled up on the
floor, putting my head in my hands as grief and terror flowed through me.
    I wasn’t a stranger to robberies or
stealing – growing up where I had, you always had to be on alert for
someone trying to take what was yours.   Or, conversely, you could find yourself on the other side of it, when
your friends decided they wanted to stop in and rob a house on their way out to
the club,