She stood in the main hall a moment longer and then went under the stairs into the entrance hall and up. The gallery opened around the well of the stairs, balustrade gilded under her hand, and beyond it the office corridor ran away in two directions, lamps lit for no one. The ground floor was done. The phones were on the second floor.
The corridor was panelled and wide, doors on both sides, and quiet in the way of rooms that worked hard on weekdays. She went along it and tried each handle as she came to it, looking in and moving on. Meeting rooms, a pantry, a waiting room, all empty. Hope ticked up with every door she opened and found unoccupied.
The clerks’ room was a long run of desks in two rows with telephones standing on them and cabinets down the walls. She chose the first handset and lifted it and pressed it to her ear.
A recorded voice came on asking for the dial‑out number. She did not have it. She tried zero, nine, one; she tried nine again, she tried nine‑nine, she tried nothing at all and then nine and a number at speed. Each time the same voice, patient and useless, asked for the code. Her throat went tight. She could have put the phone through the window.
She set the handset down and made herself breathe until her eyes were clear. Her phone. He had taken it off her in the car. Where would he keep it? She went back out and along into the outer office — two desks, cabinets, a single door at the back — and on into the Alpha’s office.
This was Roman’s room; you could feel it from the desk set square to the door and the way the windows looked over the water. Bookcases, shaded lamps, a low table by the windows for talk that was not across a desk. At the far wall stood one finer door. It was locked. The only locked door on the floor. His study. Her phone could be in there. A study was where a man would hang his car keys. She stood with her hand on the knob and left it. Breaking the lock would shout what she was doing, and this was a house full of staff, and he would be home by evening.
Car keys, then. The garage was the other place they could be. She went back out, up to the private floor and into her room long enough to take a coat from the closet — grey, with thick woolly sleeves that swallowed her forearms — beautiful, and nothing like anything she would have bought.
Down again, she crossed the entrance hall and went out through the main door, over the porch and down onto the front courtyard. She counted as she went — left at the foot of the stairs, six doors, thirty‑two steps to the stone, one minute and twenty seconds to the drive. Cold air cut at her face, sun thin through broken cloud, the wind brisk in the trees. The garage doors stood open. She went in.
It was cold and smelled of oil, the cars ranked on swept concrete, tools racked along one wall. She searched fast and thorough. She dropped into seats and checked the sun visors, ran a hand blind under driver’s seats, opened glove boxes, looked along the walls, over hooks, shelves, and every labelled box. Two of the cars were locked; most of them were manual. Opening a car door in the house she lived in was ordinary, but a locked study was another matter. At the end of the row a motorbike sat like a piece of jewellery — black, low, polished, chrome down both sides, one hard little seat. She looked at it a second and moved on. She only drove automatic, and that machine was probably worth more than every car her family had owned put together.
Nothing. No keys. They were somewhere else. The study, most likely. She stepped back out into the thin sun and the wind.
If only Elena had learned to hot‑wire a car. The thought nearly made her laugh. Years of telling the kids in her programme to keep well away from exactly that. And here Elena was, in a rich man’s garage, wishing for the very same skill. Not to steal anything. Well. Not really.
She turned across the gravel toward the steps and walked back toward the house, to try the Alpha’s bedroom.
Back to Kidnapped by the Alpha
Chapter 18