Drake Sisters 03 - Oceans of Fire

greedy as they came. She had no compunction whatsoever about proving him an amateur in the area of crime.
    The angle to reach the roof was tricky, and there was only one small target she could hook, but she was sure of her aim and took the shot without hesitation. She controlled the sound, keeping the noise of metal grinding on the roof from reverberating through the night. Crouching, she waited for a reaction, hoping the darkness would cover the line pulled taut from balcony to roof. Saunders had some very good guards, but he also had a few lazy ones. She couldn’t imagine he’d have many intruders and the guards were often bored. Saunders had a reputation of being as mean as a cottonmouth. He’d probably put a few dead bodies in the swamp over the years. She didn’t plan on being one of them.
    The guards wouldn’t hear the hook, but she had to believe there was a possibility that the man hunting her might if Whitney had sent him. The smart thing for him to do would be to kill her while she was breaking into Saunders’s tower, but it would be nearly impossible for him to collect her body and Whitney would definitely want it. Flame weighed the odds. More than likely, her stalker was sure of himself, certain he could take her when she came out, but much more likely, he was sent to bring her back. Whitney wouldn’t want his multimillion-dollar experiment axed if he could still find a way to use her.
    She shrugged, shouldered her pack, and hooked her legs around the line, sliding hand over hand out over the grounds toward the tower. She couldn’t help the little twinge of fear rushing through her at the Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
    expectation of a bullet, but she held on to the fact that she was worth more alive than dead to Whitney.
    Whitney was a man who liked answers and his adopted daughter was very much like him. Flame had hacked into Lily’s computer a couple of times and had recognized the quick mind and the same driving love of science. Traitor . That was how Flame saw Lily. There had been so much favoritism on Whitney’s part. Lily had done what he wanted, become his willing puppet, his accomplice, his doting daughter so he could continue his vile experiments.
    What did Lily think happened to the rest of them? Did she believe the bullshit stories in the computers?
    How could she, when Dahlia had been locked in a sanitarium and a hit squad had destroyed everything she held dear? Lily would pay for that too. Flame would find a way. The Whitney money was an easy and obvious target, but Lily had too much, and hitting a few accounts here or there wasn’t going to make much difference.
    As Flame made her hand-over-hand climb to the roof, she focused on finding the man stalking her. She was positive it was the same man she’d noticed at the gas station. He was putting gas in his Jeep, but he was back in the shadows, almost impossible to see, and something about him had had her warning radar shrieking. Several times on the way to Saunders’s estate, she’d had the eerie feeling she was being followed, but there was no sound and no headlights. He had to be one of Whitney’s experiments. She knew she wasn’t wrong.
    She gained the roof without incident and stored her supplies in the pack just to the left of the skylight.
    Now the biggest danger was that the hunter might follow her to the tower roof as well. She rigged the line to slip should he attempt to use it. He had to think she was going down the same way she’d gone up.
    Flame made her way to the skylight, gliding with care so her footsteps couldn’t possibly betray her presence to anyone inside.
    Saunders was hunched over his desk, glass of whiskey in hand. He looked pleased with himself. “Slimy little weasel sitting in your ivory tower thinking no one can get to you, but I’m going to take you down.”
    Flame sank down beside the skylight and lifted her face to the stars. She had to concentrate on the small things, the things she could do, the people to whom she could bring a little justice, not her past.
    She couldn’t think about the rigorous training, the long days and nights of feeling like an animal locked in a cage deprived of all dignity, of company, of anything that mattered. In the end, she had triumphed because she learned to be what they wanted her to be and she was far better than any of them had ever discovered. She’d escaped. She smiled, thinking of the bogus trust fund in