Page 114 of When He Plays

“What weaknesses?” Sebastian gritted out.

“How about the very obvious weakness named Harper Channing?”

No response. No more grunts.

They had almost reached the lobby. “By the way, I was just attacked in my room by my VP of Security, Evans McCall. The bastard told me that he was following orders given by Ares.”

“Ares.”

“That’s what I said. Evans stared me straight in the eyes when he made that confession.”

“Ares took Harper? He’s been hurting her?”

The elevator dinged. The doors opened. Logan and Sebastian both burst out and into the lobby. Though they had each tucked their guns out of sight. The better to not scare any tourists. But those damn tourists shouldn’t be up at four a.m.

This is Vegas. Plenty of people are up at four a.m.

Logan and Sebastian rushed forward and…

“Logan!” A bellow.

Logan stopped dead in his tracks.

Ares strode toward him. Ares, right there, in his hotel. When Jamar had been attacked. When Evans had been sent to kill Logan.

Right. There.

“Logan, we have to talk, now.” Ares reached into his pocket and pulled out a pair of brass knuckles. Logan’s brass knuckles. The ones that had been taken from him when he’d gone to the damn party at Ares’s place.

“I’ve got the knife, too,” Ares revealed as he kept advancing. “But we have to talk⁠—”

Sebastian didn’t wait to talk. He launched his body at the Greek, and they both slammed into the hard tile of the lobby’s floor.

Chapter Twenty-Three

There was someone in the middle of the cage.

Bright lights shone down onto the cage, but only onto the cage. The rest of the theater was pitch black.

Charlotte crept forward slowly, moving toward that light, aware of the silence in the old theater. It wasn’t like the time she’d been there before, when Logan had been so quick to confront Morris and violence had broken out in a flash.

No, this time, there was stillness. A suffocating stillness that enclosed the entire place. It was as if the whole theater waited. Held its breath.

Waited and watched and…

The figure in the cage moved. A slight shift of her body.

Her body.

A woman was locked in that massive cage. The cage that had been used for fighting. In the theater that had once housed so many people who screamed and cheered as they bet high stakes on the players in the cage.

But fighters weren’t circling each other in that cage. A victim waited inside. A woman hunched in a chair, with her hands bound behind her back, with her ankles tied to the legs of the chair. Her head sagged forward, and her long hair hid her face, but Charlotte knew she was staring at Harper Channing.

A still alive Harper.

There had been no sign of anyone else. Not outside the building. The doors in the front had been locked. So had the rear doors. But Charlotte had broken the rear lock and hurried inside. She’d tiptoed through the corridors, waiting for an attack.

Only none had come.