The Billionaire's Redemption (The Billionaire's Kiss, Book Five): (A Billionaire Alpha Romance)

by Olivia Thorne

  The only reason I can see anything around us is because there is some kind of ventilation pipe on the roof at the top of the shaft. Rays of sunlight filter through and illuminate the stone passageway.

  A rope ladder is bolted to the limestone at the top of the shaft and dangles down into the darkness.

  Behind me, JP pulls the front door of the wardrobe closed and rearranges the clothes so they appear evenly distributed. Then he closes the wooden back of the wardrobe. From this side, I can see a couple of metallic locking mechanisms click into place.

  “This is like something Grant would come up with!” I say.

  “Who do you think built it for me?” JP asks. He picks up a small flashlight lying on the limestone floor and clicks it on. “Go, go!”

  “But Grant – ”

  “He knows where it is. If he can follow, he will. Now go!”

  “Down?”

  “Yes, down!”

  I slip off my heels, stuff them in the backpack, and start my descent.

  37

  It’s hard going. The rope ladder is a bitch to deal with. It’s twisty and shifts under my feet, and feels incredibly unstable. The only light is from JP’s flashlight, which he doesn’t exactly keep shined on me, so I have to feel my way down rather than depend on my eyes.

  Not to mention that all I can think about is I’m leaving behind the man I love in the middle of a gunfight.

  We climb down the ladder for what seems like forever.

  “What is this?” I whisper.

  “When they made the building almost two hundred years ago, they required ventilation and a way to transport supplies. When they were finished, they sealed it. Grant knew of this from his architecture, and created an escape route, just in case.”

  Of course he would. Grant has been obsessed with secret passageways all his life, ever since he was a child. It was the main reason he became an architect.

  I just pray I get the chance to tell him I saw your handiwork, and it saved my life. Thank you.

  What is disconcerting is how long we keep climbing down. Every story of the building has its own little ledge, so I can see when we’ve passed another level. I count them off, but when we get to where the lobby should be, we just keep going.

  Are we headed for the basement? I wonder – but then we go another forty feet, which should put us well past any sort of basement. And there’s still more blackness beneath me.

  I feel like I’m descending into the Bottomless Pit.

  “Where are we going?” I whisper.

  “The catacombs,” JP whispers back.

  “The what?!” I exclaim.

  The only thing I know about the catacombs is what I saw in a horror movie from a couple of years ago, called As Above, So Below. In it, an archeologist leads her group of expendable co-stars into the 200 miles of tunnels below Paris, where they encounter mass graves and the gates of Hell.

  I’m pretty sure the gates of Hell part isn’t real.

  But the mass graves are, without a doubt.

  Millions and millions of bones stacked along miles and miles of underground corridors.

  Oh HELL no.

  I stop on the rope ladder. JP almost plants a foot in my face.

  “Why do you stop? Go, go!” he hisses.

  “No!” I whisper.

  “What?! Why?!”

  “Because there’s dead people everywhere down there!”

  He scoffs. “If you do not go, there will be two dead people here!”

  He has a point. I continue down the ladder until I finally reach the ground.

  I try to look around, but it’s pitch black.

  Unfortunately, all I can imagine are piles of skeletons surrounding me.

  JP jumps off the ladder and sweeps his flashlight in an arc. I can see immediately that there are only rock walls around us, with a rough-hewn doorway leading into a bigger tunnel.

  “Let us go,” he says.

  “No – JP – I can’t,” I say, freaked out. The idea of having to crawl over piles of skulls is just – I can’t. I can’t do it.

  “The bones are only in part of the catacombs,” he says. “The tunnels are mines. The limestone for all of Paris was taken from them hundreds of years ago. We are not going near the ossuaries.”

  Ossuaries.

  Such a nice word for ‘place to keep skeletons.’

  “Are you sure?” I ask, terrified.

  Maybe I shouldn’t be so frightened. But we are a hundred feet below the ground, in the pitch black, with a serial killer’s mercenaries after us, about to stumble through the remains of a million corpses.

  “I am sure, putain d’merde,” JP groans, then leads the way into the darkness with his flashlight.

  “You know where we’re going?” I ask as I follow right on his heels.

  “Of course! Mon Dieu, you think I am stupid? You think I construct an escape route, only to become lost in hundreds of kilomètres of tunnels?” He points in one direction. “That way is the Lycée Montaigne – ”

  “The what?”

  “A very famous school. In World War II, the Nazis had a secret bunker in the catacombs beneath the school. This way – this is the way we are going in order to escape.”

  “And no bones?”

  “Pas de bones.”

  “What does that mean? Bones, or no bones?” I ask, almost frantic.

  “No bones, no bones!” JP snaps as he starts walking.

  38

  We make our way through the tunnels. The entire time, I’m thinking of Grant and freaking out. I pray over and over that he made it out okay, that he’s alright.

  As we move along, I’m shocked by how much artwork there is on the tunnel walls – some of it quite artistic. Pop culture murals and reproductions of famous works of art vie with spray-painted tags and scribbles.

  “What’s with the graffiti?” I ask.

  “The drug addicts and the adolescents of a particular type like this area,” JP says.

  He’s not kidding. After awhile I begin to see shrines – to dead rock ‘n roll stars, to bad heavy metal, to all sorts of goth-looking shit – and lots and lots of broken bottles. Beer bottles, wine bottles, liquor bottles. And drug paraphernalia: crack vials, heroin needles, singed marijuana wrapping paper. Forget the millions of bones; there’s nine billion cigarette butts down here.

  “That voice in the apartment – that was the man we are trying to catch?” JP asks.

  “Epicurus? Yes, that was him.”

  JP mutters something in French, then follows it with, “Fucking arrogant bastard… insult ma système de sécurité…”

  “You’re not a little more upset that he sent a dozen guys with guns to kill you?” I ask, somewhat amused.

  “Ah, oui, that also.” JP shakes his head. “I thought you exaggerated, but he is a dick. Now I want to kill the son of a bitch.”

  I still think he’s more motivated by his professionally wounded pride than anything else.

  As we walk, JP tells me stories of the tunnels. How the French Resistance used them during World War II. How there is a chamber called La Plage – ‘the beach’ – with a graffiti version of the famous Japanese painting of a tidal wave. The statue of a man who appears to be walking through the wall, called ‘Le Passe-Muraille.’ And how there are dozens of other chambers, like “The Library,” where people leave behind books for fellow travelers to read.

  After about thirty minutes, we reach cement stairs that lead up to daylight.

  “Where does that go?” I ask.

  “Up to the street.”

  “Near the restaurant we’re going to?”

  “Putain, no. We are far from Montmartre.”

  “Well how are we going to get there?”

  “A taxi? The metro? However you want!” JP says, his voice tinged with irritation.

  “I can’t go out there dressed like this. Neither can you.”

  He stares at me. He obviously thinks I’m insane.

  I explain. “Now tha
t Epicurus knows where you live – and if he realizes we escaped – he’s going to be monitoring every ATM and security camera for miles around your apartment building. He’ll see us for sure.”

  “There are no cameras in my apartment,” JP says. “He does not know how we are dressed.”

  “No, but he knows our faces – I’m sure that was one of the first things he looked up about you – and he’s running facial recognition software for sure. We can’t go out there like this, with our faces exposed. We’ll get recognized at the first ATM camera we pass by.”

  “Ah, quel bordel…”

  JP thinks for a moment, then crooks his finger. “Follow me.”

  He leads us back into the tunnels, winding through the darkness, until we reach a large room. In it, several French kids are sitting around smoking reefers in the glow of a dozen votive candles. They’re either old teenagers or young twenty-somethings – it’s hard to tell in the gloom. Two boys, two girls. Very emo/goth.

  JP says something to the tallest guy, who answers in a totally stoned voice. Then JP goes to my backpack and unzips it.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “I said I like their… how do you say it?”

  He makes a pantomime of flipping something over his head.

  A couple of the kids are wearing jackets with hoods.

  “Hoodies?” I ask.

  “Hoodies, yes. And I offer to buy them.”

  “I need something more than a hoodie,” I say. “A hoodie’s not going to go well with a skirt and heels.”

  “Yes, yes,” he says impatiently. “I offer to buy the small one’s clothes as well.”

  He points to the girl who is closest to my size. She’s wearing jeans and a punk rock t-shirt.

  “What, she’s going to go naked?” I say, confused.

  “No. You will switch clothes.”

  Oh great.

  And potentially gross.

  I’m going to be wearing some stranger’s clothes.

  JP holds up five hundred dollars. The kids all stare in wonder… and then my girl says something.

  “Ah, putain d’merde…” JP mutters, then pulls out another couple of hundreds.

  Ten minutes later, we’re walking through the streets of Paris with a couple of hoodies cinched tight around our faces. I’m also wearing an ill-fitting pair of jeans and a punk rock t-shirt. Both of us reek of pot.

  “Ugh,” I moan. I have discovered since my arrival in Paris that the French are not particularly well-known for wearing deodorant. My girl was no exception. B.O. plus pot smoke equals crazy disgusting. I just know the jeans haven’t been washed for months, either…

  “What is the matter?” JP asks from under his hood.

  “Nothing,” I say, just to avoid complaining. I was the one worried about Epicurus spotting us, after all.

  Stink and survive, or smell good and die?

  I’ll take the stink. As long as we survive.

  39

  We take a taxi and get to the restaurant in Montmartre 30 minutes later. JP has euros to pay with, so that’s no problem.

  We go to the rear entrance in the alley. After knocking on the back door, a fat man with a waxed mustache hustles us inside. He and JP speak rapidly in French, and then JP introduces us. “Marcel, Eve. Eve, Marcel.”

  I shake Marcel’s hand, after which he takes us upstairs to a small room with wooden tables. It looks like an overflow section of the restaurant, but it’s deserted.

  “You are safe here,” Marcel says in English.

  “Thank you,” I say gratefully.

  JP pulls off his hoodie and says something in French. Marcel laughs.

  “What did you say?” I ask.

  “I told him to burn it for me,” JP answers.

  I glare at him. “I wish I were that lucky.”

  Marcel asks, “Would you like a change of clothes?”

  “Oh my God, yes, PLEASE.”

  He smiles. “I will get one of my workers to take care of that for you.”

  “Do you have internet access here, by any chance?”

  “Of course.” He writes out the wifi network and password on a piece of paper and then leaves.

  As soon as I open the laptop, I see the window with Mailin’s message: I know last night was you. Contact me the old school way. We need to talk. M.

  Oh shit.

  I wonder if somehow, some way, he’s connected to the raid on the apartment. I would bet my life that Mailin would never knowingly be messed up with somebody as evil as Epicurus – but ‘knowingly’ is the key word. Epicurus might have found Mailin’s message and somehow gotten to me from there. It seems impossible; I can’t think of a plausible link from ‘finds message’ to ‘finds me and Grant.’ But then again, I would have said a lot of things in the last five days were impossible before they happened.

  For right now, though, I can’t worry about it. All I want is to find something, anything, that tells me Grant’s alive.

  But first I have to take precautions, or I won’t be alive for long. Not if Epicurus can find me. So I race through setting up the proxies that will keep me from being tracked online – my own electronic ‘Cloak of Invisibility.’

  JP watches me. “You are trying to find them?”

  “Him,” I say. “I’m trying to find him.”

  “Dominique is not so bad, you know,” he says gently.

  I glare at him, then return to the laptop.

  JP is quiet for a moment, then apparently grows uncomfortable with the silence. “Perhaps you were correct with the suggestion about the GPS. If we each had the GPS, then we would know where they are.”

  “Now you’re on my side,” I mutter.

  “It did not seem safe at the time you suggested it,” he says defensively.

  “Are we safe here? Are you sure you can trust this Marcel guy?”

  “Oui.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Marcel is one of the indispensable members of the underground. How do you say? ‘Honor among thieves’?”

  “The saying is, ‘There IS no honor among thieves.’”

  “Well… they are wrong, then. I only work with people I trust. Marcel is one of those people.”

  “You bought guns from that one guy,” I point out. “You didn’t sound like you trusted him.”

  “Grant insisted upon it – and Dieu merci he did, or he and Dominique would not have even a chance.”

  I don’t want to think about what happened back in the apartment, so I return to my computer.

  Marcel walks in and says something in French. JP looks stricken.

  “What was that?” I ask, alarmed.

  “He says the gun battle is on the television,” JP answers.

  NO – God, please, let him be okay –

  My ‘invisibility cloak’ is about as good as it’s going to get. I do a quick search for local news channels, and find one that streams.

  As soon as I open the video, I see footage of JP’s apartment building, shot on cell phones.

  “I found it, I found it,” I announce with a combination of excitement and dread. JP circles around behind me to watch.

  In the footage, gunfire blasts out the windows – and then two figures jump through the shattered glass.

  It’s Grant and Dominique.

  I watch, mouth gaping, as they go full-on Spider-man. I’m talking jumping from balcony to balcony, catching ledges by their fingertips, then leaping from building to building. It’s absolutely amazing.

  So that’s fuckin’ parkour.

  My heart leaps as I watch Grant get away, apparently unharmed.

  “Not bad,” JP says in the biggest understatement of the year.

  The footage cuts to a female reporter chattering breathlessly in French.

  “What’s she saying?” I ask JP.

  “She’s saying ‘that was a complete fucking shitshow,’” Grant announces from the stairwell behind me.

  40

  I turn around in shock, then
run to him crying and squealing at the same time. I jump into his arms, and he spins around with me as we kiss.

  Dominique watches us from the stairs, silently seething.

  Grant puts me back on the floor, but I won’t let go – I’m too excited! Plus, I’m too afraid to let him go. He was torn away from me so quickly, I’m terrified it might happen again.

  “You’re alive!” I say, tears brimming in my eyes.

  Grant grins. “Of course – did you expect any less?”

  “Did they follow you?” JP asks, paranoid.

  “Nice to see you, too, JP.”

  “Well?!”

  “NO,” Grant says, then looks at me in bewilderment. “Um… interesting fashion choice…”

  “Huh? Oh, this – we had to buy it off a stoner chick in the catacombs…”

  “What?!”

  We all sit down at the table and regale each other with tales of our escapes. I thank Grant for his secret passageway in JP’s bedroom, and he laughs. Marcel brings bottles of red wine and platters of food, and what started off as an impending funeral turns into a celebration of life.

  Not to mention Marcel gets me a fresh, store-bought change of clothes, for which I am eternally grateful.

  We watch some more of the news broadcast for any information on Epicurus’s men. It seems the mercenaries disappeared as quickly as they showed up, and the cops have no leads on their whereabouts.

  That’s when JP says, “Perhaps we should reconsider the GPS.”

  Grant frowns. “What GPS?”

  “The little pills glued to the paintings? That Eve suggested?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a good idea,” I insist – and I’m happy JP brought it up instead of me.

  “What possible good could come of it?” Grant asks.

  “We would have known you were alive and not dead when you were running from Epicurus’s men,” I point out.

  “Which you found out anyway ten minutes after you got here.” I’m about to protest when Grant cuts me off. “I asked Marcel how long you’d been here before I walked in, so don’t even try.”

  “Well, what if you’d been gone for hours? Or days?”