Chapter 257 Escape!

Chapter 257 Escape!
Chapter Two Hundred And Fifty-Four

“Attempted murder!”

“He was going to—both of them— oh my god!”

“This is completely insane! How dare he plan this?! Right in this building, on the day of—“

“Call the police immediately, someone needs to call the police!”

Several directors were on their feet yelling.

Some were already on their phones.

The chairman had not moved from his position but his face had done something that Lucian  had never seen in ten years of watching it, a movement in the oldest part of the expression, the deep grief of a man understanding something fully for the first time.

His jaw was locked in fury, as he turned to glare at Nathan.

Nathan stood in the middle of it, floundering in terror. He swallowed hard from the sheer hatred in Lucian’s glare, and staggered back. 

He turned to look at Monica

She had taken a step back.

Just one step. But it was the specific step of a woman recalculating her position in a landscape that had just changed dramatically, the instinctive repositioning of someone whose primary loyalty was to their own survival and who was in the process of updating their assessment of how best to serve it.

He glanced at the door, taking note of the two men who were still there.

He looked at Zach.

Zach was looking at him with the particular expression of a man who has completed his presentation and is now watching the conclusion come together and has no further contribution to make because the contribution is not his to make.

Then his gaze fell onLucian.

Lucian was looking at him.

Not with anger.

That was the thing Nathan had expected and had not found. He had expected anger and he had found something else, something that was more accurate and more final than anger, the specific expression of a man who had been on a road and in a hospital bed for three years and had heard everything and had built his response not from fury but from the patient, comprehensive architecture of a person who understood that the response needed to be lasting rather than immediate.

In the blink of an eye, Nathan moved.

He moved before he had finished the decision to move, which was the particular way flight worked, the body ahead of the thinking.

He grabbed Monica’s arm.

Not to take her with him. To use her.

He pushed her toward the nearest of the two men at the door, the one on the left who had the cleaner angle to Nathan’s position, and Monica stumbled into him with the surprise of someone who had not expected to be used as a tool in quite this literal way, and the man caught her by reflex, which was three seconds in which Nathan covered the distance to the door.

He went through it, and barreled down the corridor in seconds. The men behind him regained their footing, and stampeded after him yelling threats.

Nathan gave no heed.

He ran with the specific, purposeful speed of a man who had one destination and one objective and no other thoughts.

The corridor was long and the elevator bank was at the end of it and he hit the stairwell door instead because elevators were traps and stairs were movement

Movement was what he had.

He went down the staircase in seconds, wind whipping past his ear.

Behind him, he heard the door, and footsteps, and voices, and then the more distant sound of the kind of communication that meant organised pursuit rather than individual response.

He ran down faster.

He counted floors by the signs on the stairwell doors and he went down past the lobby level because the lobby had security and security was a trap, and he went down further to the underground garage level, which had a different kind of security but also had cars.

Finally, he burst through the door into the garage.

The garage was dim and cool and smelled of concrete and exhaust and the particular underground quality of a space that existed below the city rather than in it.

He ran through the executive section, moving with the specific knowledge of a man who had parked in this garage for a decade and knew its layout as well as he knew any space.

His driver.

His driver would be here.

His driver arrived at seven each morning and parked in the same space in the third row of the executive section and waited.

It was now afternoon but his driver would still be here because Nathan had not called him and the protocol was to wait.

His eyes darted around the garage until his eyes fell on the elderly man.

The driver was a quiet man named Beale who had been with Nathan for four years.

He was standing beside the car with his phone in his hand and the expression of someone who had been receiving alerts on that phone for the past several minutes and was trying to understand what they meant.

He understood what they meant when Nathan came running toward him from the direction of the stairwell door.

His eyes widened in shock when he took in the sight of the usually polished man who was now out of breath before him.

“Keys,” Nathan growled at him.

Beale stared at him, his senses coming to attention immediately.

“Now!,” Nathan barked at him and the elderly man jerked in surprise.

Beale was not a man who made rapid independent decisions in high-stress situations. He was a man who followed instructions, and the instruction he was receiving was being delivered by his employer with the force and urgency that employer instructions sometimes carried, and his hand moved to his pocket and produced the keys before his thinking had fully caught up with the action.

Nathan took them.

He got in the car.

He started the engine.

He reversed out of the space with the speed of a man who was not thinking about the mirrors and pulled forward toward the exit ramp and accelerated up it.

Behind him, he heard a shout. Beale’s voice, louder than he had ever heard it. Something about the car. Something about—

He was on the ramp.

He was out of the garage.

He was on the street.