Harlow hums. “There’s an air bubble in the liquid. See?”
I hold it up, and she’s right. The syringe is pulled back a few milliliters. Two milliliters, to be exact.
“2mL,” I murmur. “That’s not a coincidence…”
“She would want us to know where Citadel is located. That would be her first objective,” Harlow says. “The two of you were going over possible locations for their home base, right?”
My mind is racing as I mentally catalog every address and postcode we’ve combed over. There’ve been over a hundred, and most had been false leads. We’d ruled out a lot of them because we assumed Citadel was working out of London. The dots start to connect. If they’re not based in London… that would explain how we missed them coming into Blackwell.
Fuck, this could be very bad.
“2mL…” I murmur.
“What about an anagram? She loves those,” Otto offers. “LM2?”
I shake my head. “No.” Pulling my phone out, I bring up the spreadsheet of possible locations, using ‘2’ as the search term. Five come up–and one of them causes me to break out in a cold sweat. “ML2,” I whisper.
“And where is that?” Alex asks, arms crossed.
I close my eyes. “Scotland.”
CHAPTER 30
Lottie
My eyes feel heavy, and my wrists burn. There’s a steady dripping sound from somewhere, and when I try to move my legs, metal scraping against concrete permeates the air.
“Charlotte?”
My eyes snap open, and I instantly begin to panic. Lachlan is across from me, and he’s chained up to the wall behind him like a medieval prisoner. We’re in some kind of dungeon, and I only know that because there are no windows. There’s only the flickering light of the wall sconces. I pull against my chains, and the burning sensation returns. I’m wearing a silver sequin dress, no shoes, and my whole body feels heavy, like I’ve been drugged.
Suddenly, everything comes flying back.
The dinner.
The gunshots–
My eyes flick over Lachlan, and relief washes over me when I see a white bandage around his left arm.
I recall being corralled into a different car and having the foresight to quickly pull on the syringe out of my holster…
“We’re in Scotland,” I tell him. My voice is hoarse. “We were wrong. All this time we assumed Citadel worked out of London, but they don’t. We’re up near Glasgow.”
“What? How is that possible?” Lachlan growls, tugging against his manacles.
“They disguise their voice. But tonight, when one of them was shoving me into the car, it slipped. Just one word–aye.”
“Fuck,” Lachlan hisses. “They think we’re in London. They’ll never find us up here.”
I smirk. “They might. I left Max a clue.”
“What kind of clue could you possibly have left?”
“One of the home base locations we’d been investigating was this one in Scotland–and the postcode starts with ML2. I had a syringe and pulled it back to exactly two milliliters. 2mL. Now it’s just a matter of Max finding the syringe I dropped when we drove out of the car park and him figuring out what I was trying to say.”
Lachlan’s eyes go wide as they flick between my eyes. “You’re a bloody genius.”
I smile at his praise. “I know.”
