Lock and Key by Mark Ayre

Author:Mark Ayre [Ayre, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AFS Publishing
Published: 2020-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

Following her call with Joel, Sandra returned to her office, but had no more than sat down, had not even spoken with her guest, before there was a knock on her door and Titus entered.

“What have I told you about entering ahead of an invite?” she asked of him. “My young guest and I might have been involved in a deeply personal conversation, or perhaps one of us might have been undressed. Perhaps both of us. How many times, Titus, must we discuss simple manners?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. His eyes flicked to the girl on the sofa. Here they lingered. Sandra’s fault, she knew, for mentioning the girl and nudity. To redraw his attention before he lost himself entirely to fantasy, she sighed and rolled her eyes.

“Presumably, you have some important news to impart, Titus? Something so Earth-shattering it had you forget the conversation we have had a hundred times or more.”

“Yes,” he said, glanced at the girl, back at Sandra. “Delilah’s coming. She’s less than a mile away.”

Feeling her eyes widen, her heartrate quicken Sandra rose. “With such news in hand, why even waste time knocking?”

To this, Titus could produce no answer. Sandra was already ready to depart.

“Stay with the girl. I’ll return as soon as I can, understood?”

“Of course.”

She left the room, extracting her phone. This time, the buggy took her away from Steadman’s section of the facility towards the holding cells. Outside the door at which she stopped stood a guard whose name she did not know, Yacob, her loyalist man within the facility, and Ursula, whose presence she had not requested.

“Everything is coming together,” she said to Yacob, ignoring the other two. “Delilah is on her way. You know what to do?”

“I do.”

Ursula said: “What about my Graham?”

Waving away this query, Sandra said to the guard, “Open it.”

“He’s been gone too long,” Ursula continued. “You promised you’d bring him back to me.”

“Your monster son is on the way,” said Sandra, unable to keep the contempt from her voice. Dense as she was, Ursula missed the tone. She drew enough offence from the adjective.”

“Monster? How dare you.”

The guard was hovering by the door. His hand reached towards the panel that would open it and reveal the cramped box’s contents. Sandra glared at him.

“Did I not say open it?” Turning to Ursula, she continued: “One thing at a time. Yacob will bring in Delilah, using her mother. This done, we’ll prepare for Grendel.”

The bolt clicked, the door slid open. As Sandra tried to enter, Ursula caught her arm, dragged her back.

With almost superhuman self-restraint, Sandra refrained from drawing her gun and shooting Ursula three times in the gut. With eyes like cold steel, she turned to the younger woman; this beauty who had never become anything, this waste of space who offered no value to the organisation within which she lived and worked. At the birth of her son, they might have slit the girl’s throat and been no worse for it. At this moment, Sandra would be better.

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