SEQUEL: TEN

Roman strode to a rundown photo booth with a flickering sign board right in front of it. He was currently in what looked to be an abandoned shopping complex with empty blacked out stores around.
From what he could tell, there were a handful of humans ambling around but none of them made a move to approach him so he didn’t bother with them either.
The interior of the photo booth looked exactly like what he expected it to be but in the place of the coin slot, it was sized to fit something else - the card that Anton had given him.
Roman had thought that he would have to show the card to a bouncer, he hadn’t thought that it was actually a key card to getting in. After the black card was scanned, nothing happened for a few endless seconds, it made him frown, wondering if he had done the wrong thing after all.
He wished he had asked Anton more questions but the old geezer had just dropped this mess into his hands and then dipped. Calling or texting was out of the question because he knew that the old bastard wouldn’t respond.
His thoughts were cut off by the photo booth rumbling loudly and then dropping without warning - it was actually an elevator. It took his quick wit to keep himself upright, and after descending for a minute or two, the elevator dinged to a stop.
Roman took his card which was pushed out to him again and walked out of the photo booth. Before he entered, he had been standing under the moonless night, the lack of artificial lights making the stars twinkle brightly. But when he stepped out, he walked onto a thickly carpeted hallway.
The hallway was properly lit by lamps hung on the walls and it opened to a room which had a primly dressed secretary sitting behind a counter. Surprisingly, there was no security guard in sight, he supposed that to get this far, you needed to be meant to be here.
It made Roman wonder just how Anton had been able to get a card to a place like The Underground - it made him slightly understand now why he was so busy all of the time.
He confidently walked up to the counter which was manned by a slender young lady with a red dress that matched her lipstick.
“Good evening,” She said politely, smiling charmingly, “Your card please,” She requested, keeping a formal air.
Roman preferred this because he wasn’t exactly sure how to act, he didn’t want to do something that would give himself away. He took off his shades and dipped his hand into his pocket to pull out the card.
The secretary’s eyes widened subtly at this, “Your private table is waiting sir, go right ahead.”
Roman noticed how her demeanor changed when she saw his card - of course, Anton would get a card with the highest priority. He followed her directions and headed for the double doors which opened to another well lit hallway.
He finally arrived at an open hall, which had to be the auction hall. It had surprisingly high arched ceilings considering that it was underground, and there were quite the number of people present in the hall.
Roman had put his shades back on after leaving the counter and it looked like he wasn’t the only one with the idea to hide his identity, most of the guests present had masks of various kinds over their faces.
There were scantily dressed waitresses walking around in precariously high heels serving drinks to the guests seated at the tables and chairs arranged in different orders.
There were the private tables that the secretary had told him about, they looked to be VIP tables which were positioned right at the front of the hall, in front of the wide stage. Behind them were the tables for ordinary patrons, and it was to one of those tables that Roman walked up to.
It would be expected that the organizers of the auctions and the frequenters would know who owned the number ‘21’ black card, if he sat at Anton’s table, that would be like wearing a blaring neon red sign on his head.
He still hadn’t decided on his plan of action, it was best he kept his identity hidden for the time being. He had previously had no idea that Anton had such a high priority pass to The Underground but now that he did, it meant a lot of things had changed.
Firstly, there was no way the organizers wouldn’t know that they had the Anton Costin’s only child… Roman cursed under his breath as he chose an empty table at random to collect himself, things had just gotten more complicated.
That annoying old man, he knew that this would happen, it was why he didn’t come himself - Roman cut off that train of thought, even if this wasn’t the case, he doubted that Anton would make the effort to come regardless.
The bottom line was that there would be no buying Alina because she wouldn’t be put up for auction, instead, they would keep her as a kind of bargaining chip. Anton Costin was a powerful man, there were a lot of people who would pay through the nose to get an upper hand on him, Anton himself included.
It meant that he had to break in and get Alina out… Roman cursed again, it wasn’t an impossible task, it was just the kind of trouble that he would honestly rather avoid.
At that moment, a waitress sauntered up to him, a way too bright smile fixed on her painted face. “Would you like anything to drink?”
“Yeah,” Roman accepted because it would be less suspicious not to although he doubted that he would ever get to drink it, “By the way, where’s the restroom?”
“Out those doors, just walk to the end of the hallway and you should see it,” The waitress supplied helpfully, going off to get a drink for him.
Roman pushed up to his feet and headed in the direction that he had been pointed in, he still intended to leave New York the next day and to do that, he had to get sufficient sleep. He planned to finish up this entire facade in less than an hour and then head straight to bed.
He glanced at his phone as he pushed open the doors that led away from the auction hall to check the tracker on Alina only to bump into someone else that was on their way back in from the restroom.
“My apologies,” A sultry voice said, a pretty face looking him over appreciatively.
Roman just tipped his head and swept past her, he didn’t need some lady getting attached to his side when he had important things to do. The restroom was empty, and when he was there, he could properly study the beeping.
Somehow, Anton had a detailed map of The Underground which showed Alina’s exact position, every new thing he learned about the European Alpha King awed and unnerved him. He felt like he would never truly know the full extent of Anton’s influence and just how deep the connections he made ran. It made Roman wonder if he was truly capable of ruling the entire European werewolf territory, his own territory inclusive.
He snapped himself out of his thoughts and focused on the issue at hand, Alina was being held in a room behind the stage, a place he couldn’t get to from the restrooms. However, there was a storage room on the other side of the auction hall that had an employee door that led to the back of the stage. So he had to somehow get across the auction hall without attracting attention, sneak into the storage room and make it to the back of the stage without getting caught, it sounded like such a hassle.
Fortunately, when he returned to the auction hall, the auction was yet to begin, as a matter of fact, it looked like it would take quite some while for it to get underway which was saying a lot considering that it was almost midnight.
Roman had had chances to get entangled with The Underground but after finding out that they dealt in people trafficking, regardless of specie, he gave them a wide berth. It was the one crime he wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, he wasn’t going to drag innocent people into hell because of his greed.
He knew that they also trafficked other things but trafficking people gave them quite the bad rep.
He returned to his seat to find his drink waiting for him, and without sitting down, he picked up the drink and merged into the crowd. There were people milling around, either socializing or finding a place to sit, it was easy to blend into the crowd.
However, his entire attention was taken up by how he would successfully get to the storage room that he didn’t pay attention to his surroundings, not till the lady that he bumped into earlier latched onto his hand, the one that wasn’t holding onto his drink.
“You ran away earlier,” She drawled, pressed up against his side. “Scared?”
Roman gave her a detached look, “Should I be?” He replied, not breaking his stride. The lady might actually come in handy because walking arm in arm with her made the fact that he was beeling straight across the entire auction hall less suspicious.
She laughed at his response, her laughter was low and breathy like her voice. She had black curls which she gathered into an elaborate hairstyle, and pale lavender gloves covering her delicate hands.
“That depends on you, what do you want me to be?” She countered, somehow managing to hold his eyes in a smoldering gaze and strut and slender high heels at the same time without losing the sway in her hips.
She leaned closer to him, her eyelids dropping lower on her eyes. “I could be anything you want me to be.”
By this time, they had already gotten to the other side of the room and without slowing down, Roman caught her by her waist and then pulled her into the storage room. If anyone in the auction hall saw them, they would think that they were hiding away to make out but only if they truly knew…
The lady laughed breathlessly at this sudden move, her eyes lighting up at the endless possibilities that were about to happen only for the light in her eyes to dim completely when Roman knocked her out with a chop to the back of her neck.
The storage was surprisingly more spacious than he had previously thought, there were racks of clothes in a corner, and at the other end were high shelves that had bottles of wine stored in them.
There were a lot of things stored in the storage so it wasn’t difficult to hide the unconscious body of the lady somewhere out of sight. Roman moved quickly after that, he didn’t trust that someone wouldn’t come looking for them in no time, it would be problematic if they came in and somehow found the lady’s unconscious body while he was nowhere to be found.
He slipped out the door that would take him to the back of the stage, taking off his shades so that he could see better at the hallway he stepped out into wasn’t as brightly lit as the others he had come across so far.
He had studied the route he had to take to where Alina was, it had looked simple on the map. He just had to go down a hallway, take a right, go across backstage and then take another right. At the end of that hallway should be the room that he needed to get to.
However, he knew that it would be that easy because the route to his destination was crawling with the people working in the background. Although there hadn’t been any security to boast of at the exterior of The Underground, and again when he got to the auction hall, he knew well enough that there would be tens of them in the backrooms.
There was no way he could take them all on, even if he was good enough to manage it without getting mortally wounded, by the time he completely defeated them all, an alarm would already be raised and Alina would be moved to a second location.
What he had to do was to create a diversion, and he knew just how to do it.
Roman slowed to a stop as he got to the end of the hallway he was on, he could hear voices coming his way, they sounded like a duo of henchmen. There was nowhere to hide in the open hallway he was in, and the storage he had come from had been left behind a long time ago so there was only one option left.
A few minutes later, he had taken a right turn and in the hallway he had just been in, there was a pile of unconscious henchmen. There was no time to be tactful again, even if the lady if knocked out first wasn’t found, it was only a matter of time before someone saw the knocked out henchmen and raised an alarm.
There were surprisingly a lot of people backstage, the thick velvet curtains that were drawn the only thing keeping them hidden from the auction hall. There were people moving around, setting up props that would be used for the auction no doubt.
This meant though, that Roman could easily sneak past them without drawing attention to himself because there were already enough people running around.
Before he left backstage though, he reached for his trusty golden lighter, flicked it on and then tossed it to a corner of the stage curtains before disappearing down a dimly lit hallway.
With how busy it was, no doubt no one would notice that the stage curtains were on fire until it started to blaze out of control, he would give it a minute or two at most.
It didn’t even take that long, before he got to the end of the hallway that he was on, yells started to come from the backstage that he had just left as people ran around trying to contain the fire.
Roman smiled to himself under his mask at the feat that he had pulled, stopping in front of the door where Alina was.