My Billionaire Boss Dared Me to Say No, So I Locked the Door novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: Smoke Detector

At three in the morning Ingmar stood on a stepladder in the playroom with a screwdriver in his hand.

Bartek was asleep one floor below.

He had left him in the bed on the third floor, one arm flung across the pillow where Ingmar's head had been.

He had not turned on a light.

The playroom smelled of leather and cold.

Over the padded bench, the white smoke detector looked back at him with its small green eye.

He had looked at it before.

He remembered a night in November, lying beside Bartek on the bench.

He had glanced up and seen that the light on this detector was green, where the other two on the floor were red.

He had thought: a different model.

He had thought it for an instant, and then Bartek had asked him what he was staring at, and he had said nothing.

Ingmar unscrewed the plate.

It came away in his hand, and behind it, set into the housing where no battery should have been, sat a small black lens.

A thin wire ran up into the ceiling.

His hands went very still.

He had expected something.

For nine years he had expected something, from Hedvig, from the lawyers, from the long slow web of his father's family.

He had prepared himself for it.

But he had not expected this.

He had not expected it to hold Bartek.

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