The Wolf, page 24
And got colder when he could hear nothing on the far side.
He knocked. “Rio?” he said softly.
There was no response.
Glancing up and down the corridor, the prison camp seemed really fucking dangerous all of a sudden.
Like the last however many decades had been a party?
“Rio?” More with knocking. “Rio. Answer me or I’m coming in.”
He shoved at the door with his shoulder—and got a big ol’ fat nothing as it opened wide. She wasn’t in there.
Lucan raced back to the clinic and walked directly down to the bed she’d been in. Bending low, he looked under the mattress. The gun was gone.
“Sonofabitch—”
“Lucan?”
His head whipped to the drapery hanging around Kane’s bed. “You okay?”
Not that there was anything he could do to help the guy if he wasn’t—for so many reasons. But mostly because he had to find Rio.
“Lucan…”
If it had been anyone else, he would have fucked them off. Except just as the Executioner had discovered, and Lucan knew all too well, the aristocrat was someone he couldn’t help but take into account. Even if it was just going to be briefly. Like it had to be at the moment.
Going over to the draping, he yanked it back—and turned his face away for a second. Every time he saw the male, it was a fresh horror.
“Hey,” he said, “I’m dealing with something, but later I can—”
“She is with Apex,” came the frail interruption. “Your female.”
“What.”
* * *
Lying on the floor of the workroom, Rio tracked the guard or whatever the hell he was as he progressed down to the dumbwaiter. Clearly, he knew something was out of place, but then again, she couldn’t have left a bigger clue if she’d gone neon with a Las Vegas arrow flashing at the damn thing.
Glancing behind herself, she measured the drug bundles in their cage—and discovered that the load was on a platform with wheels.
That just so happened to have the same amount of clearance as a car.
With as little movement as possible, she flattened herself onto her stomach and pulled herself forward using her bare palms and her knees. As she closed in on the undercarriage, she tilted her head to the side, and prayed—prayed—that she didn’t jostle the cage or—
“It’s some kind of—I don’t know what the fuck it is. It’s like a box in the wall. No, it wasn’t like that before. No shit, I’m not going up there—”
The words stopped short, but she couldn’t tell whether it was because the man had noticed her or just been interrupted by whoever he’d called.
When boots started stomping in her direction, she feared it was the former.
Staring out from underneath the cage’s platform, she tried not to breathe at all as a set of military-grade footwear come down to the bin—and stopped right in front of where she was hiding.
“Do you think I can’t smell you, human?”
There were a series of grunts and her cover was moved off to the side, rolled clear away. As it revealed her, Rio wondered what kind of lead shower would fall on her head if she pulled a pivot-and-trigger. But considering that was her only chance—
Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a little red dot skating across the floor—and as it went out of her field of vision, she’d have bet both her eyeteeth that the laser sight was pegging her in the back of the skull.
“Get up.”
There was no reason not to comply—and one very trigger-finger-ish reason to do so.
Rising onto her hands and knees, she looked around her arm. The man was standing right next to her, about three feet away, the toes of his boots pointed at her just like his gun was. Above his thick neck, his face was bored.
“You’re never making it out of here alive,” he said.
His eyes were some shade of blue, and they were moving over her body, but not in a sexual way. More like he was measuring her for a coffin—
“I fit in small spaces.”
“What?”
“I’m retractable.”
He shook his head. “Shut the fuck—”
Justlikethat, Rio sprang to her feet, palmed his weapon between her two hands, and diverted the muzzle. As the guard caught up with what was happening, she ripped the gun out of his lackadaisical grip and jabbed it right up into his crotch.
“You’re going to want to move really carefully,” she gritted. “Anything fast, I’m going to get nervous—and jeez, I get twitchy when I’m anxious. Click, click, oopsie.”
She jumped back so that he couldn’t grab at her.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” he said grimly.
He was still looking disinterested rather than alarmed, clearly in the camp that women were never much of a threat. And maybe she should feel complimented that he’d called her a human—as opposed to all the other derogatory nouns in his playbook.
Backing up, she went as far as the nearest table—
From out of nowhere, a strange confusion hit her like it was a tangible blow to the head, her thoughts scattering to the point that, as the gun she’d taken from him lowered of its own volition, she couldn’t stop it: Even though she ordered her arm to stay up, it refused to obey the command—and as she started to fight to keep the weapon pointed at the guard, a piercing headache flashed across her frontal lobe.
The man walked up to her and said, “Give me the gun.”
“No…”
And yet sure as if she had a remote and it was in his hands, Rio turned the weapon around and placed the nine millimeter grip-first into his palm.
The guard smiled now, revealing sharp canine teeth. “As I was saying, you don’t know what you’re doing.”
Rio opened her mouth to—God, she didn’t know what. She couldn’t think at all. The impulse to communicate was there, but her entire vocabulary was unavailable.
And then things got worse. Her feet started walking, taking her forward… toward the door across the room, the one he’d come through.
As her body routed around the tables, she told herself there had to be a way out of this. She just needed to think—
“Open the door for me, would ya?”
Like he wanted to prove who was in control, she watched her hand reach out and turn the knob. Then she pulled things wide and stood aside as he passed by.
“Come on.”
She followed him like a dog brought to heel, her body not hers to control, her will—off somewhere else.
Without being ordered to—verbally, at least—she walked down the hall in a trance, heading for some kind of wall with thick sticks protruding out of it and a door inset in the center—
All at once, her mind was flooded with images of horror, men and women strung up on those pegs, beaten with crowbars, with hammers, with lengths of chains—and then left there, the blood dripping off their battered bodies and pooling on the floor.
A figure in black, not the guard, but someone else, was smiling as he watched them die.
She had no idea where the gruesome slideshow came from, but it was as vivid as if she had witnessed it all personally, as if it were her own memories.
“He’s going to have fun with you,” the guard drawled. “You’re just his type.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Lucan rushed back to the stairwell. Goddamn it, he’d smelled the incense coming down the steps, but also the nurse? That was why he’d been thrown off—Rio must have been put in one of Nadya’s robes to mask her scent.
What the hell was Apex thinking, taking that human woman into the mouth of the monster. Helping Kane was fine, but fuck.
As he arrived at the landing of the workrooms’ floor, he looked through the glass window in the fire door and tried to see if there was any disturbance. Everything seemed locked tight and business-as-usual for the daytime hours. And down at the far end, the pair of guards were in place in front of the wall—and there was nothing on any of the pegs.
Maybe she and Apex had gotten in and out already.
Either that or the Executioner had taken her into his quarters for a private party. Where that fucking madman would bite her jugular and drink her dry just for shits and giggles—
Directly overhead, a door opened and closed.
Lucan dematerialized into thin air and re-formed on the underbelly of the landing above him, hanging aloft like a bat, ready to pounce on—
Apex stumbled down the steps, weaving from side to side. “Not now, wolven. We got a problem—”
Releasing his grip, Lucan dropped down in front of the vampire, and went for the bastard, grabbing his throat and forcing him back.
“She wasn’t supposed to leave the clinic!” He punched the other male into the wall. “What the fuck were you thinking—”
“It… was… her idea. Her… i… dea…”
The words came out as he banged, banged, banged the dumbass piece of shit into the concrete over and over again.
“Executioner… has… her.”
Lucan stopped with the bread dough routine. After a split second of total shock, he shoved his face forward, baring his fangs. “You better hope she lives. Or I’m going to kill you with my bare hands—”
“I tried to stop her, asshole!” With a shove, Apex broke free—but then tripped over his own feet, fell onto the steps, and slumped like he was out of gas. “Fuck.”
“I don’t believe you,” Lucan hissed.
“You want to argue with me or save her life? We need to get her out of the Executioner’s private quarters. I heard them talking from where I was—”
“Fuck you. No one can trust you—”
Apex shot up and got right back into Lucan’s grill. “She was trying to help Kane. For that alone, she deserves better than dying at the Executioner’s hands—or underneath him. So you can bet her fucking life you can trust me on this.”
Between one blink and the next, Lucan remembered Rio strung between two stakes on the floor of that apartment, that human cutting open her shirt with that knife.
“I owe her,” Apex announced.
There was a pause. And then Lucan lowered his head. Rubbed his aching temples.
“Since when did you grow a conscience?” he muttered as he went over to the doorway and checked through the glass again.
Apex cracked his knuckles. “Since I’ve been sitting at the bedside of that male of worth in the storage room. And then listening to that female of yours get manhandled by a goddamn guard.”
Lucan couldn’t even think about that last one. Or his head was going to fucking explode. “Like morals are something you catch like a cold.”
“Shut up, wolven. You can’t bust her out of there alone and you know it. You need me.”
As Lucan assessed the guards on duty at the wall, he shook his head… but couldn’t argue. “We have to go for a frontal assault. Take out the pair by the door, get into the private quarters—”
“The guards’ll call for reinforcements if we rush them, and the backups are only one floor down. We need a reason to get close.”
Lucan frowned. Then it came to him.
“I know what to do.” With a quick yank, he pulled open the door. “Make like you’re in on it all.”
“As if I’ve never done that before,” Apex muttered.
The two walked forward at a leisurely pace, Apex a couple of feet behind, as was his way. He never, ever made a pair with another, the I-am-an-island bullshit a cliché except for the tally of his kill count. Which was about to go up by at least one, maybe two guards—
They’d gone about halfway down the hallway of workrooms when gunshots rang out, the pops! muffled and distant. As the guards glanced toward the door to the Executioner’s private quarters—because, hey, those kinds of noises were not that unusual—Lucan ditched his plan to talk some bullshit about the deal and lunged into a run—
Apex yanked him back, and spoke under his breath. “You have to pretend you don’t care. You make like it matters, and the Executioner is going to have your balls really in a grip. You want in there to help her, you have to chill.”
It took every bit of self-control for Lucan not to explode into a sprint, but in the back of his mind, he knew it was unlikely she was merely wounded. The Executioner only shot to kill. He liked his torture wet and messy—and it wasn’t until he was done or bored that he’d cap someone.
Unless someone was a physical threat, of course, and Rio, as a human woman, would never be one of those.
“I’m going to kill that bastard with my bare hands,” Lucan growled.
“And my job is to make sure you have plenty of time to do that.”
One of the guards pointed off toward the stairwell’s entry. “Go back to your quarters. Right now.”
“Yeah, no.” Lucan came to a halt, putting his hands in his pockets and rocking back and forth on the toes of his boots. “I’m well aware of what the Executioner has in there. Right now, as you say.”
The guard leveled his gun right at Lucan’s face. “I know you have special privileges, but fuck you.”
Lucan leaned forward, puckered up, and kissed the muzzle of the weapon. “You’re so cute. But the Executioner needs to know that that human female with him? She’s his only way to Mozart. She’s the source down in Caldwell that he’s asked me to negotiate with. I brought her here to prove that we had the capacity to meet the supply she wants. We lose her, we lose all his business he planned for, paid for, is expecting, you know the drill.”
As light dawned on the guard’s Marblehead, that gun started to lower and Lucan shrugged. “If he’s just plugged her full of lead? He’s shit out of luck and he’s going to blame you for not telling him who she is. Better hope the holes are somewhere that doesn’t leak a lot—”
“Fuck,” the guard said as he went for the door and entered a code. “Sir, we have a problem—”
As the way was opened, both of the guards, and then Lucan and Apex, funneled into the Executioner’s private quarters. And what they saw was—
“Rio?” Lucan breathed.
In the center of the large open space, next to the army field desk that had been set up by the foot of a mattress… the human woman was standing over the dead body of the Executioner, the gun Lucan had given her in her hand.
She looked up—and did a double take, like seeing Lucan was the last thing she’d expected. Although as levels of shock-and-awe went, Lucan was feeling like he was totally winning in that department. Had she really just—
“He was going to kill me,” she announced. “It was justifiable homicide.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Rio couldn’t tell who was more surprised. The four men who rushed into whatever the hell space she was in… or the man she’d just killed with two bullets to the heart.
The shooting had happened in the blink of an eye. She’d been marched into the room and the guy in black with the shaved head had stood up from that table over there—and looked at her as if she were fresh meat.
The cold happiness on his face had been something to remember. Especially as he’d taken out a knife with a blade as long as his arm.
After he’d been informed where she’d been found, he’d excused the two guards, and the sound of the lock getting turned had been like a coffin lid secured over her body.
So self-assured he’d been, so completely in control. And in spite of her mental confusion, she’d known she had only one chance, given that tremendous, sword-like weapon in his hand.
Out with the gun. Two shots just like she was drilling targets at the range: Right into the center of his chest.
Real blink-of-an-eye stuff.
In the aftermath, he’d stumbled backward, looking at his sternum like he was baffled at the fact that the lead slugs hadn’t bounced right off him or something. She hadn’t been interested in his death throes other than monitoring him to be sure that he didn’t get his hands on another weapon in his last three and a half seconds of life. After a couple of final twitches, he’d stayed still, and just as she’d wondered what the hell to do next—
The welcome party had burst in.
Luke jumped forward. “Are you all right?”
Rio was in his arms next.
She didn’t know who went for who first. She didn’t care. As she squeezed her eyes shut, she just held on to that strong, warm body, and breathed in his cologne, and felt gratitude for being alive.
Not that he wore cologne. God, he smelled like home…
Dimly, she was aware of a strange cracking sound. Then another. Followed by two duffle bags being dropped on the floor. Had he and Apex brought luggage?
Who cared. In this moment, Luke was what mattered.
“We’ve got to get you out of here,” he said.
She pulled back and touched his face. Then came to her senses. “Not yet. I need to help—”
Rio didn’t finish the thought as something in the background caught her attention. Looking around Luke’s muscled arm, she blinked. A couple of times.
The two sounds she’d thought were bags hitting the floor had not been about any kind of Samsonite. Apex had done something dramatic to the two guards. The two men were both lying facedown—no, wait, their bodies were on their stomachs. Their heads were facing upward.
Meanwhile, the guy was walking over to the open door and calmly shutting it. Locking it. “We’ve got problems now.”
“More,” she corrected numbly. “We have more problems.”
As she stated the obvious, a series of Caldwell Police Department rules and regulations weaved their way around the fact pattern of everything that had just happened with the man and the big knife and the handgun she still had in her palm.
She was in over her head. Big time. And her allies in the situation were a pair of drug-dealing killers.
“All right,” Luke said as he started to pace around like he was thinking.
When he came up to a display of rifles mounted on the wall, he nodded like he’d sought their advice and decided to do what they’d told him to. “We need to play this like we’ve taken over. Apex, you and Mayhem will stand guard out in front of here until nightfall. No one will question it. Then, as soon as it’s dark, I’ll take her out—”
