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“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.”
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.
