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“Do you want to die here, Rio?” Luke demanded as he ignored the other man. “You want this to be how it ends for you?”
“Oh, absolutely,” she snapped. “That’s why I let that man murder me about fifteen minutes ago. Instead of shooting him in the heart. Twice.”
There was a tense standoff. And then Luke broke away and walked around like there was so much anger flowing through his veins, he had to either move or explode.
When he stopped short, she had no idea what was going to come out of his mouth.
“Fine, but I’m taking her down.” He jabbed a finger at Apex. “You’re too involved.”
“And you’ve bonded with her,” the other man snapped. “So who’s the problem here?”
Luke marched right over to the guy. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Bonded? Rio thought.
Before a brawl got started—because, yeah, that was going to be so helpful—she double-checked the clip in her gun and walked over to the door out to the hall.
“What’s the combination to this keypad?”
Mayhem, who’d been totally quiet, joined her. “I got it.”
He put in a pattern and the lock shifted—
“Will you let me get armed first?” Luke bitched.
“We’re leaving now,” Rio announced as she opened things and stepped out—
Oh . . . God.
The man she’d shot had been spear-mounted on the wall, sharp pegs stabbed through the back of his throat as well as in various places down his torso, his body weight suspended off the floor.
“You wanted to do this,” Luke said to her in a low voice.
She looked at him. “No, I have to do this.”
“You don’t even know Kane.”
“This is about my brother,” she blurted. “I was forced to learn a helluva lot of things I didn’t want to while trying to deal with his overdose. At least now, I can put some of the knowledge to good use. Let’s go.”
Rio walked off in a daze, her past tangling with the present—but she had to snap out of all that. Which, as Luke had pointed out, was the survivor thing, wasn’t it: Stay focused, stay sharp, stay in the here-and-now. It helped you not get shot.
Besides, when she’d been escorted down here by that guard, she’d had that crushing headache and all those weird thoughts. She couldn’t afford to waste this opportunity to mentally record the details of the building.
Forcing herself to plug into her environment, she saw—
Four rooms. There were four processing rooms, going by the layouts down the long hall, and she stopped at the door the guard had walked her out of.
“Here.”
Luke stepped up next to her. “We gotta move fast.”
“Thanks for the tip.” Rio rolled her eyes. “I was going to stroll around and maybe do a little feng shui inside. You know, redecorate some. Maybe design a mural.”
Luke shook his head and glanced over his shoulder. “Mayhem, do you have the—”
“Code?” the guy said. “Yup. Aren’t you glad when I set this all up, I kept a default?”
“How did they not kill you?” Luke said like he was pondering a law of the universe and wondering why it existed.
“They don’t think I’m very smart.” The guy stepped up to another keypad and entered a different pattern. “There are advantages to appearing to be an imbecile.”
“Well, you’re an expert in that,” Luke muttered.
When the lock clicked free, Rio opened the way in—and immediately started for the cage of kilos in the corner.
“You stay out here,” Luke ordered Mayhem before joining her.
As the door eased shut behind them, she took a deep breath and smelled the unpleasant chemical sting in the air. She hadn’t noticed it before, probably because she’d been frantic.
“What happened to your brother?”
Rio nearly lost her stride as she went around one of the worktables. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“The testing chemicals are on the desks over there.” Clearing her throat, she rerouted her trajectory and went to one of the supervisors’ monitoring positions. “This is exactly what I need.”
Putting her hand into a wicker basket full of ampoules, she nodded. “Yup, this’ll do for testing.”
The thing was even trademarked NarcoCheck. She couldn’t have done better if she’d ordered the stuff herself.
“Now can you get me in that?” she said as she nodded at the cage.
Luke crowded into her personal space. “Stay behind me.”
“Why, what are you going to—”
The shot rang out in the room, sharp and loud, and Rio covered her head and hit the floor. Fortunately, the bullet ricocheted elsewhere—and what do you know, from around the edge of the desk, she saw the chain link uncoil and fall free of the bin.
Rio didn’t wait for the all-clear. She rushed over to the cage, opened the front access panel, and reached in to the blocks. Which were marked “H” or “C.”
Go figure what that meant, she thought as she thanked the Lord for the bene she hadn’t expected. And jeez, it meant Apex or Luke could have done this part of things after all.
