AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Good?”
She locked eyes with Roman. “Yep. Let’s go.”
“Stay between us.”
Lucian turned her around and all four of them tunneled deeper into the pit of hell. Maddox had kept quiet for the most part watching.
She kept on Roman’s heels and made sure to stay close to the wall with Maddox and Lucian silently bringing up the rear. They came to the end of the tunnel and the room before them flared open to show nothing but grungy cement with a familiar red scrawl across the back wall. In the dim lighting from the single bulb hanging in the center of the room, she could only faintly make out the edges of what was written on the wall.
She knew this place. Had it burned into her memory. This was the last place her father drew air.
Whispers of voices carried along the currents of stale, musty air. They didn’t have long before they were found.
Her eyes landed on a single piece of furniture sitting dead center of the room. A table.
Chains were tossed across the flat surface, the cold, metal cuffs drenched in layers of dried, cracked blood that crumbled at the slightest touch.
“No, don’t get that on you,” Lucian warned flatly as the flakes of dried blood fell to the tabletop. “You don’t want that kind of curse following you through life. Blood from a murder especially as brutal and heinous as this—” His words fell off as he shook his head. It took him a minute to gather his thoughts. She couldn’t blame him.
Roman grunted in disgust. “It’s tainted in the worst kind of way,” he supplied roughly.
Whispers of the horrific screams peeled through her head as though the video played on repeat in her mind. Bile filled her mouth—the putrid smell of death crawled over her and razor-thin bolts of pain ghosted across her senses. What they had to have endured under their torturer’s hands.
“Let’s keep moving.”
Sandwiched between Roman and Lucian, all three pushed deeper through the other side. She couldn’t get out of there fast enough either.
Once past the table, Maddox gave her a push. “Stay close to them. They’ll keep you safe” He looked over her head. “Get ’er the fuck out of here and stop looking for people who are already dead. I can’t lose her too.” His voice was a deep gurgled rumble of rock over stone.
She shot him a puzzled look. What did that mean? But she didn’t have time to ask. Not now.
He had already turned and disappeared down another shaft, but she couldn’t think about him right now. Not when screams peeled through the corridor.
“Do you hear that?”
Her men nodded in unison. They’d found the girls.
Fingers reached through the darkness to clamp down on her bare arm. Rhia screeched, bringing her gun up, finger ready on the trigger.
Roman spun, gun raised.
Tiny hands flew up to protect a fragile-looking face. “No, it’s me. Just me, please don’t kill me.”
Sweet brown eyes peeked out from behind a curtain of black hair.
“You,” Rhia gasped, pulling the girl to her. “God, I thought you were dead.”
Roman tore off his shirt and draped it over the young girl’s shoulders.
“Please, you have to help. I can’t break the locks. They’ve already emptied most of the chambers. We can still get a few out. Please, help!”
“Show us,” Lucian ordered.
They followed the girl another twenty yards until they found the source of the screams dead-bolted behind metal doors situated in a semi-circle around four cylinders. This is where they loaded them into their glass cages to be sold. Overturned tables showed whoever cleared out of here did so in a hurry.
“Stay with Roman. Get them out of the pins. I’ll make sure the path is clear for us up ahead.”
She had a bad feeling about him going alone but only nodded. “Be careful.” He gave her a quick kiss and stormed ahead, not looking back.
