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“You know I’m in,” Tony says.
“I will support in any way I can from here.” Dada rubs a hand along her stomach. “Sean can get you inside using the Tony’s plan.”
“Finally,” Tony says. “If you all would’ve listened to me—
“I can help,” Bridget puts in. “I can—”
I hold up a hand, stop her from talking. “Not you, traitor.”
“We’ll have to revise Tony’s plan,” Leland says, saying he’s in without actually saying it. “It never called for a rescue.”
Momma touches her niqab and nods as her gaze scans the room. “But if I’m not mistaken, the original plan called for a second man. Justice, you’ll have to choose someone from Internal, unless you have another idea.”
Idohave another idea. A man who will do anything for Sandesh, a man for whom this won’t bejustanother mission, a man with the training to be part of the team and as many contacts as I have siblings.
Victor.
49
SANDESH
Iwake up groggy, head aching, body trembling, and blind. Blinking repeatedly doesn’t help. There’s a moment of panic—how can I get out of here if I can’t see. Slowly, my brain comes online and scolds me,You’re not blind; it’s just really dark in here.
Relief and terror battle for my attention. I take a deep breath, falling away from either emotion to concentrate on details. My pounding headache tells me that I’ve either hit my head or have been hit at some point. Every time I blink, which is often as my eyes won’t accept my brain’s analysis that it’s really, really dark, dried blook pinches the skin of my forehead.
I shiver. Not just blindingly dark, but freezing, too. The thin material of my tuxedo shirt and pants aren’t getting the job done. Shivers roll down my body uncontrollably and there’s no way to get warm against the ice-cold stone floor.Stone coldsuddenly makes perfect sense to me. I try to sit up.Bam! My head slams into the ceiling.
Motherfu…
That explains the blood on my forehead and the pounding headache, which could’ve come from the fight in Philly. Although, I doubt it. My internal clock is telling me the fight happened days ago.
My attention skips from my aching head to the manacles on my wrists. I raise my hands and hear theclinkof iron, feel the weight and pinch of chains. I move my feet and feel a similar heaviness, a cramping cold at my ankles and numb bare feet.
Looping my hands around my wrist chains, I pull. Sharp coils of pain twist into my bones and race up my arm. The wounds from whatever bits of raised metal line my manacles are so sharp and unexpected that nausea rises.
Bracing myself, I pull again and again until the clank of the manacles echoes in the room like the desperate wailing in my mind.
I stop.
Shivering all the way down to my ass, I fumble around with shaking hands along the gritty stone floor, ignoring the warm blood dripping into my palms. I find and trace the outline of a ring embedded deep into cement, too deep for me to pull out.
Using a hand so frigidly cold my knuckles feel arthritic, I brush my fingers along the chips and flakes of the stone ceiling. Cold. Rough. Pitted. A stone coffin. Or, if you happened to be a prisoner in France during the Middle Ages, an oubliette—a place of forgetting.
Forgotten will not be my fate. No. Walid has brought me here to torture me.
He thinks I organized the Jordan hit against his brother or, at least, played a big part. That means that the bone-rending pain I feel now is merely an appetizer.
He might even ask me a question or two, but mostly, he’ll want to hurt me as badly and for as long as he can.
“You’re quiet,” a voice in the darkness rasps, and I shoot up again, slapping my head against stone with athudthat pierces my jaw and muffles my ears.
“Fuck!” I peer uselessly into the darkness. “Who the fuck’s in here?”
“The one you sentenced here.”
A Russian. I sentenced a Russian here? Great. I’m trapped in the dark with a nutjob. Here’s hoping his hands are manacled, too.
“Sorry, buddy. You’ve got the wrong guy.” Maybe the wrong century. How long could someone stay alive down here? Or am I speaking with a ghost?
