Total pages in book: 74
Estimated words: 68831 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 344(@200wpm)___ 275(@250wpm)___ 229(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68831 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 344(@200wpm)___ 275(@250wpm)___ 229(@300wpm)
But a few seconds was useless when I was chained to the wall by my other hand. I tried to remember what she had done with the handcuff key. Had she returned it to her neck? Was it over in the bag? Was it still hanging from the handcuffs? I couldn’t risk looking, broadcasting my search, especially not right now, with her staring at me, waiting for me to respond to her psychotic dialog.
I couldn’t think, couldn’t come up with something to say. She was right. I didn’t know what she’d done. Or been through. Or sacrificed. I’d say this. I was raped by two men when I was fourteen and had managed to maintain a normal life. She was in a warehouse full of prisoners, shoving a knife into my thigh. I was going to guess she had been through hell and back to fall to this point.
She prodded, unhappy with my lack of response. “You think you KNOW ME?”
She pushed on the knife, and it effortlessly cut deeper into the muscle, severing nerves and lighting my thigh on fire. I screamed, the pain blotting out my vision, the intensity worse, so much worse, than the initial penetration had been.
“Please.” I wheezed out the word, my chained hand gripping my thigh just above the place where the knife jutted out of it. Blood bubbled around the blade, running down my muscle. Too much blood. Didn’t I have a major artery somewhere in my thigh? The femoral? What if she hit it? I could be minutes from bleeding out. Minutes from death.
“You think I killed Gwen? Please.” She stood. “YOU killed Gwen.” She lifted one boot and hovered it gently in the air about the knife. “Think I can get it to go all the way through? One hard stomp, I think it’ll do it. Can we at least try? I’ve always wanted to try.”
She giggled, then stopped, her silhouette suddenly illuminated in bright red light. Her head twisted around, the long blonde strands spinning out, and eyed the overhead bulb that had illuminated. I watched her boot carefully, my heart in my throat as the heavy black rubber sole swayed above the wooden handle. The light began to blink, dousing the room in black, then red, then black, then red.
Her head snapped toward the light and she paused for a moment, watching it flash. “Shit.”
There was a crash, a deep engine revving, and the terrible grind of metal against metal. I looked in the direction of the sound, trying to gauge how far away it was, hoping that it was somehow tied to the red light.
When I looked back, she was gone and I was alone in the room, the knife still protruding from my bloody thigh. I locked my free hand around my thigh and tried to staunch the bleeding.
Twenty-Six
THE REACTOR
Shit. Claudia ran up the stairs and to the small room at the top landing, entering the code and shoving open the door. She leaned over the desk, her eyes darting over the grid of camera screens until she found the right one. A Humvee had broken through the fence on the east end. The night vision camera showed bodies moving, crawling over the vehicle and stepping over the electric wire. She spun, looking at the cameras facing the opposite end of the property, and saw another set of SUVs pull up there. Motherfuckers.
She watched the men as they crossed into another camera’s line of vision, their guns drawn, night vision goggles on. The view went black, then static, the connection gone, the camera taken out. As she watched, another monitor flashed dark, then white. She was running out of time. She straightened, looking around the room, thinking through the evidence that may exist. There were no files, no names, nothing in the room that connected her to him. Her eyes fell on a scrap of magazine, one she’d taped to the desk. She reached forward and carefully pulled it off the surface. It was a photo of Robert, taken years ago, around the time he’d brought her in. It had been published in a Vegas social publication, the image taken at a benefit, and it was one of the few photos she’d ever seen of him. He was smiling in the photo. Genuinely smiling. It was a beautiful and rare thing for her to see, especially on him and she looked at it whenever she needed a reminder of the man that lurked behind the hard exterior.
In the last four years, he had become the focus of her entire world. A focus honed and sharpened in their joint pursuit of… She inhaled sharply, her mind unraveling, his lessons already flaking, dissolving, her mind twisting into knots ever since. She hadn’t killed Gwen. She couldn’t have killed Gwen. Everything that she had said to Bell Hartley was true.