“Worry about that when we get there.”
“If it’s much farther, this is going to get uncomfortable for both of us,” I said, aware this chokehold made it that much harder for anyone to help me.
“My car’s parked behind the factory,” he said with a snigger. “I’ll manage.”
“It’s not like I’m going to run with that dagger—” A loud thump from the direction of the office cut me off.
“What was that?”
Lex’s shoulder against the door, I assumed.
“You didn’t come alone,” he hissed.
Another thump and the sound of a door banging open. Lex was inside, and my situation went from bad to hell. The guy swapped elbows and the next thing I felt was the cold bite of a blade against my throat.
A chilling numbness spread through me. One false move and it would all be over. The pure and utter fear was too great to sustain. It drained out of me along with the last dredges of hope.
Lex couldn’t save me from this, not without getting me killed first.
He came rushing in from the hallway and slammed to a dead stop when he saw us. If I were in any doubt about the severity of my predicament, the look on his face would have swept it away.
“Sage, it’s okay,” he said anyway, slowly, carefully. “He’s not going to hurt you.” His eyes flicked to the guy. “You don’t need her. Take me.”
“We both know that’s not how this is gonna work,” my captor snarled.
Lex held up a hand to him. “I saved your life. Twice.”
What? He knows this bastard? He saved his life?
“That’s your mistake,” the guy said. “Now get out of my way and don’t come after us. If I catch one fucking whiff of you, I’ll spare you the trouble of having anyone to save.”
The menace in his words did nothing to me. That other shock was too busy rattling through me, unravelling everything I thought I knew about Lex.
He’d sat in the truck and told me he couldn’t explain, I wouldn’t understand, I had to trust him.
He’d known all along.
He’d known I’d be running into danger.
Somehow Lex knew this guy would be here. He’d saved his life. Twice! I didn’t even care where or when he’d had the opportunity, I just really wished he hadn’t been such a damn hero.
Lex took a few steps to the left, leaving the path clear between us and the hallway.
It wasn’t enough.
The blade pressed closer to my skin, breaking skin. “Now you’re just irritating me.”
The slice of pain broke me free of the shock, the numbness, the rising anger, the paralyzing fear. In its place, I recalled my Krav Maga training. I was a goddamn green belt. I didn’t need anyone to save me but me.
“Okay,” Lex said in a strained voice, moving quickly. “Don’t, please.”
The pressure of the blade lightened, just as Gideon stepped into the fray.
With a sardonic twist on his mouth and a raised brow, he stood there, assessing the scene for a long second before he drawled, “You really don’t want to do that.”
“Yeah?” Something changed in my captor’s stance, dropping the angle of his elbow, giving me another half inch between the blade and my throat. “You’ll have to go through her to get to me so just back off.”
He’d bent his knees, I realized, lowered himself so he was shielded behind me. The cowardly instinct worked in my favor, gave me more margin for error with that blade and weakened his hold.
I curled my biceps upward.
Sweat pearled above my upper lip. My pulse quivered with some combination of commitment and nervous energy. I’d practiced this move hundreds of times. Perfected it. But this was the real world. There was no sparring mat beneath my feet. No second chances if I got this wrong.
“Hey,” my wet-breathed captor hissed. “What are you doing?”
The twist on Gideon’s mouth flattened, as if he knew exactly what I was doing and thought it a terrible idea.
Too bad.
The mantra my instructor had drilled into us flowed through me and Gideon blurred from my vision.
Don’t overthink.
One hand gripped high on the forearm blocking my throat, slid down to his wrist as I turned into him, catching the crook of his elbow on my shoulder.
Don’t hesitate.
My other hand slapped over the hand already on his wrist to strengthen my grip as I pushed out and slipped my head through the gap beneath his arm.
Don’t give your opponent time to react.
I threw his arm away and flung myself into a roll that I could bounce up from, fighting ready while the guy staggered, confused, not sure what the hell had just happened.
Gideon took advantage before I could. He raised his hands into fists and flung them open at the guy.
Huh. Nothing happened, obviously. Then it did. The man lit up like blue and white fireworks.
A scream rent the air, the shrill vibrating with the echo. It wasn’t the man. He never knew what hit him. One moment he was an exploding blue and white popsicle and the next all that remained of him was a small pile of greyish ash.
Gideon went to investigate the source of the scream and Lex rushed over while the adrenaline drained from my body and the enormity of how much could have gone wrong bowled me behind the knees.
You don’t mess with a blade to the throat.
But I had.
And I was still alive.
“Sage,” he sighed out, wrapping me in his strong arms. “Thank God.”
“I’m fine.” I hugged him back until the tremor had run its course and by the time I pulled away, I was fine.
Mostly.
If I didn’t think too hard about the man who’d gone up like the 4th of July before my eyes.
I stared at what was left of the thug who’d lured me here and threatened me at knifepoint.
“Gideon did this.” The firework display? That shook me. But I felt oddly calm about the pile of ash. “He threw something from his fists.”
“He did.”
I looked at Lex, a swell of gratitude taking another hit behind my knees. I wasn’t seeing things. I wasn’t totally losing my mind. “Thank you.”
His brow wrinkled. “For what?”
“For being honest.”
“Most people would prefer the lie.”
“You may be surprised,” I said with a dry laugh.
“I am surprised,” he said. “By you. The way you got out from beneath that blade was impressive.”
I smirked. “I told you I’m a green belt.”
“That was more than training. It took courage and conviction and a damn clear head.” He took my hand in his, his eyes searching me. “It’s not just that. You’re taking this all incredibly well.”
My gaze returned to the pile of ash. “Trust me, I’m just hiding it well. Outside, in the truck, you said you couldn’t explain. I wouldn’t understand.”
I looked back to him, my heart suddenly vulnerable. Fragile. I wasn’t asking for much—I didn’t think—but it was important. “I don’t need to understand, Lex. I don’t even need the explanation. I only need to be aware.”
My reality.
My control.
“I get it.” His honey eyes darkened in torment. “I should have warned you about the danger.”
“You saved his life.” I couldn’t keep the sting of accusation from my tone. “Twice.”
“The first time, I gave him the benefit of the doubt,” Lex said. “He hadn’t done anything yet. Not that we knew of.”
“And by we, you mean…?” I had a lightbulb moment. “You and Gideon. Of course. You were already investigating the bastard. This has something to do with that security division Gideon works at.”
Lex confirmed with a short nod. “The second time, he had Callie. We needed him alive to get to her.”
That’s the thing with lightbulbs moments. One, and you can see that little bit more clearly. Two, and it damn near blinds you.
“Sage, I’m sorry.”
“But?” There always was one.
His face creased. “I wasn’t in a position to say anything.”
“You’re not the freaking CIA, Lex.” Or maybe he was! Who knew? Not me, that’s for sure.
“I’m a college dropout and an artist,” he sighed, rubbing his brow. “That’s all.”
That wasn’t all.
He was also the boy who’d touched my soul, stolen my heart and shared my bed last night. And he was this stranger. The boy with the disappearing scar. The boy who had people in his life with alcohol immunity and freaky fry’em fingers and God knew how many more secrets.
He was too many things right now.
I spun away from him, relieved to see a distraction on the way. Gideon was walking Callie over to us. He said something I couldn’t hear. Something soothing, I tried to imagine—couldn’t. Whatever it was cleared the terror from her expression but she was still jittery.
“I’ve read about this,” she chirped as they approached, her eyes darting to the pile of ash. “Spontaneous combustion. That’s it, isn’t?” Her chin bobbed up to Gideon and away again. “There’s loads of evidence all over the internet although the pictures all show orange flames, like a fire. This was blue fire.” Eyes on Gideon. “That’s weird, right? Blue?” Eyes back on the cremated flesh. “It didn’t look like fire.”
“Flames are sometimes blue,” Gideon offered off-handedly, his gaze meeting mine. “That was an interesting move you pulled. Glad it worked out for you.”
I glowered at him. “I’m more interested in Callie’s spontaneous combustion theory.”
“Callie.” He cupped her jaw, bringing her eyes up to him. “There was no spontaneous combustion. Nicholas Larkin got away.” He threw her jaw away and glanced to Lex. “That’s Rolling Stones to you and me and the extent of what she knows about him.”
Nice to know he’d already completed his interrogation, dotted every i and crossed every t and filed the damn report in the time it took to untie her from that crate and join us. If this was how he ran every investigation of his, no wonder we’d ended up here.
“He escaped.” Callie stated softly, totally taking Gideon at his word. “Oh, my God!” Her eyes shot to me. “I didn’t know he was going to hurt you. He swore he wouldn’t.”
“What did you think he wanted with Sage?” Gideon said, his voice scathing. “A fucking tea party?”
“That’s enough,” I told him. “She was scared.”
“And that makes it okay to trade you in to save her own butt?” The look he set on me was steeled in disgust. “You’d be feeling a lot differently if you were dead.”
“I wouldn’t be feeling anything if I were dead,” I snapped. Which kind of stressed his point. But it was over. And I was quite happy to spread the blame. “From what I’ve gathered, she wouldn’t have been kidnapped in the first place if you’d done your job properly.”
“Touché.” He smirked, his gaze sliding to Lex. “Anything you didn’t tell her?”
Lex stared at him, tension mounting between them. “Would it really matter?”
“I guess not.” Gideon stepped around Callie and tipped her chin up to look her in the eye.
“Forget everything that has happened since Nicholas grabbed you from the lake,” he said, as if he could rewrite history in the retelling. “You drank too much and wandered off from the party.”
I held back a snigger, thoroughly amused.
Until Callie repeated, “I drank too much. I wandered off from the party.”
What the actual fuck?
“You met some guy called Nicholas and went to his place to sleep it off.” His voice was low and commanding, mesmerizing her.
“I met Nicholas.”
“That’s all you remember until you called Sage from the warehouse this morning and asked her to fetch you.”
Callie didn’t break eye contact, not once, completely enthralled in his gaze. “I called Sage and asked her to fetch me.”
I shifted closer to Lex. “What is Gideon doing?”
“What he must.” Lex sent me a quick, miserly look that gave nothing away. “The Sheriff would have too many questions we wouldn’t be able to answer.”
No kidding.
But what I’d really wanted to know was, “How is Gideon doing that?”
Lex ignored me and Gideon wrapped up his hypnotic trick with, “There’s a black Audi parked out on the road. Go now and wait there for me.”
My heart drummed off-beat as I waited to see what Callie did with that. My money was on her sticking him the middle finger.
She didn’t.
On her way out, she paused in front of me. “My mom would kill me if she knew I’d passed out after the party and woke up here. You won’t say anything, will you?”
“I won’t,” I said stiffly. Should I warn her she was walking into a shit storm anyway? She seemed blissfully unware she’d been ‘passed out’ for two days.
And that wasn’t even the most disturbing thing here. Callie had barely acknowledged me since the start of high school, when she’d trimmed out the riff raff to sharpen her image. How did she not think it strange she’d called me before her own friends?
Gideon had rewritten her past and whatever he’d done was still rippling, warping her reality.
As soon as Callie was gone, Gideon set his sights on me. I had a terrible feeling I knew exactly what was coming.
“No.” I backed away in panic even though he hadn’t moved. “Don’t.”
He put a hand up. “I won’t hurt you.”
“Don’t make me forget.” I looked him in the eye. If he was going to do this, he’d do it with a damn front row seat to my soul and see exactly how much it was in fact hurting me.
But that’s how hypnosis gets you, isn’t it?
It’s always with the eyes.
I blinked away from him to Lex. “Please, don’t let him do this.”
Lex scrubbed his jaw, looking at me like a lost cause.
Me or him?
Maybe us.
We both knew I wouldn’t forgive this.
Not that’d I remember.
My blood grew hot as Gideon took a loose-limbed stride toward me. I caught the movement out the corner of my eye, refusing to look directly at him, but I was no longer sure that would be enough. I’d seen what he was capable of. He’d wiped two days from Callie’s life. He’d combusted a man with his bare hands. That was no parlor trick.
I couldn’t breathe and now I couldn’t look away from the intensity of him and the hard glint in his star dusted eyes.
He was no mere hypnotist.
He was more.
More than naturally human.
His body treats alcohol like a virus.
Supernaturally human.
“Gideon, wait,” Lex said, stepping in to block him. “Sage is part of our world. She deserves to know what kind of danger she may be up against before she runs straight into it.”
“You can give her the pretty version.”
“I already tried that and it almost got her killed.”
I wasn’t thrilled to be spoken about as if I weren’t here, but I bit down on my tongue. Lex stood a better chance at convincing Gideon than my petty pleas.
“Try harder next time,” Gideon tossed out carelessly and side-stepped him to get to me, his chiseled jaw set in stone.
If I ran, how far would I get?
If I screamed, who would hear?
If I just stood here, how much of myself would I lose?
“The demon is still out there and he wants Sage,” Lex said. “I didn’t save her today. You didn’t. She had to save herself.”
Demon? His choice of word for the lowlife who’d kidnapped Callie and lured me here for
some reason I hadn’t even begun to process tripped my frantic thoughts. Quickly followed by the rest of what he’d said. This wasn’t over. Nicholas hadn’t been working alone. Someone else was out there. After me.
Gideon had reached me.
He curled a hand around the back of my neck with a firm grip, tilting my face up to him.
I squeezed my eyes shut.
“That won’t help you tune out the command of my voice,” he said, with a gentle—regretful?—note I must have misheard.
There was nothing sentimental about Gideon.
My eyes flashed open to see I was right. A thin smile twisted into one corner of his mouth. The stars in his eyes were crystals scattered over black ice, chilling me to the bone.
And I was wrong about his brand of hypnosis. I’d heard it in the absolute authority of his voice. The command of his voice. I couldn’t defend against him simply by looking away.
“You’ve always told me the best defense is to be forewarned and forearmed,” Lex pressed. “Think about that when you take it away from her.”
Gideon’s brow sunk low while his gaze drilled deep, chasing my will to resist and the last of my independent thoughts into the shadows of my soul. Then his gaze fell away. The grip at the base of my skull released.
“We’ll finish this discussion later,” he said to Lex, turning a shoulder on me. “I’ll get Callie home, tighten up any loose ends in her story. Try not to drive Sage straight to death’s door again while I’m gone,” he added sarcastically as he walked out.
Lex and I didn’t move for the longest time.
We didn’t speak.
I was a little dazed to be standing here with my memories intact. They were intact, weren’t they?
My stomach knotted.
“What did Gideon make me forget?” I asked Lex hesitantly.
“Nothing,” he said. “Yet. We need to talk, but…” He held a hand out to me. “I’d rather not do it here.”
I brushed past him and walked on ahead. “Let’s start with what that guy—Nicholas?—wanted with me.”
“You were a means to get to Gideon.”
“Gideon doesn’t give a damn about me.”
“He came, didn’t he?”
“Only because you called him.” So Nicholas took Callie to lure me here so he could use me to get Lex to lure Gideon in? Talk about convoluted. “He didn’t seem particularly interested in Gideon when he got here.”
Torment: Dark Paranormal Romance (Eclipse Warlocks Book 1) Page 16