Dangerous To Love

by Toni Anderson, Barbara Freethy, Dee Davis, Leslie A. Kelly, Cynthia Eden, J. Kenner, Meli Raine, Gwen Hernandez, Pamela Clare, Rachel Grant

  It just is.

  Like time itself.

  But time can stop. Hearts can stop. Entire worlds can stop.

  All with one word.

  “Carrie,” he says.

  Carrie.

  My own name becomes a death blow.

  So many stupid responses fly through my mind at a rate of a million miles a second. “Fancy meeting you here,” doesn’t quite work. “Let me go,” is pointless. “What are you doing here?” is a waste of my breath.

  I say nothing.

  Because, really—what do you say when the biggest drug lord and sex slave smuggler in the world is standing in front of you carrying what looks like a bag filled with medical instruments?

  And your best friend just lost an arm to him?

  “Cat got your tongue, Girlie Girl?” Frenchie says with a laugh. The cackle sounds like bubble wrap being stepped on by someone wearing combat boots. He tips his head back so far that in the thin shred of light I can see his back molars.

  They’re filled with silver. He even has a gold tooth up top.

  My skin turns to putty. It’s like I’m terrified and frozen but pumped full of heat at the same time. The dean’s cologne fills the air, a spicy European scent that is supposed to be intriguing.

  I retch instead.

  He’s so calm, Dean Landau. I shouldn’t call him that any more, should I?

  He’s El Brujo.

  The Wizard.

  And he’s here to kill me.

  Or worse.

  “You need not be afraid of me, Carrie,” he says, his eyes latched to mine as if they’re connected. With a grace he really shouldn’t possess, he sets the medical bag on the ground, never breaking eye contact. His eyes are dark, the pupils round and full of calculation.

  He looks like a hunter who is enjoying the chase.

  Right up until the second he’s about to kill.

  Please kill me fast. The thought rips through my mind like a hot knife through a stick of butter.

  “I said get the fuck outta here,” Frenchie says to someone above. He looks up through the hatch.

  The dean’s mouth tightens. He’s irritated. I feel like I see everything at once. It’s like the world turned out to be six layers deeper than I ever knew. Now I can see every layer, all the parts working at the same time like the most complex factory ever.

  It’s too late, though. All this knowledge won’t help me.

  It’s too late.

  Amy’s safe. Amy’s safe. Amy’s safe. The words roll through me like an electromagnetic pulse. They’re all I have now.

  “Carrie.”

  God, I hate the sound of my name when it comes out of him.

  “Carrie, do you have any idea how difficult this journey has been? Joe was so much easier to manipulate than you. Perhaps your mother was the one with the intelligence,” the dean says, his voice filled with a sick amusement. He’s playing with me.

  Enjoying me.

  Batting me back and forth with verbal paws, like a cat plays with a mouse before killing it.

  Fury rushes through my body like a linebacker tackling a quarterback. The force of my rage is like a twin. His eyes light up.

  He likes this.

  He feeds off this.

  I know I’m dead. Know it. There is no way out of this situation alive. Between the dean and Frenchie, they have the manpower to do whatever they want to me. I can’t fight them off. I can’t escape.

  All I can do is stall.

  Meanwhile, my mind starts to slip. It’s hard to describe, but it’s like holding on to something that looks solid but is actually made of millions of little pieces barely holding together to mimic something.

  That’s what is happening inside my brain.

  I’m just millions of shards of nothing that are floating off, as if gravity itself were disappearing.

  My heart smacks against my chest like a dying fish on a dock, but all I can feel is the thin thread of oxygen that goes in and out of my lungs. It hurts. Breathing hurts.

  Thinking hurts. Everything hurts in anticipation of what this man with the happy, sadistic eyes is about to do to me.

  And I don’t mean Frenchie.

  Suddenly, Mikey’s voice breaks in from above. “She’s not supposed to—”

  “Get the fuck out of here!” Frenchie snarls, storming up the steps.

  No more Mikey’s voice.

  And then the slam of a body against something heavy. Metal? A wall?

  A choking sound.

  Or maybe that’s me, trying to breathe. I can’t make sense of anything now.

  Not when the dean is looking like that at me.

  And his hands are flexing, opening the bag, and pulling out a saw. A bloody saw.

  I look away but I know he’s coming closer. I smell him. It’s not just the scent of his cologne any more. The odor of anticipation smells like a man aroused.

  His musk is a very masculine scent. It’s power and excitement, teasing and accomplishment, all mixed with cloves and lemongrass.

  This is the last thing I will ever smell.

  This, and the wet copper tang of my own fresh blood.

  I want to close my eyes. I want to lay on the floor and stare at the ceiling and wake up from this nightmare. It’s a nightmare, right? I’m actually asleep and this is just like the screaming dreams I’ve had for three years. None of this is real. Any minute now, Mark will shake me awake and hold me in his arms and stroke my hair and calm me down.

  Right?

  Right?

  Wrong.

  It’ll take at least half an hour to get Amy and Allie through that pipe, then longer for Chase to realize I’m not coming. Worse, Allie will crawl back with the rope and—oh, God.

  I have to warn her.

  If she comes down here, he’ll—

  The air between me and the dean is filled with a thousand tiny pins of torture. When I move an inch to the right, it’s like a knife slices my ribs. To the left, my head howls with blinding pressure. If my hand shifts, it’s as if I’ve beckoned him.

  Time is an enemy.

  It ticks on, each second a century as I await my doom.

  Amy’s blood is still on my hands, my shirt, in my hair and filling my nostrils.

  The butcher.

  She never said the dean.

  “You’re the butcher?” I ask, my voice like dry sand. I cough, the skin at the back of my throat sticking together, making me gag.

  His mouth tips up with a smile, his eyes on the gleaming, dirty metal blade of the instrument he holds.

  “Me? No.” He frowns. “How do you know that name?”

  Oh, shit.

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  No one can blame me for losing half my mind and forgetting that I’ve just shoved Amy and Allie into a pipe to help them escape. My goal right now is survival. Being halfway intelligent and remembering to keep them hidden feels like trying to hold water in your hands. You can cup your palm for only so long, but eventually all of the water will fall, pulled by gravity.

  You can’t fight physics.

  And El Brujo is a force of nature.

  A malevolent force.

  “What name?” I say, my tongue stuck to the sides of my mouth. My words come out slurred.

  “The butcher,” Frenchie growls, returning down the hatch and flipping some wall switch I’ve never seen before. Bright fluorescent lights turn the storage space into a bizarre, glowing laboratory of the damned.

  I shrug. “Whoever is cutting off the arms and legs of these women is a butcher,” I respond.

  “How do you know about that? The police have carefully kept that detail out of the news,” Frenchie snaps.

  The dean makes a dismissive sound. “The DEA agent told her, of course.” His voice drips with contempt. The change from suave sophisticate to irritated criminal mastermind makes my organs rearrange themselves in terror. “But he’s no concern any longer.”

  I say nothing. But the dean’s words can be taken so many ways
.

  Oh, Mark.

  “I am no butcher, Carrie,” the dean says. His voice feels like an evil caress.” I am an artist. A lover. A connoisseur of oddities. Nora was my one dear truth.”

  Nora? Oh. That’s right. Nora was Claudia’s mother’s name.

  “She was everything and nothing. Perfect and grotesque. Untouched and damaged. She was the ying and the yang, black and white, and when she died a piece of me went with her,” he says. His voice is filled with sorrow.

  But not an arm or a leg, I want to say. I can’t move. I’m watching him and Frenchie, letting time slip as fast as possible, wishing I could nudge it. Shove it.

  Make it go faster.

  In the bright, blinking light the dean seems less dangerous. Frenchie is pale, wrinkles in his face showing bleakly. He seems older than he is, and more pathetic. Less severe.

  I wonder what I look like.

  Not that it matters.

  “You are smart, Carrie. By now you’ve figured it all out,” the dean prods. He wants me to play this verbal game. Frenchie walks past us, toward the hole in the wall. I panic, because if he gets past the boxes he’ll see the pipe, know where Amy went, and then Allie and Amy will be at risk again.

  Just then one of the giant coffee bags begins to groan.

  Frenchie turns on his heel, walks two paces to it, and gives it an enormous kick.

  The groan intensifies.

  Frenchie kicks again with the tip of his boot.

  The sounds stop.

  “Fucking whiners,” he mutters, shaking his head. His phone buzzes and he pulls it out. He moves like someone who is pissed off at having to make any effort whatsoever to even live.

  As Frenchie reads his text, he makes a strangled noise of frustration. “Fuck,” he says, looking at the dean. “We got a problem.”

  “We have no problems,” the dean corrects him. “You do. This is what I pay you to do. Fix it.”

  “Well, then I have the fucking problem that the DEA agent got set loose by the dumbass police chief,” Frenchie grinds out.

  My heart sings.

  “Excuse me?” The dean’s voice is a metal spike through the eye socket.

  “Got a text. Huge MC fight between the Mephists and Loogie’s gang. Rolled into town and the chief needs all his officers. Paulson got set loose but on administrative leave,” Frenchie barks out. He runs a tight hand through his greasy, black hair. “Galt’s on his way.”

  Galt? Mark and Chase’s dad?

  What does all that mean? I don’t understand a word of it. I just know this has delayed the dean by one minute, and if I can string together enough delays, I can make sure Allie and Amy escape.

  The dean’s face puckers with rage. “Explain in one sentence.”

  Frenchie mutters, “DEA agent loose. Motorcycle gang fight in town. Chief distracted. Galt busy.”

  “That was four sentences,” I whisper.

  The corner of the dean’s mouth rises a fraction of an inch.

  SLAP! The back of Frenchie’s hand cracks against my cheek before I can even see it coming. I’m used to smelling Amy’s blood.

  Now I can taste my own.

  “Shut your piehole, you useless little slit,” Frenchie shouts at me.

  He’s hit the same cheek that I banged in the parking garage a week ago. It begins to throb. Heat floods the skin around my eye and tears fill my vision. My good eye looks at his hand and sees a big ring on it.

  Ah. That’s where the long, hot feeling comes from. I reach up and my fingers slide along blood.

  “Learn to keep your mouth shut, Girlie Girl. There’s more where that came from.”

  The dean just sighs, as if he doesn’t approve of Frenchie’s actions.

  He doesn’t stop him, though.

  “There is nothing that imbecile can do,” the dean says with an airy tone. “He was perfect three years ago, though, when we needed him most.”

  As I gingerly touch my face and watch Frenchie to make sure he stays away from the hole in the wall, I realize I need to say something.

  “Who?” I ask, even though I know the answer.

  Frenchie rolls his eyes, reaches over toward my chest, and pinches my nipple. “Your little boyfriend. Bet he loves dipping it in you.”

  I go cold.

  “Unless you’re still a virgin,” Frenchie adds, the implication clear.

  I look at the dean in horror. Allie’s story ripples through what few brain cells I have left. “No. No. I’m not a virgin. I’m sleeping with Mark.” I stumble over my words, my tongue swollen now. I say it again to make sure they understand me. “We’re sleeping together.”

  The dean’s mouth stretches in a disapproving line. “So sad. What a waste of pure flesh.”

  Frenchie’s nipple twist turns onto a palmful of my breast. Bile rises in my throat. I let him touch me because it buys Amy and Allie time.

  It’s a given that I’m going to die. But I won’t die in vain.

  “You like that?” Frenchie says in a husky voice, moving closer to me. The fact that I’m not fighting him seems to make him think he has permission. He smells like old spunk, cigarette smoke, and the sour nastiness of someone who drinks themselves into unconsciousness on a regular basis.

  I say nothing, but I don’t move.

  Frenchie’s phone buzzes again.

  “Ah, damn. Work comes first,” Frenchie says, moving his hands off my body. I release my held breath. My neck is tightening, nerve pain filling the bones around the side of my face. A jagged lightning bolt starts around the edge of my eye socket. A migraine. I haven’t had one of those since I was thirteen.

  I’m not surprised it’s happening now.

  “Fuck,” Frenchie hisses, looking at the dean in alarm. “We gotta go.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,’ the dean declares.

  “Shipment’s compromised. Fifty-three of them intercepted by a roadblock.”

  The dean is examining the saw blade with the emotional interest of a person looking at Egyptian artifacts at a museum. “Roadblock?”

  “We were moving them from here to the next target point.”

  “Fifty-three? We only had fifty.”

  Frenchie snickers. “We picked up a few extra along the way. For good measure. Plus the new one.” Frenchie jerks his thumb at me. “Her friend. The one the butcher took care of.”

  My heart jolts. Wait. The dean isn’t the butcher? Then who is?

  The dean nods once. “She was promising. Looked so much like my beautiful Nora.” He makes a tsk tsk sound. “And they’re all gone?”

  “Fuck,” is all Frenchie says.

  The two mutter to each other, their conversation hard for me to hear over the ringing in my ears. If Frenchie hits me again like that, I’ll pass out. And I can only imagine what he’d do to my body if I weren’t sentient.

  I shudder. I try to breathe through my nose and can’t. It’s clogged, swollen from the blow.

  But I’m also relieved. They think Amy was part of the shipment of women who’ve been intercepted. They have no idea I got her out of here. No idea she’s alive and with Allie, Chase and Drew.

  I know where everyone is, now.

  Except Mark.

  I may not know where he is, but I do know one thing.

  He’s coming for me.

  And he won’t stop until he succeeds, or—

  He dies.

  “Carrie,” the dean says, reaching out to touch my upper arm. I flinch. He ignores it. “We regretfully must pause our little interaction.”

  Sick. He’s a sick bastard.

  I turn my head away. He grabs my chin and yanks so hard I feel something pop in my neck. I open my mouth to cry out and he jams my jaw up, my teeth slamming into each other so hard I feel something break.

  “You were the final piece in this, Carrie. The piece that got away. Joe figured it all out in prison and sent you a letter before we could kill him. You were so easy to lure. Just a job with benefits. That’s all it took,” he says
with a sad, low rumble in his chest. His eyes blaze with calculated madness. “So simple.”

  I want to look anywhere but at those eyes.

  “You know nothing, though. Not one thing. Remarkable, how Joe protected you. Foolish of him. Telling you the truth would have given you a tool. A weapon. Instead, he left you defenseless. You came back to seek the truth. How cute,” he adds.

  When he says the last part, I see Claudia in his features.

  “We need to go,” Frenchie says, his voice terse. A strange sound fills the air behind him, up top where the storage room door is open. It’s a low rumble, like thunder in the distance. It grows, like a Doppler effect, but it doesn’t peak.

  It just keeps getting louder.

  The dean freezes, looking at Frenchie with a speculative air. He is in no rush.

  Bosses never are.

  Frenchie’s nostrils expand, his knee jiggling, his body nothing but supersonic speed trapped inside bones and skin. He storms across the room, grabs the giant bag of coffee beans, swings it around his hip and shoulder like it’s a demented sack of Santa’s toys, and stomps up the stairs.

  One drop of what I now know is blood splats on the concrete, leaving a stain in the shape of a bullet hole.

  The dean drops the saw to the ground with a clanging echo, then click-clacks up the stairs. The hatch shuts over my head, leaving me in the blinking light of too many fluorescent bulbs.

  But with the light of a thousand suns as hope burns so bright.

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Galt. Mark. The dean. Frenchie. The interception of fifty plus women. Mikey. My mind races to process it all.

  Mark is out. He’s free and he will find me. By now, Chase has explained where I am and what’s happening—

  Bzzzzz.

  Allie’s phone. I reach back into my pocket and grab it. My hands are slick with my own blood and the phone rises up in the air, arcing high across the room, crashing down near the hole in the wall and the sound of glass breaking feels like my heart shattering into dust.

  No.

  NO.

  I open my mouth and realize there’s something in it. As my jaw pops from being opened, I reach between my lips and worry out the irritation.

  It’s a piece of my own tooth. Frenchie really did a number on me.