by Anne Stuart
He caught her as she fell, dragging her into the tiny room and closing the door behind them. They were enclosed in darkness, but he knew the space very well indeed. The rest of the house had no electricity, but this one room had once been very well wired. He wasn’t about to check—he wasn’t about to do anything that would signal their presence here. He dragged her over to the bed against the wall and dumped her down on it, lifting her legs up and pulling his coat around her. There was only one window in the place, overhead and covered with a blackout curtain that no light could penetrate.
She would be unconscious for at least an hour, maybe more. He glanced at his watch, the number glowing in the dark, the only light in the inky blackness. It was just after eight in the morning, and he hadn’t slept for forty-eight hours. It wouldn’t make sense to head out to the airport for another twelve hours, and in the meantime, even an hour’s sleep would make a difference.
The bed was a narrow one, and he had no intention of doing anything to disturb her. He’d slept in worse places, and he was a creature of discipline. He took one of the thin wool blankets from the bed, covering her with the other, and stretched out on the hardwood floor. His body hurt—he felt old at thirty-two. Working for the Committee was a younger man’s game—this kind of shit aged you like dog years.
He closed his eyes, willing himself to fall asleep immediately. But just as his spirit was rebelling against the Committee, his body was rebelling against its training. He lay there for five minutes, staring up into the darkness, listening to the sound of her breathing, wondering what the hell he was doing.
And then he slept.
She was trapped. Smothered in a blind darkness, the weight of it pressing down on her, stealing her sight, stealing her breath, darkness and the smell of blood all around, and she could see Sylvia lying there in a pool of red, her throat slashed, her eyes staring, her favorite dress ruined by the blood that had soaked into it. She would be furious about that. She would have wanted to be buried in that dress, she loved it so much. He’d slashed her throat—the man had slashed her throat—the same man who told her he’d kill her? And she’d let him take her, blindly, out into this darkness where she couldn’t see, couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe, could only open her mouth to scream….
He caught her as she flung herself off the bed, his arms like bands of iron around her body. She fought him like a crazy woman, alone in the darkness with death and blood pressing down on her, but he was much, much stronger. He put his hand over her mouth to silence her, and she bit him, as hard as she could, her teeth digging in, bit him until she could taste blood, and he didn’t flinch.
“If you don’t calm down I’ll be forced to break your neck,” he whispered in her ear as he held her tight against him. “I’m getting tired of dealing with you.”
She struggled, though not as wildly, and he moved his hand from her mouth, enough to let her speak. She could barely manage to choke out the words.
“I…can’t breathe….” she whispered. “It’s too dark. I…can’t bear it. Please…” She didn’t know what she was begging for, and she wouldn’t have thought it would do her any good, but he suddenly hauled her up against him, so that they were both standing on the narrow bed, and with one arm he pushed overhead, and the darkness fell away as he opened a window in the low roof and held her up to it.
The air was cool and crisp and clean, and she drew in deep lungsful of it, drinking it like water in a desert. Slowly her panicked heart quieted its racing beat, slowly her breathing returned to a semblance of normalcy, and she looked out over the rooftops of Paris on a cold winter’s morning as the first hint of calm touched her heart.
She leaned back against him as he supported her, letting the fear and tension drain from her body. “If you’re tired of dealing with me then why don’t you just let me go?”
He didn’t answer. He simply shifted her body against his, and his face was next to hers as he looked out with her. “How long have you been claustrophobic?” he asked. “All your life? You don’t strike me as someone who’d be crippled by complexes.”
“Since I was eight. We own a lot of land in North Carolina, including an abandoned mine where my older brothers used to play. They didn’t know I’d followed them, and I got lost there, and they didn’t find me until the next morning. I haven’t been able to bear dark, closed-in places ever since.” She was talking too much, but she couldn’t help it.
He said nothing. The air was icy cold—she could see her breath in front of her, see the mist from his mouth as well, and the two mingled in the sunlight before dissipating. She was still wrapped in his coat, but even through the layers of clothes she could feel the strength and power in his lean, elegant body.
And then the strength left her, and she sagged, and he lowered her down to the bed, reaching up for the handle on the blacked-out window.
“Please don’t close it,” she said. “I don’t think I could stand the darkness again.”
“It’s cold,” he warned her.
“I’ll survive.”
He left the window open a crack, just enough to let a narrow shaft of light into the room, as well as a few flakes of snow, and then he knelt down on the bed beside her. “The thing is,” he murmured, “you have my coat. This room was cold already, but with the window open it’s going to be freezing.”
She tried to sit up, to pull his warm coat from her body, but he pushed her back on the bed with alarming finesse. And then he lay down next to her on the narrow bed. He covered them both with a thin wool blanket, turning on his side and pulling her back up against his chest, spoon-style. He was warm, even through the coat.
“I’ll give you the coat,” she offered in a whisper. She didn’t like having him so close to her.
“Screw the coat. Just be quiet and let me sleep for a few hours. We can argue about it when I wake up.”
“And what if I’m not here when you wake up?”
“You will be. If you try to leave I’ll shoot you. I’m a very light sleeper, and I’m not in a good mood. I suggest you try to sleep as well.”
She moved her face against the threadbare mattress. Her cheekbone hurt, but Hakim hadn’t touched her face. Hadn’t gotten to it yet. And then she remembered. “You hit me!”
“And I’ll do it again if you don’t stop yammering,” he said in a sleepy voice. “I did it to save your life. You were making such a fuss someone could have overheard you.”
“Then why would you do it again?”
“To keep me from killing you,” he said in that matter-of-fact tone that drove her crazy. “Now be quiet and let me sleep.”
Clearly she wasn’t going to be able to dislodge him, and any more attempts at trying would probably wind up with another enforced sleep, or possibly something worse. She shut her mouth, keeping her eyes trained on the narrow shaft of light that somehow made her able to breathe. As long as she could breathe she could survive. The things she had seen, had heard, were too horrific to even comprehend. If she stopped long enough to really feel anything but this odd, terrified numbness then she’d start screaming, and nothing would make her stop, unless Bastien snapped her neck as he’d threatened to do. She was cold, inside and out, cold and numb, and all she could do was try to survive. She took another breath, and without any warning the vision of Sylvia’s body flashed into her mind and the numbness began to crumble.
She’d only seen her for a second, but that brief glimpse was forever burned into her brain. Someone had cut her throat, so deeply that Chloe could see bone. The pool of blood had been thick and viscous, and her eyes had been open and staring. Somehow that was the worst. Sylvia staring sightlessly into the world that had left her behind, and it had been Chloe’s fault. She was the one who was supposed to be dead, not Sylvia. Sylvia, whose only fault was to love life too much. To prefer a good time to a weekend of work in the country.
Sylvia wouldn’t have poked her nose where it didn’t belong. She would have cheerfully gone to bed with Bastien, translat
ed and come back home with no disturbing questions. She’d always had the ability to ignore nagging discrepancies, but she’d died anyway, because her friend couldn’t leave well enough alone.
“Stop thinking about it.” Bastien’s voice was a sleepy whisper in her ear, just a breath of sound. “There’s nothing you can do about it, and brooding will only make it worse.”
“It was my fault.”
“Bullshit.” The word sounded strange in such a quiet voice. “You didn’t kill her. You didn’t even lead them to the apartment—she was dead before you got there. For what it’s worth, she died quickly.”
“If I hadn’t taken the job—”
“‘If’ is a waste of time. Let her go. You can mourn her once you’re safe at home.”
“But—”
He put his hand over her mouth, silencing her last protest. “Go to sleep, Chloe. The best thing you can do for the girl is survive. Not let them destroy you, too. And in order to do that, you need sleep. I need sleep. Enough.”
He was holding her against his body, and she couldn’t turn to see his face. Instead she looked upward, through the narrow slit of light into the cold gray Paris sky. A few stray snowflakes drifted down into the room, landing on the black cashmere coat that had become almost a second skin. Drifting and melting and gone. And Chloe slept.
15
Chloe wasn’t quite sure what had woken her up. She was alone in the bed, and cold, but it wasn’t the dense, suffocating blackness. A small flashlight lay on the mattress beside her, the light a tiny beacon in the dark.
She sat up, slowly. Her entire body ached, her stomach was twisted in knots and her head hurt. Her best friend had been murdered because of her, and she was on the run for her life, with only an enigmatic killer to turn to.
But she was alive. Painfully, undeniably alive, despite the guilt and the fear that were tearing at her. The only question was, what would she do next? And where was Bastien?
There was always the possibility that he’d finally abandoned her. Taken her to this deserted house, dragged her up to a tiny room and locked her in there to slowly die of starvation.
But there was a window in the roof, and she could climb out. And he had no reason to drag her all the way here if he wanted her dead.
If it was a question of simply hiding her body, then he wouldn’t have abandoned her to starve or scream or fall to her death on the pavement below when she tried to escape. He would have killed her, quickly, painlessly. He’d promised her that much, and she found the notion comforting. It was a sick, twisted reaction, but she was beyond conventional thought and emotions. Everything had been stripped down to the bare minimum—survival. After seeing Sylvia’s poor body she could no longer deny it. Her only means of survival was Bastien, and she wasn’t going to fight him anymore. In fact, she was actually going to be glad when he reappeared in the tiny, closed-off room. Downright delirious. Though she had no intention of telling him.
She scooted over to the corner of the bed, wrapping his coat more closely around her, pulling the threadbare blanket over her as well. She was hungry, a notion that horrified her. When her nephew had died in a car accident she hadn’t been able to eat for days—the very sight of food had made her nauseous. But now, even after seeing Sylvia’s brutalized body, she was famished. Part of the survival instinct, she supposed. It didn’t make her feel any less crass, but there it was. She wanted to survive, and she needed her strength to do it. And to be strong, she needed to eat. It was that simple.
Where the hell was he? At least he’d left her the light. She would have been screaming and climbing the walls if she’d awoken alone to total darkness.
He was right, she wasn’t the sort to be crippled by complexes. She’d actually thought she’d gotten over it years ago. She had no problem with familiar places, elevators or dark basements.
It had been her fault in the first place. She’d been eight years old, tagging after her older brothers, always trying to do what the older kids did, refusing to realize her own limitations. The mines were off-limits, even to the older boys, but no self-respecting teenager would pay attention to danger warnings. They would, however, stop at bringing their younger sister on such a risky adventure, so her only choice was to sneak after them. One wrong turn too many, and she’d lost them in the warren of passageways deep below the ground.
They hadn’t known she’d followed them, and no one realized she was missing for hours. Her flashlight had given out, and she’d been trapped in the darkness, in the middle of Miller’s Mountain, while time lost its meaning and monsters crawled at her from every corner. By the time the search party found her she’d been in the dark for nineteen hours, and she didn’t speak for two weeks after the ordeal.
Her father used to joke that after that she never stopped talking. She had a sensible family who carted her straight off to the best therapists, and by the time she was twelve she no longer had to sleep with a light on. By the time she was fifteen she could go down into the basement again, and by the time she left for college she thought she’d put it all behind her. Until last night.
It was probably just the accumulation of horrors that had suddenly made her weak and vulnerable again. She accepted that fact, grudgingly, just as she accepted she needed Bastien’s help. And she might even tell him so, if he ever got his skinny ass back here.
Except he wasn’t precisely skinny. She’d had a good look at his body in his apartment yesterday, whether she’d wanted to or not, and he was long and lean and smoothly muscled.
And she wasn’t going to start thinking about that, even though she should have welcomed the distraction. In the end she was more comfortable thinking about being trapped in a small room with monsters trying to kill her than she was thinking about Bastien Toussaint’s, or whoever he was, naked body.
She didn’t even hear him approach. She didn’t know whether the room was soundproofed or he was simply very silent, but she was sitting cross-legged on the bed, staring fixedly at the tiny beam from the flashlight and trying not to think about him when the door slid open and he was standing there.
“Are you all right?” he asked as the door slid shut behind him.
She took a deep breath, trying to sound unconcerned. “I’m fine. I don’t have any idea what time it is, but shouldn’t we be starting toward the airport?”
He said nothing, moving into the room. She saw the spark, and a moment later he’d lit candles that she hadn’t realized were there. “You’re not going to be flying out tonight.”
The knot in her stomach tightened. “Why not?”
“It’s shut down. Most of Paris is, for that matter. The snow has brought everything to a standstill. That’s why it’s safe enough to light some candles. The snow…” He paused.
“That’s all right. It’s covered the roof window, hasn’t it? I’m calmer now. Especially with some light.”
He nodded. He’d managed to acquire a jacket somewhere, and she suspected he’d changed his clothes, though they were still all the same unremitting black. Which reminded her…
“I don’t suppose there’s a bathroom in this place?” she asked. “Otherwise I’m going to have to sample the snow firsthand.”
“There is one. It’s rudimentary, but it works.”
She’d scrambled off the bed before he’d even finished his sentence. “Where?” Now that she knew relief was at hand it had become a great deal more urgent.
“It’s on the floor below, directly beneath this. We’ll have to go without light—we can’t risk anyone seeing the torch.”
She swallowed. She was better now, she reminded herself. Calmer. “Okay.”
He blew out the candles, and in the sudden darkness she heard the door slide open. She swallowed, then jumped as she felt him take her hand.
She tried to pull away, instinctively, but he held on tight. “You’re not going to find it without holding on to me,” he said, matter-of-fact.
She took a deep breath, her hand still in his. “Of course
,” she said.
It helped, holding on to him, though she wasn’t about to admit it. They walked through the cavernous darkness, down a narrow flight of stairs to a wall by an old fireplace. The door opened, and he put the tiny flashlight in her hand before giving her a little push. “Don’t turn it on until the door is closed. I’ll wait here.”
It was utilitarian indeed, but the toilet flushed, the water ran cold from the sink, and there was even a square of mirror. She could have done without that—but curiosity got the better of her, and once she’d rinsed her mouth and done her best to wash up she took a curious look.
She’d expected hollow eyes, pale color, some kind of mark from the horrors of the last few days. Instead she looked like Chloe—practical, not unpleasant to look at, the damnably pedestrian freckles still scattered across her nose and cheekbones, the bane of her existence. Her hair was ridiculous, standing up around her face like a dark halo. But she was no saint either.
She took a deep breath, flicked off the light, and then realized she had no idea how to open the door. She rapped on it, lightly, and it slid open. She couldn’t see him, but she didn’t jump when he took her hand this time, and she was almost happy to be back in the safety of the little room in the attic.
She scrambled back onto the bed—the room was so small she’d bump into him if she remained standing. He lit the candles again, reached behind his coat and pulled out a gun, setting it down on the table. She looked at it like it was a poisonous snake, which it was, but it was there to help her, not kill her. She hoped.
“So what now?” she asked.
“Now we eat,” he said, and she almost wanted to kiss him. “There weren’t many stores open, but I managed to get us something. And don’t tell me you don’t feel like eating—you have to. You’re not out of this yet, and you need your strength.”