Hotter Than Wildfire

by Lisa Marie Rice

  Unless…

  “Sure, I’ll come in with you, but—I’d love to make myself useful. I don’t have Nicole’s investigative skills, but I’m a really good accountant. Tax time is coming up. Would any of you like me to check your returns, or prepare them if they aren’t ready?”

  Four blank looks, which quickly turned into excitement, eyes wide, like kids just promised chocolate ice cream.

  “Oh, man,” Nicole moaned. “Me me me! I hate bookkeeping!”

  “Me, too!” the three men echoed in chorus.

  Okay. So she had some work to do. It made her feel better.

  Seattle

  At first she thought she was in her apartment, in bed, after a particularly nasty nightmare. Nightmares often accompanied her sleep. The one she had most often was running from terrible danger, only her legs wouldn’t move and she couldn’t scream. She’d wake up with a pounding heart, gasping and shivering and sweaty.

  Kerry’s brows came together in puzzlement. How could this be? She was awake, she knew she was, but somehow still in the nightmare. She couldn’t see, couldn’t move, couldn’t talk, she found, as she made a sound deep in her throat that came out soft and muffled.

  She snapped her head back, tried to look at the ceiling, but her eyes wouldn’t open. All she could see was blackness.

  “—out of it,” a man’s voice said.

  “Yeah.” Pronounced Yiah. “She’s coming round.” Another man’s voice, not American. Australian?

  Her senses returned, all at once, in a painful rush. She was blindfolded, gagged, tied up. To a chair, she found as she tried to kick her feet. They were bound at the ankles, and as she swung her bound ankles side to side they encountered spindly wooden columns. Chair legs.

  Her heart nearly stopped. Tom, she thought, terror welling up, cold and icy. He’s found me.

  He was going to kill her, beat her to death, and her hands were tied. She had an escape, but she needed her hands for it and her hands were tied.

  How could she not have imagined he’d tie her hands?

  Because he wouldn’t.

  Kerry remembered how Tom had laughed when she tried to hit back once. It had amused him. She remembered his disdainful laugh, the half-smile as she tried to defend herself. He’d studied martial arts since he was a boy. There was nothing she could do to him with her hands that would hurt. He’d never tie her hands. It was an ego thing.

  She was puzzling over that when she heard quiet steps, much quieter than the thundering of her heart. The steps approached and she braced herself, but the steps walked past her, behind her. Hands at the back of her head, and the blindfold was pulled off.

  At first she couldn’t see anything. There was a blinding light in her eyes. They hurt as they tried to accommodate.

  There was the sound of something being scraped across the floor, and a figure came slowly into focus. Black shoes, black pants, black sweater, dragging a chair. Everything about him was elegant, expensive. Another scrape and she saw a face.

  Hard, dark, triangular. High cheekbones, the kind of beard that grew dark after five p.m. Dark eyes, dark hair. A face she’d never seen before, a face she’d never forget.

  But not Tom.

  “Who—who are you?” she said, but the words were muffled by the gag.

  The man flicked his forefinger and the man behind her untied the gag. Kerry dropped her head, coughed. Her mouth was completely dry.

  The man had somehow understood. “Who am I?” He edged even closer and looked her straight in the eyes. “It doesn’t matter who I am. What’s important is what I want. I’m looking for the woman who sings under the name Eve. Her real name is Ellen Palmer, but she’s not using that name.”

  So. Kerry stared into the man’s blank black eyes. This was Irene’s Tom, worse than her own Tom. And apparently Irene wasn’t Irene. She wasn’t Eve, either. She was Ellen.

  Kerry looked into those eyes and flinched. No wonder Irene—Ellen—had been on the run. Those black eyes were utterly dead, like the eyes of a crocodile or a corpse. His eyes didn’t even reflect the light. They were like two dark pools of stagnant water.

  Impossible as it seemed, there was something worse than Tom.

  Tom was crazy, no question. But no matter that his emotions made no sense, he felt them, and keenly. All he wanted, he said, was for her to be his and to be perfect. Even when he was hitting her, there was emotion there. Rage, a perverted and twisted kind of love, a need to dominate. His eyes had glowed with what he was feeling; it was almost visible on his skin.

  This man felt nothing, nothing at all, which she now realized was scarier than rage.

  Often she’d been able to talk Tom down, get him down from the ledge of crazy despair and wrongheaded love he’d felt. Reason with him, at least a little. Because somewhere in there was a man who was suffering, who couldn’t get a handle on his feelings. She’d stayed with him way too long, but part of it had been out of a misplaced sense of pity.

  This man didn’t need pity. And he didn’t feel pity. He felt nothing.

  It was there, in his eyes, in his face.

  And at that moment, Kerry knew that she was dead. There was nothing in this man she could in any way appeal to. No common humanity, no mercy. There was none in him.

  She needed her hands. They were duct-taped together. She needed them now.

  “Where’s Ellen?” The question was quiet, factual. But she knew it was the first salvo of a coming firestorm.

  She said the only thing she could say. “I don’t know.”

  Those dead eyes watched her, watched her face. Could he tell she was speaking the truth? Was she? She knew where Ellen had gone, but she had no idea if she was still there.

  Something of her ambiguity trickled through.

  “You know,” he said flatly. “You’re just not talking.”

  He gave a short nod of his head and Kerry felt a large, male hand land on her shoulder from behind. His hand moved and suddenly two fingers pinched a certain spot and pain exploded in her body. Hot, crackling pain, unlike anything she’d ever felt before. Pain so intense she couldn’t even pull in the breath to scream. Pain so intense she thought her heart would stop.

  Only gurgling sounds were making it past her throat, then a strangled keening. The man in front of her nodded again, the hand was lifted and Kerry sagged against the duct tape, gasping and shaking.

  The man sighed. “We can do this all day and all night, you know. Just this and you’ll be reduced to a screaming mass of protoplasm at the end. My friend here touched a special plexus of nerves that is extremely painful in humans. He exerted minimal effort. He’s very strong and tireless. He can do this forever.”

  The chair scraped even closer, and through her own sweat and terror, Kerry could smell him now. He actually smelled good—of clean linens and expensive leather and some costly male cologne. She knew that if she ever smelled that smell again she’d throw up.

  The man behind her smelled of nothing at all. She hadn’t seen him yet, but already he seemed larger than life, inhuman as an insect or an alien.

  “Now, the reason my friend here found that particular spot so very easily is that he’s an expert at extracting information.” The man in front of her was watching her carefully, gauging the effect of his words on her. He didn’t need to assess the effect, though. He terrified her and she didn’t know how to hide that. “He knows exactly what he’s doing, and he’s broken hundreds of men. Men who were very strong, highly trained to resist torture. And he broke them down into parts. He’d have them whimpering, begging for him to stop. He never stops until he gets what he wants. And he sure won’t stop with you because you’re a woman.”

  She needed her hands!

  Another scrape and a small table was brought forward into the circle of light. On it a leather case, much like a traveling case for jewelry. The man slowly opened it up, like opening up a flower for someone’s delight. First the left-hand flap then the right-hand one. The upper one, the lower one.r />
  Kerry flinched and closed her eyes against the glare of the gleaming steel instruments.

  “Now, these are not carpentry tools,” the man said casually. “They’re tools for extracting the truth out of living flesh.”

  Kerry’s breath was caught in her chest like hot rocks; she couldn’t breathe in or out. Sweat dripped down her face, fell between her breasts, between her shoulder blades. It dripped down into her eyes, big salty drops, stinging her.

  She couldn’t clear her eyes.

  She needed her hands.

  The instruments gleamed brightly, as if brand new or recently polished to a high sheen. You couldn’t even pretend they weren’t for hurting. Every surface came to a point or a sharp edge. The handles were made to augment the strength of a hand. These two men’s hands were plenty strong. The instruments would only allow them to hurt her more.

  The man across from her, Mr. Elegant, simply waited, one leg thrown over the other, one expensively shod foot flexing every now and again, his only concession to nerves.

  Kerry had no doubt that her nerves would snap first. Her nerves, her bones. She could be reduced to a mockery of a human being and he wouldn’t break a sweat.

  Quiet. Utter and complete silence.

  For the first time since coming to, Kerry wondered where they were. Someplace where no one would come galloping to the rescue, that was for sure. Rescues were for novels and movies. No one was going to rescue her.

  There was no one to come. The deep silence could only be that of a place that was utterly deserted. Where? No clues at all. Bare concrete floor. Small Formica-topped table, inexpensive wooden kitchen chairs. That was it. She couldn’t even see the walls beyond the pool of light thrown by the spotlight.

  This place could have been a basement, a storage space, a warehouse. It could be anywhere.

  “So,” Mr. Elegant said finally. There was no impatience in his voice. No impatience, no anxiety, not even curiosity. Nothing. “Are we ready to talk, or do we have to use these?” He flicked at the table holding the instruments. “It makes no difference to me, because the end result will be the same.”

  She needed her hands. In her worst nightmares, she’d always had the use of her hands.

  As if he’d heard her, Mr. Elegant picked up what looked like needle-nose pliers, only of a superior steel, coming to a sharp point. He weighed it in his hand, turned it this way and that in the bright spotlight, as if admiring its workmanship.

  “Perfect for pulling out fingernails,” he murmured. “Designed for it, in fact.” When he lifted his head to look at her, there was no menace. He wasn’t making an idle threat. He was stating a simple fact.

  She shivered.

  “Now.” Mr. Elegant put his open palm over the instruments and looked at her. “Are we ready to talk?”

  The shivering took her whole body, as if she’d been suddenly plunged in ice. She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

  He waited.

  “Y—yes,” Kerry choked out. “I—I’m ready.”

  “Excellent. Where is Ellen now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  His hand fisted over the pliers.

  Kerry wheezed to get air into her chest. “I don’t! I don’t know! I haven’t seen her in days! Last time I saw her I was coming off the day shift and she was coming on the evening shift. More than a week ago. She hasn’t come in for work since then. Our boss is worried. It’s not like her. She’s always been very reliable.”

  He drummed his fingers once on the edge of the table, processing this.

  “Where do you think she is?”

  Running away from you. “I don’t know.”

  His eyes slid sideways and the man behind her pinched that point on her shoulder. The pain shocked her so much she jumped in her chair, lifting it off the ground. This time he kept his fingers there, on and on and on.

  She was rendered down to rock bottom by the time he lifted his hand away from her. Her head hung down, curly hair forming a dark curtain around her face. Tears spurted out of her eyes, mucus ran out of her nose, both dripping down onto her knees.

  She could barely stand stage one. Stages two, three, four and beyond were right here in this room.

  The shivering was beyond her control. She looked down at her knees, knocking together, though the movements were hampered by the duct tape around her ankles. Her breathing was loud in the room, sharp intakes of breath and sobbing.

  No way out.

  Except one.

  “I need to go to the bathroom,” she mumbled. She could barely get the words out.

  “The bathroom?” Mr. Elegant asked, black eyebrows raised, as if the very concept were foreign.

  “Please.”

  She couldn’t stand another session of pain. And they’d only just begun. Kerry didn’t have much information on Irene. Irene had been very closemouthed about her story and now Kerry understood exactly why.

  But the fact that she knew so little would just enrage the man sitting across from her. She could feel it. Years with Tom had taught her a lot about male rage. This type’s rage wasn’t explosive like Tom’s. This type had rage hidden under the skin, cruel to the bones. Even after she’d told everything she knew, he’d punish her for knowing so little.

  Kerry couldn’t do it.

  She had two things to give. She’d give one, then beg to go to the bathroom.

  Her hands, she needed her hands.

  “Bathroom,” she mumbled again, trying to dry her eyes on her shoulder. “Please.”

  “How did you two communicate?” the man asked abruptly.

  It was a question she was expecting. Still…Don’t make it easy. She let her head hang for a minute, then raised her eyes. She tried to look shaken, disoriented. It wasn’t hard. Her muscles held the memory of the red-hot pain and a pounding pulse had set up in her head.

  She opened her mouth.

  His voice dropped, became ice cold. “And don’t tell me by cell phone, because you didn’t.”

  Actually, they had. Kerry should have realized the type of man who was after Irene by the precautions she took. Irene had three cell phones, prepaid, untraceable. One to communicate with her, one to communicate with her agent and one for their boss, Mario.

  These men didn’t know that. Oh God, every piece of information she could withhold—if only she could get to the bathroom!—was something that might help Irene survive.

  Her own life was lost, she understood that. Given a choice, she’d have chosen to save her own life instead of Irene’s, but the choice wasn’t hers.

  Life, fate, destiny. Whatever you wanted to call it, it was operating here. She was already gone. A ghost. Her thirty-two-year journey from Denver to Vassar to marriage in San Diego to life on the run was over. She’d never know the love of a child, of a good man. Never feel the rain on her face, never rock to Aerosmith again. Never eat ice cream, never finish War and Peace.

  Her life ended here. Her only choice was between betraying a friend who could fall into this man’s hands, after hours and hours of unspeakable pain, or controlling the situation in the only way she knew how.

  “How did you communicate?” he asked again. He wouldn’t be a man to ask three times.

  “Computer.” Kerry coughed the word out. It tasted bitter, like betrayal. But of the two, this was better than giving a cell phone number. Or—God!—forcing Irene out in the open to save her. “Message board.” She gave the access data and password.

  Mr. Elegant nodded to the man behind her. The man whose hands held such pain in them. An electric whir, a faint bluish light reflecting off the concrete walls. The trill of Windows firing up. The tapping of keys.

  “Got it. Yeah.” The way he spoke was weird. Clipped, the vowels all wrong. Yiah. “Scrolling through. Mostly messages about meeting up. Nothing interesting.”

  No, there wouldn’t be anything interesting there. Both she and Irene would never have committed anything potentially dangerous to writing. So no, these two dang
erous men wouldn’t find what they needed in the message board. Which meant they’d probe, hard, for the next thing.

  Pain, much more pain, was coming. With death at the end of it.

  Kerry suddenly bucked, the back legs of the chair coming up off the floor. She opened her mouth, tightening her stomach muscles, retching with forced dry heaves.

  “Please,” she whispered. “I’m going to throw up. Please let me go to the bathroom.”

  They exchanged glances. They were going to kill her. But disposing of a vomit-drenched body was going to be marginally more unpleasant than disposing of a body that had been allowed to throw up into the toilet.

  With a disgusted sound Mr. Elegant waved his hand. “Take her to the bathroom.” He pinned her with his black, crocodile gaze. “Try anything and you’ll wish you’d never been born.”

  Forcing herself to retch had brought up bile, made worse by his words and the images they conjured up. She nodded her head. The man behind her came around, bent, pulled out a long, sharp knife, as gleaming as the instruments on the table. With a smooth movement, he sliced through the duct tape holding her ankles together and the tape around her breasts anchoring her to the chair.

  With a strong hand he lifted her up out of the chair. If he hadn’t kept a grip on her arm, she’d have fallen straight to the floor.

  For the first time, she got a good look at him. He was the man on her rainy street. The man she’d thought was Tom for a horrified moment.

  Turned out he was worse than Tom.

  “Hurry it up,” Mr. Elegant said sourly.

  Tears pricked at her eyes. Yes, she should hurry up and die.

  “Okay,” she whispered.

  The blond man holding her arm in a tight, unbreakable grip, Kerry shuffled more than walked to a door in a corridor she hadn’t seen before. Her legs were extremely weak, from being bound, from the terror she felt.

  The man with the funny accent almost carried her. When her knees buckled, he just picked her up with one arm around her waist and hustled her to the bathroom door. Inside was a malodorous cubicle, stained and filthy.

  Kerry stopped at the door, shuddering deep inside herself, long deep tremors. Oh God, this was it. Her life, stopping now. However awful the past year had been, on the run from Tom, once or twice she’d thought that somehow some day it would all stop.