Then Bones spoke. “You don’t want to do this.” His voice was so calm that it helped Marina slow down her own spinning thoughts.
She took a quick mental inventory of her situation. The ground was hard beneath her. The sole of one of her boots was pressed flat to the ground, giving her an opportunity for leverage. The guard was pressed against her. Every bit of his attention was focused on Bones, not her. She inched her hand down to her pocket and felt the cool metal hilt of her knife in its holster at her hip. She could tell exactly where the guard was just by the position of his hand in her hair. His sour breath whispered across her ear with each exhale.
The guard was starting to get panicky. “Drop it or she dies!”
Marina chose that moment to strike. She pulled her knife in one fluid motion. Half rolling her hips, she used her foot against the ground to lever her body over. There was barely enough space beneath the truck for the arc of her arm, but she cleared the undercarriage of the trailer and angled the blade down.
There was a squishing noise and then the warm coppery scent of blood as the sticky stuff spilled across her hand. She felt the skin give at the man’s neck. It was soft there. The knife sank in all the way to the hilt and stayed. He let go of her hair, and she was abruptly free. Rolling quickly in the opposite direction, Marina whipped her head around to face the threat, only to realize that the man had been neutralized.
The sound of his choking was suddenly loud in her ears. Blood spurted from beneath his fingers as he attempted to use his hands to stem the flow. He was looking at her. Their gazes locked as the life began to leave his eyes. He had been a coward. She wasn’t sorry she took his life.
“Marina?” Bones grabbed at her and dragged her the rest of the way out from beneath the truck. “Oh my God!”
“We have to go,” she panted. “Won’t there be other people coming? How come no one heard the shot?”
Bones sank into a crouch and reached for her knife.
She touched his shoulder. “Leave it.”
“No.” He gave a sharp shake of his head. “It ties you to this scene.”
That was when she started to feel sick. Her stomach turned over, and Marina had to flee behind the trailer and grab the bumper in order to bend over and be sick. She had killed a man. He had deserved to die, but she had taken his life. What did that make her?
Chapter Nineteen
Bones was pretty sure that his kill-box was full to the brim of intense emotion. His brain was all over the board, and he didn’t know what to do about it. He listened to Marina being violently ill. Her fingertips curled around the edges of the bumper as she held out for dear life and lost the contents of her stomach. He didn’t know whether to help or just give her a minute. The woman had just taken a life. She wasn’t a soldier. This wasn’t a battle on some foreign soil. She should not have been in that position, and he was to blame.
Self-loathing warred with a sick sense of something akin to pride. Marina hadn’t just held her own. She had been magnificent! Yet Bones knew that she had to be sick with guilt. She was a wonderful human being with an incredible ability to empathize with others. It made her vulnerable in this situation.
She finally stood up. The way she clutched at the trailer suggested she wasn’t quite steady on her feet, but she swiped the back of her hand over her mouth and took a deep breath anyway.
“What next?” she asked.
He should have told her that they were getting the hell out of there. He had no damn clue what would greet them inside that warehouse. A whole legion of guards might wait inside. Yet they had come this far and sacrificed so much to get here. Wasting that effort now went against his grain.
Bones took a deep breath. He refused to let her see the compassion in his eyes. Right now she was a brother in arms, not a woman he wanted to cradle against his chest. “No reason to waste what we’ve done. Time to move in and see what we can find out.”
Her throat moved as she swallowed. Then she squatted down and picked up a weapon. She checked the chamber and then lowered the weapon to her side. “All right then. You want to lead or bring up the rear?”
He cocked his head, wondering whether or not he was about to push her too far. “You’re the one who has previous knowledge of the layout. Where did you exit the building before?”
“That door there.” She gestured to a man door about twenty yards away, toward the back of the building. “It was a straight shot from the room where they held us to that exit.”
She was already moving in that direction. Her quick walk became a jog in less than two steps, and soon she was sprinting. Bones let her go. He knew she needed to work off some excess energy after what had happened anyway. Yet when he arrived at the back entrance to the building, Marina was yanking on the door handle and groaning.
“It’s locked!” She turned and frowned up at him. “Can you pick it? These old dead bolts are a nightmare.”
Bones squatted beside the door. He wasn’t great with locks to begin with, but this one was particularly rusted and ancient. “There’s no way I’m getting through this without equipment I just don’t have at the moment.”
“So what now?”
“Do any of those security guards have keys?” Bones began moving toward the bodies. Quicker than he was despite her smaller size, she beat him back to the loading dock.
Together he and Marina began searching pockets and utility belts. They came up with nothing. He could see the frustration on her face. Finally she stood up and gave a little huff. Stomping her foot in a fit of pique, she gestured to the men on the ground. There was only one dead. The others were just out for a while.
“I don’t understand!” she said tensely. “What use are they if they don’t have keys?”
“They probably don’t know what’s back there,” Bones reasoned. “Giving them keys might make them curious. I can’t imagine someone would leave them alive if they got too much information. These are pawns. Not high enough up the food chain to matter at all. And yet if bodies started appearing in the area and security guards went missing periodically, it would throw suspicion on the whole operation.”
“They hoard information, don’t they?” she reasoned. “It’s power to them.”
Bones needed to make something very clear. “It’s power to anyone.”
“All right then.” Marina sounded as though she’d made a very firm decision. “Where do you think the truck driver is? Shouldn’t he stay by his vehicle?”
“Chances are this is a regular route for him. He’s probably inside waiting for his load to be put on the trailer. I bet if we really wanted to find him we’d go to a break room somewhere and interrupt him jaw-jacking with his buddies.” Bones snorted. “The only drivers that stay with their loads are the ones who are self-employed and do the loading themselves. Otherwise I can’t imagine why they’d bother.”
“Then let’s go in through here and see what we find,” Marina told him. She licked her lips and set her face in a look of pure determination. “If we find trouble, then I guess we try to be more trouble than they are.”
“Great plan. Although we need to stash these bodies back in that corner, where nobody is going to find them and cry about it.” He couldn’t help but admire her bravado when she didn’t even flinch at his suggestion. “After we take care of that, I’ll go in first. You stay right on my ass. Understand? I do not want some half-assed security guy crawling up my six, so keep your eyes and ears open. Got it?”
She bobbed her head, eyes wide as she registered his grouchy-as-hell tone of voice. He bit down on the urge to apologize and started dragging the unconscious security guards back behind the loading docks, where the overhang would hide them from view. This was not the time to start acting all sensitive and shit. He needed to keep them alive. He’d try to figure out how to make all of this up to her later.
MARINA WAS SCARED out of her mind, but there was absolutely no friggin’ way she was going to admit that to Bones. His mood swings were making her dizzy a
gain, and she had no clue where she stood with him. At this point she was just glad that he was willing to keep digging around this warehouse with her.
It didn’t help her confidence any that the entrance they were using appeared from the street to be a big gaping black hole in the side of the building. There was an overhang where the loading dock was recessed into the structure. From there it was a wide doorway that appeared to have no lights on inside. There were pallets stacked here, though the two of them had watched the product get loaded onto the truck nearly twenty minutes ago now.
Her mind kept spinning as they approached that shadowy entrance. What if the driver came back? What if someone else came? What if they were spotted or someone had laid a trap for them inside? She could not help but wonder whether she had dragged Bones into a death trap simply to satisfy her own vanity.
No.
She couldn’t think that way! She had to stay grounded in the here and now. Forcing herself to be in this moment, she noted the cooler temperature inside the building. Bones crept with total silence across the cement floor. The bare, gray surface seemed to radiate cold air.
Goosebumps broke out all over Marina’s arms. Her palm sweated on the butt of her weapon, and she resisted the urge to let go and wipe her hands on her pants. She trained her eyes on every nook and cranny as she listened for anything but the hum of machinery.
That humming noise was almost more than she could bear. She knew that sound. It had haunted her dreams for months now. Then, she had not known what the noise was. Now she could imagine an entire operation to her right at the front of the building. Tiny pill bottles spinning around an assembly line as they were packed full of drugs that would take away a woman’s will to fight.
There was another noise deeper inside the building. Bones raised his hand and flattened it with his fingers outstretched. He was pointing to their left and indicating that they were not going in search of that noise.
Hard on his heels, Marina ducked behind a stack of pallets right next to Bones. She was so close to him that she could feel the heat radiating off his skin and smell the yummy male goodness of his personal musk. Then she realized why they’d hidden so quickly.
“You all loaded up?” Someone must have been talking to the truck driver!
A pair of heavy boots clomped their way, passing them by as they headed for the loading bay. “Yeah. I have to drop this shit in DC, pick up more shit, and then be in Richmond before midnight.”
“At least it’s not an overnighter,” the unseen person said with a cheerfulness that was macabre considering the circumstances.
The trucker didn’t even pause in his trek. “I suppose. Sometimes I wonder what the hell is up with these loads though.”
“I don’t,” his friend said emphatically. “Don’t ask questions and you last longer around here. That’s what I’ve learned.”
Marina wondered what the man had seen that made him feel that way. Could he know about the women being kept in the back room? Could he be aware of the cages and the people starving to death less than a hundred yards away from where he was standing? It was sick!
Bones nudged her, and she realized that it was time to get going. He was already heading down the length of the storage area filled with pallets, toward a door. She just hoped that one wasn’t locked. Surely the trucker would notice the pool of blood under his trailer, or maybe the pile of puke she’d left by his back bumper. What then?
Can’t think about that either.
She followed Bones’s lead. They ducked from pile to pile. Occasionally Bones would take out his phone, snap a picture of a label, and then send it to someone. She figured he had to be trying to help out the rest of his team. If they were trying to investigate a drug angle, this was certainly the place to do it.
It felt like hours before they made it to the door. The room smelled strange. There was an odor like ammonia and a musty scent that turned her stomach. Marina couldn’t decide whether the smell had to do with the medical supplies and pharmaceuticals stored in the room, or something else entirely.
Bones carefully and quietly tried the door handle. It didn’t seem to surprise him that it was locked. He looked at her and pointed to the door. She bit her lip and pulled her lock pick from her hip pocket. Hopefully this would be a more workable situation than that ancient, rusted-out exterior door.
She carefully placed the first pin and then slid the narrow metal pick into the lock. Her relief was almost palpable when she heard an immediate click. There was a certain satisfaction to picking a lock and doing it in a quick, efficient manner. Of course, the good vibes lasted only long enough for her to push the door open.
The scent of human waste and death wafted toward her like an intangible wave from hell. Marina gagged instantly, but managed not to vomit. She flung her arm over her mouth and tried not to breathe. Bones had already moved into the room, but her feet were planted outside the door. He turned, but she didn’t have to explain her reticence. He had already seen the cages.
Chapter Twenty
Hearing and seeing are two distinctly different things. Never had that been more apparent to Bones than when the stench of human waste and death hit him full in the face as he entered a room that was so obviously a prison.
His boots scuffed through straw. It looked as if entire bales of the stuff had been scattered over the floor to soak up—well, to soak up whatever. It was almost dark inside. Whatever pale light filtered through dingy skylights in the ceiling barely reached the floor. The odor was so strong it made his eyes water. He blinked, but the horror did not alter.
There were cages stacked haphazardly in a far corner and a forklift that appeared to be used to move them around when necessary. Five units were placed in the center of the space. Bones felt his stomach clench into a hard knot when he realized that there were shapes lying on the floors of each cage. Two looked still as death. The others seemed to cave in upon themselves.
Marina was whimpering behind him. Bones reached back and felt for her hand. He twined their fingers together and held on. Trying not to react to the smell, he moved farther into the room. They had come to find out what was here and to face Marina’s past. Now there was the necessity of freeing these women. It horrified Bones to imagine Marina—his Marina—curled up in the bottom of an animal cage like this. Nobody deserved this type of treatment. Nobody.
“What do we do?” Marina’s voice was weak and reedy. She sounded near panic.
Bones knew if he didn’t move to action soon, Marina would be lost to a resurgence of her PTSD. He could already feel how clammy her grip on his hand was. Her breathing was shallow, and she was trembling as she tried to walk.
“Check the locks,” he grunted. It was at least a place to start.
Keeping hold of Marina’s hand, Bones moved forward toward the five cages placed in the center of the room. Only one of the occupants seemed to take notice of his arrival.
“Who are you?” the woman whispered through cracked lips. Her eyes were huge in her dirty face, and she was skin and bones. She appeared to be wearing a tattered dress. “You’re not one of them. You shouldn’t be here.”
“You want out or not?” Bones snapped. “Where do they keep the keys?”
The woman was now sitting on her bottom with her arms wrapped around her knees. She rocked back and forth like a traumatized child. “The man has them.”
“Marina,” Bones whispered. “Pick the lock. You did it before.”
SHE HEARD HIS words, but they seemed to come from the other end of a long tunnel. Pick the lock. Yes. She had done it before. That was how she’d escaped, but it had taken so very long. Her tools were crude. She’d only ever watched someone do that sort of thing on television. She had possessed a basic notion of how it worked, and she hadn’t had anything else to occupy her time anyway.
Marina recalled fashioning her picks from discarded pins that had wound up on the floor. Metal shavings and the bars of her cell had been her whittle stones as she’d shaped things
to her liking. It had become an obsession, but she hadn’t thought about that time until right now. She had picked open the lock on her cell, but she had not even once thought to stop and help the other women who were locked in this hell with her. She had left them. How could she have done that?
“Marina.” Bones’s voice was coaxing and carried not a note of harshness. “Come back, sweetheart. I need you to pick this lock.”
Marina took a ragged breath. Her lungs hurt. Had she stopped breathing for a moment? Her senses were flooded with the awful smell of this room. She forced her body to move. She reached into her hip pocket. Her fingers brushed the familiar contours of her picks. She drew them out and stared at them for a moment, almost as though she had forgotten how to use them.
The lock in front of her was so very familiar. What if this was the same cage? It occupied the same position that hers had. The lock was set into the metal. It was well-oiled and maintained. All of the cages had been. She could remember a man in coveralls who would show up to oil the hinges and locks. He had worked on the containers too. Why had she never thought of him until now? How odd was it that these bastards had a maintenance man?
She brushed her fingers over the cold metal. The faintly greasy coating of oil made her shudder with distaste. Taking her pin in one hand, she inserted it into the lock. It sank into position with no argument. She twisted the other pin in her hand and inserted it next. She felt the tumblers. Twisting the pin, she waited until she heard the telltale click. How was it so silent in here? The only noise seemed to be the sound of her breathing.
A little wiggle and another twist, and the lock popped open. The cage door swung a bit, but the woman inside wasn’t about to wait. Marina barely managed to avoid catching the bars of the door in her face as the young woman shoved her way through with surprising strength.
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