by Meli Raine
No sound, no music, no noise of any kind but the ringing in my ears and the rush of my breath as I hear myself inhale and exhale. Once again, awareness is a curse. It’s supposed to be a source of centering but all my breath does now is remind me that I’m breathing alone.
Where is he? Why am I in here?
A key scrapes in the lock, the click like a heartbeat, one-TWO, one-TWO. For reasons I’ll never, ever understand, I run to the far corner of the room, where thick curtains hang like sentries next to a fake window. I hide behind one panel, surprised to find a small closet there, big enough for me to stand and keep the curtain flat. Behind me is another curtain, a shaft of light coming through to the right of it. This isn’t a closet.
It’s a hidden passage. I have an escape. Instinct made me find a way out.
Hiding from Silas is not an instinct I want to possess.
The clicking of the doorknob pauses, then it opens, my relief turning to horror as a man I’ve seen only on television or in newspapers appears in stark reality.
But he’s a man I recognize instantly. Nolan Corning is in the room. I can’t make a sound.
Nolan Corning.
Who has the deadest eyes I’ve ever seen.
I’m holding my breath, wondering what the hell he is doing in here. His hand lifts, a shaft of light illuminating the key ring he slips into the pocket of his suit jacket.
It has the same gold key fob as Silas’s key.
Oh, my God.
Harry’s warnings rocket through me. Are they working together? Has this been one big con all along? Am I as foolish as Silas was when he trusted Rebecca implicitly? What the hell is going on?
Corning turns back to the door and locks it.
Warm flesh covers my mouth, a hard arm curling around my waist, wrist digging up into my ribs. The scent of a man I don’t know permeates every part of me as Nolan Corning scans the room a handful of feet away, searching. My body freezes as my heart explodes, all the pain receptors screaming, legs going cold.
I’m trapped.
I’m trapped, and the man whose forearm pushes so hard against my breast is not Silas.
“I don’t want what happened with Lily to happen with you, Jane,” the man holding me whispers into my ear, the accent grating and soothing at the same time. He’s Romanian, not Russian like my mother, but the clip of his words is familiar.
And terrifying.
I feel something cold and hard pushing against my hip. It’s his gun.
Romeo.
Oh, God. Is he here to save me or hurt me?
He won’t move the hand that covers my mouth. I can’t ask, can’t speak, can’t use words to try not to die.
I have no control.
I have no input.
I have no choice.
He whispers in my ear, the scent of roasted apples, woodsmoke, and sweat filling my nose. “I’m here. I’m here, sweetheart. I’m here to do my job. Don’t move. It will all be over soon.”
Silas
Wet.
Stuck.
Pain.
The back of my head feels like someone took a sledgehammer to it, and as I open my mouth, the edge of a broken tooth cuts the inside of my lip. It’s dark in here, too dark, and where the hell am I?
Jane.
I push up off the ground to a standing leap, fueled by nothing more than panic and instinct. Within a second, I’m calm again, rattling the doorknob in this closet I’ve been shoved into.
Locked. I’m locked inside a bleach-scented janitor’s closet, water dripping on my arm as I fight the lock mechanism.
Wait.
That’s not water.
Viscous blood ripples down the back of my hand. I reach up. Head wounds are messy affairs, and I suspect I’ll need stitches.
But right now, I don’t give a fuck about me.
Jane.
The darkness spins, my eyes fighting to see by the dim light shining in under the door. I need to orient. I need to get out of here. Someone sucker-jumped me from behind and locked me in here. I’m damn lucky they didn’t kill me.
Why didn’t they kill me?
They know Jane’s here, don’t they?
I rattle the door harder and start banging, shouting for help.
I pat myself down. No gun. No key. They stole the key to Jane’s room right out of my front pocket. Ice takes over my senses, cold hands, cold feet, images of what could happen to her flashing across the screen of my mind in a flood I can’t stop, a tsunami charging the beach.
I spit. A small sliver of tooth flies out. I’ll deal with it later. I back up until my ass slams into the handle of a mop, a bucket tipping over. I turn and feel around on shelves filled with everything you can imagine until I find what I need.
Matches.
I strike one, getting light, getting hope.
A small bag of tools, a canvas sack with handles, is on the floor to my left. I find a screwdriver. Time seems to slow down as I unscrew the hinge screws, one at a time, stripping two of them in the process. Finally, one hinge is free. One is all I need.
I peel the door back enough to crack the old wood, ripping out the next hinge, splintering a hole I crawl through.
Dizzy. I’m spinning. Lurching down the hallway, I whack into the wall, my hand covered in blood. I leave a print.
It grounds me.
My blood means someone’s out for Jane’s blood.
That cannot happen.
“Dirty?” The voice sounds like it’s above me, floating. I turn around to find Busy standing there, holding a bottle of wine in a bucket of ice. “What on earth?” Her eyes migrate to look at my head and based on her expression, it’s not good. “Someone did that to you?” Anger fills her face. “Who? I’ll get Max and Jules on him.”
“Dunno,” I say, grabbing a handful of ice from the bucket, smashing it against the wound on the back of my head. “I need a gun.”
“Gun?” I know she packs. We let the staff pack.
“Ankle? Waist?” I ask. It’s harder and harder to form words. I need a bare minimum to get what I want, though.
“You need an ambulance, Dirty. Not a fucking gun!”
“I was jumped. My client’s in the playroom. The one with the surprise passage. Get me there. Get me a gun. Get me a key to the room.”
She bends down and pulls her weapon out of the ankle holster. Knew it. She hands me a Cowboy Defender. A tiny, powerful weapon. It only holds two rounds.
That’s twice as many as I’ll need.
Busy reaches up on tiptoes to touch my wound.
Gun. I start to walk down the hall toward Jane’s room, armed again. She grabs my wrist. Presses a key into my palm.
“That opens your room. You need Max and Jules for this, or is it private?”
“Tell them to come to the playroom, but this one’s deadly. I can’t guarantee anyone’s safety.” Even Jane’s.
Especially Jane’s.
I don’t stick around to explain. Don’t need to.
Because Busy’s abandoned the wine and is running down the hall like the place is a war zone.
Which it’s about to be.
Muscle memory is a funny function. It takes you places you’ve been a thousand times and makes sure you arrive at your destination with as little mental effort as possible. I find the room Jane’s in. It’s still locked.
That means nothing.
My hand’s on Busy’s gun, my vision blurred, but that could be from the blow, from the dark, from the rising, loose feeling that my body has a limit. Who knew? I fight that feeling, ordering my limbs, my brain, my vision to provide the clarity I need to finish my mission:
To save Jane.
Jane
The curtain parts. Romeo doesn’t let go of me.
I feel his gun nestle gently between my hip bone and my lowest rib.
Please let that be a gun.
The alternative is even worse.
Nolan Corning stands there with a wicked half grin stretching thin lips acro
ss a face that doesn’t look quite human. Survival instinct makes me look at him, because how can you escape a threat you can’t see? He’s pieces of a face, his nose floating, his eyes telescoping and expanding, his lumpy cheeks sprinkled with broken red blood vessels, red nose matching the whites of his eyes, a roadmap of pink as he slurs his words.
“You look just like your mother. And your father,” Nolan Corning adds in an arch tone, making it clear he knows my paternity.
He’s as slimy in person as he is on television, a balding man in a rumpled suit, tie loose, his body reeking of sour alcohol and vengeance gone wrong. Why is he here?
I start to ask.
“She’s mine,” Romeo says before I can speak, the pit of my stomach dropping between my legs, where I clench in fear of what is to come. Two men have me in their clutches, at a disadvantage.
In the “safest place on earth.”
Where is Silas?
And if he arrives... will he save me?
Or was this all a lie, too?
I can’t believe he’s part of the conspiracy. I can’t. I won’t. Because if I let Harry’s suspicion get to me, then I’m as bad as Drew and Silas when they suspected me.
What hurt me deeply can’t be turned into a weapon against Silas.
Besides – I don’t have a choice right now, as Nolan Corning walks toward me and caresses my cheek with the back of his hand, eyes greedy.
“She’s ours,” he says to Romeo as his hand drifts down my collarbone to my breast.
I shudder.
This cannot happen.
Romeo takes a long, deep breath, his body warm, then cold as he moves, preparing to speak, the gun moving off my ribs just as the door cracks open and Silas appears, the door starting to close back on him. He shoves it, pauses, takes aim at an angle.
And Nolan Corning’s forehead explodes.
Too late, Romeo pivots to shield me, his gun disappearing, his arm around my waist yanking me back into the closet, behind the second curtain, our bodies falling pell-mell into the cloth, tearing the curtain rod off the wall. It falls and hits me square in the eye socket, the sudden pool of fabric and metal an abyss my mind can’t make sense of.
“Gentian, what the fuck? That bullet missed us by an inch!” Romeo shouts as he extracts himself from the mess of us. I’m left flailing, Silas’s scent the first thing I detect, his musk and blood stronger than the pieces of Nolan Corning splattered all over me.
Blood.
Silas’s blood?
I’m suddenly in the air, breathing in the small, dark space, dragged back into the room where Corning’s lifeless corpse rests half on the bed, half on the ground. He’s pissed himself in death.
Before death? I don’t remember how any of this works. But he’s dead.
And I’m covered in him.
“What the hell were you doing, Czaky?” Silas asks Romeo, gun on him.
“FUCK!” Romeo screams, hands up. “I was protecting her! Drew told me to cover you! Said Corning was here and –”
Silas looks at me, reaching out to smear some kind of organic matter off my forehead, flicking it away while still training the tiny gun on Romeo. “That true, Jane?”
“You asshole,” Romeo declares. “Can’t trust your own guy?”
Silas ignores him.
“I don’t know,” I answer honestly, trying to remember what Romeo did, what he said, but it’s all a blur. My hands run up and down my face, my shoulders, my neck, finding wet pieces of something I can’t let myself think about. Like walking into a spider web you don’t see but can only feel, I flail and jump, desperate to get it off me. Get it off. Make it go away.
Make it stop.
“I saved her! Found a back passage in the room. Drew told me to get in here and assist,” Romeo protests, not backing down. His manner is so different from a few moments ago, when it was just me, him, and Corning.
Silas slowly lets the gun down. Just then, two bouncers crash the room, guns up.
“It’s cool,” Silas tells them. “Thanks. Got it under control.”
They retreat as fast as they entered, turning just once as Silas shouts, “Max!” and tosses a key to the guy, who catches it with reflexes that make me think he’s part robot.
Silas takes me back behind the curtain, bending down to walk through a small passage, to a door that leads to the hallway.
I say nothing. I just move.
We walk past an ice bucket on the ground, bloody ice next to it. Silas’s hand pulling mine feels sticky. Like it was wet before, but it’s drying now. The dark hallway and the ick all over overwhelms my senses, so I just imagine my legs are robot limbs and move them, one step at a time.
I’m holding my breath.
Only when we burst into the garlic-filled kitchen do I breathe, the scent making me cough, a deep chest sound that convulses the back of my throat. Silas presses me into the open door of a car driven by Drew, the door slamming shut as the wheels are in motion, backing up in a tight alley with an expertise that is so precise, it makes me cry with relief.
“Safe, huh?” is all Drew says through clenched teeth as the car makes a two-seventy spin in the road, cutting off a minivan as we peel out.
The backseat is upholstered. I see a bloody handprint.
How much of Nolan Corning’s blood is on me?
I press my hand into the cloth. A smear.
I look at Silas.
And start to scream.
Chapter 21
Silas
I can’t really hear her.
I can see Jane screaming. Feel her hands on my arms, her fingertips brushing against the deep scalp wound at the base of my skull, her palms patting my neck, my shoulders, my back. I watch Drew’s lips move as he says words to her, his neck turned as much as he can while his eyes stay on the road.
The backseat is covered with blood in streaks and thicker stains. Looks like a Rorschach test for the damned.
“DREW!” I can finally hear her words. “We need to get to an ER. Now! He’s bleeding everywhere! My GOD, Silas, how are you functioning?”
“He’s fine. Flesh wound,” Drew says, but I know it’s all downplay to keep me calm. The hit is bad. Jane reaches up behind me and flattens her palm, sliding the flap of skin up so it closes, and puts her other hand against my forehead, pinning my head between the seatback and her hand on my brow.
“Apply pressure,” she recites to herself. I look at her, blurred vision coming into focus.
She’s a mess.
“You need a shower,” I tell her, my words thick as Drew takes a corner hard and I plow into her. Those hands of hers stay steady, locked in place even as the rest of her loses control. We’re a tangle of limbs in the back, but damn if she isn’t making sure I stop bleeding.
“I’m pretty sure I saw his skull,” Jane announces, screaming toward the front.
“Dura, mostly,” I mutter. “I just need stitches.”
“You two are impossible! You need immediate attention, you bastard, because I am not about to go through all that only to have you bleed out in the backseat of an escape car being driven by the king of the assholes!” she screams in my face as she moves against me, twisting in place as she tries to climb back onto the seat.
“Take that back,” Drew shouts. “I’m not king of the assholes. I am emperor of the assholes.”
She doesn’t get the dark humor. No one outside our world ever does. “Fuck off, Drew. And where are we going?”
“To see your dad.”
That shuts her up.
We blend into traffic. The silence gives me a chance to inventory myself. Jane’s hands on me help, but it’s like she’s a vise. Pain has something to work with now, ricocheting off her hands. The throb inside my skull feels like someone’s dropping a concrete block on my head with a clockmaker’s precision.
Bam.
Bam.
BAM!
“I can’t believe you killed Nolan Corning,” Jane finally says.
“WHAT?�
� Drew shouts. “Again, Gentian? Again with killing people who require Senate subcommittee testimony? Jesus fucking Christ.”
“I’ll try to remember your annoyance next time I save someone’s life.”
“He was about to rape me, Drew,” Jane calls back. “Or worse.”
Drew shuts up.
The silence makes my pain more real.
“Does Harry have a first aid kit? A doctor on call? Someone who can help Silas? Because I don’t think direct pressure and some antibiotic cream is going to cut it here,” Jane says, her voice cold and low. I can tell she’s falling apart.
It’s a theme.
We pull up to a row of brownstones where many senators live. There’s a flock of guards openly sitting in dark sedans just like the one we’re in. This isn’t covert.
But shielding Jane is still the goal.
“Harry and Lindsay are here,” Drew explains. “Campaign appearance and endorsement lunch thing is over. Monica’s on a plane back home for some other event.”
Jane’s body drops one ounce of tension.
“Can’t we get Silas to a doctor first?” she begs.
“It’ll be the next thing we do,” Drew promises. “What happened back there with Corning and what’s unraveled over the last few hours has to be addressed.”
“What do you mean?” she asks.
“Come to the meeting. We’re about to find out. The senator said this is a matter of life or death. When Harry says that, I take him at his word.”
“But Silas –”
“I called ahead. There’s ice and bandages, and our next stop will be a hospital,” he assures her.
I gently reach up and pry Jane’s fingers off my forehead. “You made a difference.”
“So did you.” She looks down at her blood-and-flesh-stained shirt and grimaces.
“We can’t slow down,” I say, my mouth dry, my body disconnected from thoughts. “Not yet.”
I expect skepticism. Instead, I get understanding tinged with reluctance. “Fine. As soon as this is over, you’re getting stitches and recovering.”