Текст книги "The King"

Автор книги: J. R. Ward

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 39 страниц)

EIGHTEEN

Sola woke up with a start, her face whipping off a cold, concrete floor, her body stretched out unnaturally. Flipping herself off her belly, her brain processed the status of her location in a split second: Cell with three solid walls and one with bars. No heat, no window, recessed light high above, stainless-steel toilet.

No cellmate, no warden that she could see.

Next check-in was her body: Her head had splitting pains at the nape and in the front, but that wasn’t as bad as what was going on with her thigh. That bastard with the dark birthmark covering half his face had shot her about six inches above her knee—the fact that she could lift her calf off the floor suggested he hadn’t gotten bone, but talk about a case of the ouches. The burning sensation coupled with the throbs was enough to make her nauseous.

Silence.

Across the basement, over on a wall, a pair of chains had been bolted into the concrete, and the wrist latches that hung off their ends were a promise of horror.

Well, that and the stains between and below the setup.

No security cameras that she could see. Then again, Benloise was cagey. Maybe he’d use a camera phone to replay his version of home movies?

With no idea how much time she had, she got to her feet—

“Fuck.”

Putting weight on her right leg was like taking a hot poker and shoving it into her wound. Then pulling a Chubby Checker twist.

Let’s try to avoid that, shall we.

As she eyed the toilet, which was a good five feet away, she cursed again. This leg of hers was going to be a major tactical disadvantage—because it was hard to walk without doing a zombie foot drag—which made noise as well as slowed her down.

Trying to whisper her way over, as opposed to creating a major audible disturbance, she used the loo but didn’t flush. Then she backtracked to where she’d been. She didn’t feel the need to test out the bars or see whether the door was locked.

Benloise wasn’t into shoddy construction and wouldn’t employ someone that stupid.

Her only shot was to try to overpower that guard with the gun, and how that was going to happen in her current condition, she hadn’t a clue. Unless …

Resettling down on the ground, she sprawled herself out in exactly the same position she’d woken up in. Closing her eyes, she was momentarily distracted by the beat of her own heart.

Loud. Really damn loud.

Especially as she thought of her grandmother.

Oh, God, she couldn’t end here. And not like this—this wasn’t an illness or an accident on a highway. This was going to involve suffering deliberately inflicted, and afterward? Benloise was exactly the kind of sick fuck who’d send a piece of her back to be buried.

Even if the recipient was an innocent party to all this ugliness.

As she pictured her grandmother having only a hand or foot to place in a casket, she found her lips moving.

God, please let me get out of this alive. For vovó’s sake. Just let me survive this, and I promise you I will get out of the life. I will take her and go somewhere safe, and I will never, ever do a wrongful thing again.

Distantly, she heard a clank like a door was being unlocked, and then muttering.

Forcing her breath to be even, she watched through the veil of her hair, listening to footsteps get closer.

The man who came down the staircase was the one with that huge birthmark on his face. Dressed in black combat pants and a muscle shirt, he was grim, hairy, and mad.

“…goddamn idiot, dying on me. Least that shut him the fuck up—”

She closed her eyes … and there was another clank.

Abruptly, his voice was much closer. “Wake up, bitch.”

Rough hands grabbed her arm and flopped her over onto her back, and it took all her self-control not to gasp in agony from her head and her leg. “Bitch! Wake up!”

He slapped her across the face, and as she tasted blood, she figured he’d split her lip—but whatever pain flared up was a drop in the bucket to that thigh of hers.

“Bitch!” Another slap, even harder. “Don’t you fucking play with me!”

Her chest jerked up as he grabbed the front of her parka and ripped it open—and as her head scraped across the concrete, she couldn’t keep in the groan.

“That’s right—I’ll wake you the fuck up.” He yanked up her shirt, and there was a little pause. “Nice.”

Her bra had a front fastener and he snapped that free, icy air hitting her skin.

“Oh … that’s … yeah…”

She gritted her teeth as he felt her up, and had to force her limbs to stay limp as he went for the waistband of her pants. Just like with the flare she’d found in the trunk, she had one shot at this, and she needed him well and properly distracted.

Even though she felt like she was going to vomit again.

The guard stripped her jeans along with her panties off in a series of harsh tugs, her bare ass slapping against the cold, scratchy floor as he yanked and pulled.

“You owe me this, bitch—now I gotta tell him about that little shit you killed—what the fuck with your boots!”

He frantically pulled the laces free and yanked the things off, one after the other. And while he worked on her, there was the temptation to try to kick him in the face, but she wouldn’t have enough power at this angle to really do damage—and if she fought back too soon and lost, he was no doubt going to chain her to that fucking wall.

As his hand went between her legs, she couldn’t fight her body’s panic at the invasion—no matter what her brain commanded, her thighs pressed shut around his wrist.

“You awake now?” he gritted. “You want this, don’tcha.”

Relax, she told herself. You’re waiting for one thing and one thing only.

His hand retreated. And then the sound of a zipper being yanked down gave her the extra incentive to let her legs fall open. She needed him to try to mount her.

And what do you know, he gave it a shot.

Shoving her thighs even wider apart, he got down on his hands and knees and began to crab-walk into position.

One shot. And she took it.

With a sudden burst of energy, she jacked up and nailed a grip on the motherfucker’s nuts like she intended to castrate him. And gee whiz, that was exactly what was on her dance card.

Wrenching as hard as she could, she ignored the screams of pain in her thigh and her head and twisted with every ounce of strength she had. The guard let out a high-pitched holler, like a lapdog that had fallen into a deep fryer, and listed to the side.

That was all she needed. Throwing him off of her, she jumped to her feet as he cupped his cock and balls and curled into a ball.

Looking around quickly, she needed …

Limping across in her socks, she unlatched one of the chains that had been intended for her and dragged it back across the floor. Coiling it up around her fist, the heavy links formed a cage around her tight hand.

She went across and straddled the man’s head and shoulders. “You want a good fucking, asshole? How ’bout this.”

Lifting her arm high above her head, she brought the weight down with as much force as she could, striking at his cranium. The man immediately let out a roar and tried to cover himself up top, his arms forming a barrier around his skull.

Fine. Lobotomy later.

She went for below his ribs, for the soft field of flesh that protected his kidneys and his spleen. Over and over again, until he attempted a new defensive crouch. Back to the head—harder this time, until she broke a sweat even though she was mostly naked and the cellar’s air temp had to be in the fifties.

Over.

And over.

Again.

Anywhere she could find a place of vulnerability.

And it was the strangest thing: She had all the strength in the world during the beating; it was as if she were possessed, her injuries fading into the background in deference to the superior need to ensure her own survival.

She had never killed anyone before. Stolen from people? Ever since she was eleven, sure. Lied when she had to? Yup. Broken into all kinds of places she hadn’t been welcome in? Nailed it.

But death had always struck her as a level she didn’t want to go to. Like heroin to a pot user, it was the granddaddy of them all—and once you’d crossed that line? Well, then you really were a criminal.

In spite of all that, however, some minutes or hours or days later … she stood over a bloodied mess of a body.

Sucking breath down into her lungs, she let her arm come to rest by her side. As her strength ebbed, her grip on the chain relented and the links uncoiled themselves from her fist, falling to the floor in a hiss.

“Move,” she panted. “You have to move.”

Jesus … when she had prayed for survival, she hadn’t considered that God might give her the power to break one of his Ten Commandments.

“Move, Sola. You must move.”

Dizzy, nauseous, with a headache that was so bad her vision fizzled in and out, she tried to think.

Boots. She was going to need boots—they were more critical than pants in the snow. Scrambling around, she picked up the first one she came to, only to have it slip right out of her hold.

Blood. There was blood all over her, her right hand especially.

Wiping her palms on her floppy parka, she went back to work. One boot. Then the other. Laces sloppy but double-knotted.

Back to her victim.

She paused for a beat to take in the mess.

Shit, she was going to be seeing this on the backs of her lids for a very, very long time.

Assuming she survived.

Making the sign of the cross over her chest, she got down next to the man and patted around. The gun she found was a godsend; so was the iPhone that was … shit, password protected. Plus it wasn’t getting a signal, although maybe that would change when she was aboveground.

All she needed was the emergency call feature and then she could toss the thing.

As she leaped out of the cell, she slid the bars shut behind her. She was pretty sure that the bastard was dead, but horror movies and the entire Batman franchise suggested that belt-and-suspenders were a good call when it came to bad guys.

Quick survey. Two more cells just like the one she’d been in. Both empty. That was it.

Outside of the open area, there was a short hall and then that set of stairs, and it took her forever to get over there. Goddamn leg of hers. Pausing before she went up, she listened. No sounds of anyone moving upstairs, but there was a distinct smell of cooked hamburger.

Guess it was her kidnapper’s last meal.

Sola stuck to the wall side of the steps, the gun out in front of her, the shuffling of her right boot kept to a minimum even though she had to stop and catch her breath twice.

The first floor had plenty of lights going on and not much else: There were a pair of cots in the corner, a galley kitchen with dirty dishes in its shallow sink—

There was somebody lying on a third cot by a bathroom.

Please let that be the other dead guy, she thought … and shit, what kind of night was this that that was even on her radar?

The rhetorical was answered as she went in for a closer look.

“Oh—” Clamping a hand over her mouth, she turned away.

Had she done that with the flare? Jesus … and that smell hadn’t been from somebody doing a DIY Big Mac. That was human flesh burned to a crisp.

Focus, she needed to focus.

The only windows in the place were the squat prop-open casement ones that you usually saw in basements and they were mounted high off the floor so there was no seeing out. And there were only three doors: the one she’d used to come up from the basement, the other that was open and flashing a toilet seat, and the last … which certainly looked reinforced.

It had a punch bar on the inside.

She didn’t bother to look for any more weapons. The forty she had in her hand was sufficient, but she did go across to snag an extra clip from the kitchen counter—

Hello, Powerball winning ticket.

Car keys had been thrown casually with the clip, and if she hadn’t been so afraid for her life, she would have taken a moment to cry like a little girl.

Yeah, sure, whatever car she’d been in probably had a GPS tracker like the phone.

But compared to the option of getting out of wherever she was on foot?

She’d take it in a heartbeat.

Limping to the door, with her vision going wonky on her, she hit the bar—

And smacked right into the steel panel.

Nothing budged.

Trying again and again, she found the door locked from the outside. Damn it! And as she checked out the car keys, there was nothing else on the ring. No—

Oh, right, she thought.

Mounted beside the door, there was a small square security sensor.

Of course you’d fingerprint it—on the outside and on the inside.

Glancing over her shoulder, she looked at the body across the way—specifically the hand that had flopped off the cot and was hanging halfway to the floor.

“Fuck me.”

Going back to the dead guy, she knew dragging him over was not going to be a party. Especially with her leg. But what other choice did she have?

Glancing around, she—

Over in the corner, at a makeshift desk, there was a rolling chair, like you’d find in a proper office. It even had padded arms.

Better than yanking him across the floor, right?

Wrong. Stuffing flare-in-the-face guy into the thing was harder than she’d thought—and not because rigor mortis was an issue, as he’d apparently died not long after she’d melted his puss off. The problem was the chair—it kept slipping out of reach every time she got the deadweight—ha, ha—anywhere near the padded seat.

Not going to work. And P.S., the stench of that flesh was like a football coach urging her stomach to punt.

Breaking off with the corpse, who was now half off the cot, she scrambled for that bathroom, and the dry heaves were soooo helpful: First of all, there was nothing in there to toss, and second, if she’d thought her concussion was bad before?

Back at the dead guy’s side, she went around to his shoulders, grabbed him at the armpits, and dug in with her good leg. His boots banged into the floor one by one as she got him completely off the makeshift bed, and those Timberland heels scraped their way over to the door. Fortunately, the guard had arms long enough to be a center for the Knicks, so she was able stop a good four feet away from her target.

His elbow even bent in the correct direction.

The thumb went right where she needed it, and the light at the base of the reader went from red to blinking orange.

The instant she got out of here, she was going to jump into that damn car and hit the gas—

Red.

The reader went back to red. So his print didn’t work.

Dropping his hand, she sagged in her skin and hung her head. As a wave of pass-out threatened, she took some deep breaths.

The other guard was now locked in the cell all the way in the basement—and she’d barely been able to get this one across the damn floor. How the hell was she going to hump the man she’d killed up here?

Other man she’d killed, that was.

And shit … she’d locked him in downstairs. If that cell was print-locked, too? She was liable to starve to death first.

Unless Benloise got here soon.

Leaning up against the wall, and bracing her hands on her good knee, she tried to think, think, think …

Looked like God had taken her prayers literally: She’d gotten out of the trunk after her first “Help me, Father.” The second “Dear Lord, please let me get free” had only sprung her from the jail, but not the house.

As she offered up a third prayer, she got real specific.

Oh, Lord, I promise to get out of the life if you let me see my grandmother’s face once again. Wait, wait, that could happen if she were on the verge of death and somehow vovó came here or to a hospital. Dear God, if I can just look into her eyes and know that I am home safe with her … I swear I will take her somewhere far away and never again put myself in harm’s way.

“Amen,” she said as she struggled to straighten.

Reaching deep, she found the strength to weave her way back to the stairwell and—

Sola stopped. Pivoted back to face the counter where she’d found the car keys and the clip. Locked eyes on a solution that was at once utterly repugnant, and evidence, arguably, that God was listening.

It appeared as if things were looking up.

In a sick way.

NINETEEN

“There it is,” Assail said, pointing through the windshield. “The turnoff.”

He had waited a lifetime for the nearly hidden, evergreen-choked lane that finally saw fit to make an appearance about fifty feet ahead.

As Ehric’s phone had prescribed, they had followed the Northway all the way through the Adirondack Park, past a place called Lake Placid as well as some mountain that, considering what they had in the back, was rather fitting.

Gore Mountain.

And hadn’t he seen something about a ski resort called Killington? His kind of recreation, indeed.

It had been such a long trip. Hours and hours, each mile under the tires of the Range Rover like an endless succession of hurdles to be surmounted.

“Thank fuck,” Ehric muttered as he wrenched the wheel and they bumped onto a miserable stretch of earth.

The ascent that followed was best suited to goats, and fortunately the Rover’s superior traction turned whatever version of Goodyear they were riding upon into quite passable hooves. It was, however, another endless delay, to the point where Assail became convinced that they had chosen the wrong way: although Benloise himself was with them, one wouldn’t have put it past the man to have some sort of edict in place whereby if he didn’t contact the captors within certain parameters, whoever was in custody would be eliminated.

Assail propped his elbow on the door and leaned his face into his open palm. The fact that his Marisol was a female made him ill. Males could be hard enough on members of their own sex—thinking about all the things that could be done to a woman was a nightmare he prayed had not been made manifest.

“Faster,” he gritted.

“And run the risk of losing a shock absorber? We must needs get down off this pile of rock.”

Just when Assail was ready to roar, the end of the trip presented itself abruptly and without fanfare: A single-story concrete structure with all the charm of a kennel came into view, and before they even closed in, he popped his latch and began to jump out—

At that very moment, the door to the place swung wide.

And for the rest of his life, he would never forget what came out of there.

Marisol was naked from the waist down, a parka that he recognized flagging wildly behind her as she lurched into the night. Spotlit and blinded by the headlights, she glowed red, blood streaking down her legs and up her ghostly torso, her face grim as death as she pointed a gun straight in front of her.

“Marisol!” he screamed. “Don’t shoot! It is Assail!”

He put his hands up in the air, but it wasn’t as though she could see him. “It is Assail!”

She stumbled to a stop, but like a good girl she kept that gun up as she blinked myopically. “Assail …?”

Her voice cracked with a despair that changed him forever: As with the vision of her, he would hear that tone frame the two syllables of his name for years yet to come.

In his nightmares.

“Marisol, darling Marisol … I have come for you.”

He wanted to tell Ehric to kill those lights, but he didn’t know who else had been in there with her and whether anyone would be chasing after her.

“Marisol, come unto me.”

The way her hand shook as she brought it to her head made him want to go to her. But she seemed unsure of what was reality and what might have been a phantom of her imagination. And with that gun, she was as dangerous as she was vulnerable.

“Marisol, I promised your grandmother that I would save you. Come unto me, darling one. Come unto my voice.”

He held his arms out into the darkness.

“Assail…” As she took a step forward, he realized she was limping. Badly. But then, of course some of that blood had to be hers.

“She is going to need medical care,” he said aloud. Damn it, how could he get her treated?

If she died on the way back …

How much of that blood was hers?

As she took another step and one more, and still nobody emerged in her wake, he had some hope that not all of what covered her was her own.

“Come unto me.” As he heard his own voice break, he could feel Ehric shooting him a shocked look from the SUV. “My darling…”

Marisol moved that shaking hand over to shield her eyes, and for some reason, that brought the fact that she was naked into full focus.

His throat stung so badly he could not swallow.

Fuck this.

Assail shoved his gun into his belt and rushed forward to meet her more than halfway.

“Assail … is it really you?” she whispered as he came close.

“Yes. Please don’t shoot—come unto me, darling one.”

As she let out a sob, he grabbed her and hauled her up against his chest, the muzzle of that gun of hers going right into his sternum. If she pulled that trigger, she would kill him outright.

She did not.

With a sob, she gave herself over to his strength, and he held her up from the ground as she crumpled. She weighed nearly nothing against him, and for some reason, that terrified him even more.

Accordingly, he allowed only a moment of communion—and then he needed to get her safe.

Swinging her up into his arms, he turned and ran for the bulletproof Rover, ran into those headlights as if they were a heavenly safety zone.

Ehric and his brother anticipated what he wanted to perfection. They jumped out of the Rover and left open the backseat doors—whilst they removed Benloise from the rear and kept that man away from sight.

Marisol did not need to know of his presence.

Placing his female in the back, Assail broke out the sleeping bag he had packed, along with the water and PowerBars he had brought for her. Covering her nakedness, he held on to her as she fell into a fit of trembling.

“Marisol,” he said as he pulled back. “Eat. Drink. Ehric, my cousin, shall take you—”

Her nails bit into his forearm even through the heavy sweater he wore. “Don’t leave me!”

He touched her beautiful face. “I must needs work herein for a moment. Things must be attended to. I shall meet you on the road.” He wrenched around. “Ehric! Evale!”

The two males came over—and for a moment, he considered driving her away himself.

But no, vengeance needed to be served, and he was the one to balance the scales.

“My darling, look unto my relations.” As he eased back so they could lean in and show their faces, he was thankful they had his exact coloring, and that their features were so like his own. Indeed, the three of them had been mistaken for brothers. “They shall carry you unto safety and put their lives before your own. I shall join up with you anon. I shall not be long, I swear to you.”

Her frantic, harried eyes bounced back and forth as if she were trying desperately to hold herself together.

“Go,” Assail hissed, glancing at the facility. “Go now!”

And yet he found it impossible to turn away from his Marisol. She had been abused and her state of undress suggested that—

Ehric gripped his upper arm. “Be of ease, my cousin. She shall be treated as our precious sister.”

Even Evale spoke up for once. “She will be well in hand, cousin.”

Assail had a moment of connection with the males, words of gratitude clogging his throat. In the end, all he could do was bow unto them.

Then he had to lean back into the SUV. “I shall not be long.”

On an instinct, without being conscious of deciding to do so … he kissed Marisol on the mouth.

Mine, he thought.

Forcing himself to refocus, he grabbed his backpack, shut the SUV’s door, and stepped away. Ehric, bless him, was careful to turn the vehicle around so that Benloise was not illuminated in the headlights—and then the Rover sped down the uneven path.

Oh, how he wished that lane had been paved. He wished it were a fucking highway with a seventy-mile-an-hour speed limit. Or better yet, that they had come via helicopter.

After the headlights had disappeared, he took out a headset and put it on, clicking on its miner’s light. Then he went over to Benloise, grabbed him by the duct-tape straps about his ankles, and pulled him across the snowy ground to the open entry.

Dropping the legs, he palmed his gun and pointed it at the man.

“Just to make sure you stay put,” Assail ground out.

Pop!

Benloise jerked in tighter, trying to protect his gut—too late. The bullet was already in there and leisurely doing its job: While painful and debilitating, intestinal wounds took their own sweet time accomplishing their goal.

Although Assail didn’t plan on keeping the bastard waiting long for his death.

Striding into the dwelling, he kept his weapon up and his eyes sharp.

What he found inside gave him pause.

Directly by the open door, a severed human hand lay discarded, as if its purpose had been served and it was no longer of value. The body it had been attached to was right there as well—no, that corpse had two hands … although no face to speak of.

So there was at least one other dead inside.

His Marisol had clearly fought for her freedom like a banshee.

Walking around the open floor space, he saw nothing of value or interest—or anything that could detain an individual. But over in the far corner, there were a set of stairs descending to a lower level.

He double-checked on his captive. Benloise remained writhing in the snow just outside the main door, his dark eyes open and blinking unevenly, his upper lip peeled back, his porcelain caps glowing in the ambient light.

Best to take him with.

Assail went over and yanked the man up to his feet. When Benloise failed to stand on his own, it was the work of a moment to drag his hundred-and-forty-pound weight into the interior. Then together, they promenaded over to the staircase.

Down into the underground, Benloise’s useless feet bouncing behind them like balls.

And there was the evil.

The lower floor was made up of a large open space with three cells and a wall of horror. One of the cells was not empty. There was a man with a brutalized face and neck lying on his back, staring at what you could only hope was Hell. His right arm had been pulled through the iron bars, and the bloody stump announced that his was the hand that had been taken.

For a moment, Assail felt his heart sting with desolate pride. Marisol had gotten herself out. No matter what they had done to her, or how few her resources had been, she had triumphed over her captors, bringing them not just to heel, but to their graves …

It was at that moment that he knew he was lost to her.

He was in love with this woman—and indeed, it was sick to feel those depths in the midst of this carnage and violence, but the heart was where it was.

And as Assail pictured his Marisol chained to that stained stretch of concrete wall, he became rageful to the point of insanity, a stampede of bulls racing through his body, their thousand hooves driving him into madness.

Wheeling around on Benloise, he bared his fangs and hissed like the vampire he was—

In spite of being shot, the drug wholesaler recoiled. “Madre de Dios!”

Assail scrummed down, getting in the man’s face. “That is right! I am nightmare come upon you!”

There was only one chain hanging from the wall. The other was coiled on the floor inside the locked cell, the blood that painted the links proving it had been the murder weapon Marisol had used.

It would be put into service yet again.

Assail dematerialized through the bars and picked up the sticky, copper-scented links.

Oh, Marisol, would that you had not had to be so brave.

As Assail dematerialized back out, Benloise was no longer the in-control businessman who was used to holding all the cards. Unlike the dead bodies and the blood or even the loss of his brother and the threat to his own life—all of which he had been able to mostly retain his composure around—learning Assail’s true identity sent him over the edge.

Whimpering, crying, praying, the man lost control of his bladder, urine pooling out of his shrunken cock onto the concrete floor.

Assail stalked over to the wall and reattached the chain. Fortunately, there was nothing fresh upon the stained surface. There was going to be, however.

Manhandling Benloise’s shrieking, flopping, pissed-on body off the floor, Assail bit through the duct tape tethers at the man’s wrists, and cuffed him to the wall Christ-style by shortening the lengths until his hollow torso was pulled flat.

Assail shucked his backpack and unzipped it. As he looked at the amount of explosive he had brought with him, he knew it was more than enough to blow the facility sky-high. He glanced at Benloise. The man was crying all over himself, shaking his head as if he were hoping to wake up.

“Indeed, you are truly conscious,” Assail gritted. “That shall not last, however.”

Pivoting to face the cell, he pictured his Marisol in there, terrified … and worse.

His heart thumped in his chest. If he blew this place up … Benloise would be home free, dead and gone—mayhap to Hell, but as one could not be sure of the afterlife until one got there, it seemed far more prudent to err on the side of real-time suffering.

He had intended to kill the wholesaler first. Then set the explosives and detonate them from a distance.

But that was not as equitable as it should be. Marisol had suffered—

A growl vibrated up through his chest … as though his very body were protesting at the prospect of being cheated of the death.

“No,” he told himself. “Better this way.”

Too bad only part of him believed it.

Assail rezipped his backpack and strapped the thing on again. Going to first one and then the other of the chains, he inspected them for security. Indeed, they were well and truly placed. The same was true for the cuffs upon those wrists.

Snapping out a hold, he took Benloise’s chin and forced the man’s head back.

With another hiss, he bit into the flesh by the carotid, ripping a hunk out and spitting it onto the floor. The blood tasted good in his mouth and his canines tingled in anticipation of more. Except they would be denied.

The bite was but a symbol of what as a male he was driven by instinct and custom to do in the protection of his female. And he would have torn the neck fully open if Benloise himself had not been into torture.

As his prey spoke in a rush in that foreign tongue, Assail fought the battle to leave the man alive. Cruelty was going to require self-control in this circumstance—and ordinarily that was not a problem.