The King (Black Dagger Brotherhood #12)(54)
Author: J.R. Ward

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 f**k,” 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.