Chapter Twenty-Six
Blake was in the kitchen, rapping on cabinet doors, when Reagan called his name. She sounded excited.
“Be right there,” he shouted. He stepped into the living room, and the floor creaked behind him. He reached for his gun as he whirled, but something sharp jabbed him in the neck. A needle? Pain seared through the muscle, and the edges of his vision blurred.
“I’m so sorry about this,” Queen said, before his world went black.
BLAKE’S HEAD WAS SCREAMING, starting with the stabbing pain in his neck and spreading to his temple.
No. That wasn’t his head making the noise. It was coming from outside his skull. Did he fall asleep with the TV on? He tried to pry his eyes open, but the lids felt like they were weighted with cement.
He waded through the fog in his brain, to remember what happened. Reagan was shouting for him, because they were in the house. He couldn’t grasp anything after that. It was a black cloud. He’d been drugged? By whom?
The screaming was louder, hammering his ears until he winced. It was Reagan. Was she shouting for him? No. She sounded terrified.
“Don’t you dare do this to me, you fucker.” Her voice was sharp, bordering on panic. “Don’t ignore me, you fucking asshole.”
Blake forced himself toward consciousness, and his surroundings swam into view. It was a small room, and he lay in the corner, on a futon. Reagan stood at the door, pounding on it with her fists.
He struggled to stand, whatever was in his system receding more with each movement. The room was similar, but not identical, to the one Reagan had been locked in so many months ago.
He reached her and wrapped her in a hug from behind, pinning her arms to her sides. “Stop.” He slurred the word.
“Don’t touch me.” She broke away and spun to face him.
He stumbled back but regained his footing quickly. “Help me out. Tell me what happened.” It would fill in the blanks for him, but it would also force her to access parts of her mind not attached to the panic driving her.
“It’s Jabberwock.” She said the name with a combination of disgust and fear. Her voice was raw but strong. She hadn’t been screaming too long.
Not Blake’s former employers then. He didn’t know if he was relieved or a little more nervous. “How long have we been in here?” He approached her again and clasped her wrists loosely.
This time she didn’t break away. “Probably only ten or fifteen minutes. And the drive was another fifteen or so.”
“So we’re still in Logan.” He examined her hands. The fleshy sides were pink and swollen, starting to bruise. She must have been hammering as hard as she was yelling. The skin wasn’t broken, though.
“You are indeed not far from where we found you.” Jabberwock’s voice crackled through the air. It sounded as though it was being filtered through a screen before spitting out of the speakers. “I didn’t have the luxury of a fully armed contingent to help me snag you, and I was concerned, Blake, that if we pumped too many sedatives through your system, it might do damage before we got started.”
Fantastic. But not even remotely.
“What’s the game?” Reagan asked.
This was bullshit. “We’re not playing any games.” Blake looked around. The speaker was in a corner above the bed. It looked like a squashed metal cone.
“You’re not in a position to negotiate.” Jabberwock’s reply screeched with feedback.
Blake pressed his palm to the wall and dragged his hand enough to get a feel for the texture. Painted brick or cinder block.
His coat had been removed, as well as his gun and holster. Not that he was surprised. He reached for his ankle out of habit.
“I took them all,” Jabberwock said. “I want to have some fun; I’m not stupid.”
There were cameras too. Blake wasn’t surprised. Where were they? An old school, maybe. An abandoned warehouse or restaurant.
Reagan crossed her arms. “What’s. The. Game?”
“I’m getting to that. Fucking hell. You’d think a woman who hid as well as you did for so long would have a little more patience.” Jabberwock’s tone was flippant. “I’m telling a story first.”
“Fine,” Reagan said.
Blake continued to scan the room, but there was as little to see as in Alex’s house. Now that the drugs were mostly gone from his system, he could think. Stand without wobbling. Process their surroundings. He’d prefer the headache left as well, but he wasn’t betting on that happening any time soon. “You do know I’ll kill you as soon as I find you. Bare hands or whatever it takes.”
Jabberwock’s tinny chuckle filled the room. “I knew you’d play. Here’s the thing—it turns out the two of you pissed a lot of people off when you resurfaced as not dead. That wasn’t my doing. You can thank Cat, who I thought was Alice, but now I’m not certain. That’s not relevant. It didn’t take much to find out what happened to Alice after she vanished from my condo.
“We’ve got a holding facility, where we introduced her to a taste of what held indefinitely can mean.” Tony Harrison—Blake’s old boss—sounded like a bad movie villain when the recording played over the speaker. “The bitch fucking hated it. Screamed. Threatened. Negotiated. She burned herself, to get attention.”
With each new word, Blake’s ire grew another notch toward rage. Reagan clenched her jaw and fists, staring straight ahead.
“Guy was an asshole,” Jabberwock said. “He’s not a problem anymore. But my point is it was easy to find details. I didn’t have a lot of time to reconstruct the room, but you won’t be in it long, anyway. A little cash passed to the right people. A few nudges with others. My hell, Blake, your NSA friends were more willing to sell you out than—well—you were us.”
“Talking isn’t a game.” Blake couldn’t keep the irritation from his voice.
“Right. Sorry. Let’s move on.” Jabberwock’s exaggerated sigh made the sound system crackle and screech. “There’s a Glock G22 under the futon with a single bullet it in.”
“You can’t play Russian Roulette with a semi-automatic,” Reagan said.
Jabberwock laughed. “I did miss you. I’m still explaining the rules. From there, it’s simple. Gun is yours. I let you out. If you make it to me with that bullet still in the chamber, you can take your shot, Blake.”
There was a catch. Blake didn’t doubt for a second this would be much more difficult than that. He might be concerned about a pressure-sensitive trap under the futon, but he’d been lying on it, so his getting up would have changed that weight. Still, he kicked the mattress aside rather than flipping it. Sure enough, in the corner, there was a pistol on the ground.
He approached the weapon with caution, then grabbed it. He knelt on the floor, ejected the chambered round, and field stripped the gun so he could examine the springs, the barrel, the firing pin—all of it.
It appeared to be in order. That Jabberwock had given him a loaded sidearm, regardless of the limited ammunition, overloaded Blake’s dread.
“Satisfied?” Jabberwock asked.
Reagan extended her hand, and Blake grabbed it, more for the contact and assurance than for help standing. “No,” he said, “but you’d be disappointed if I said otherwise.”
“So true.” The latch on the door clicked, and it cracked open. “You were anxious for the game? Let’s play.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Reagan should be grateful for the open door, but it made her stomach plummet into her shoes. Blake encircled her waist from behind and buried his face in her hair. The intimacy was nice but ill timed.
“Listen to me.” His warm breath hit the back of her neck. His voice was so quiet she had to strain to hear the words. “Yes or no answers only when I ask. Understand?”
“Yes.” She got it—he didn’t want to be overheard. This wouldn’t be a practical tactic once they left the room, regardless of what waited, but for now, it helped calm her racing pulse.
“I’ll take the lead when we wa
lk out of here,” he said. “Not that the gun will be much more useful than a club, once I fire it, but I need you to watch our backs.”
Of course she would. “Yes.”
“Two priorities. Find you a weapon—a stick, something, anything—and get an idea of where we are. Make sense?”
“Yes.” She could do this. The conversation was all logical steps she would have figured out on her own, but talking through them helped her segment her thoughts.
“And most important, though you’re more familiar with this than I am, we promise each other right now we don’t let this guy fuck with our heads. Right?”
“Yes.”
“Cuddle time’s over. Break it up.” Jabberwock’s volume made her eardrums throb.
Blake kissed the back of Reagan’s neck. “When we get out of here, I can have us on a flight to Fiji in about two hours.”
She had to hide her smile. “Yes.”
Blake stepped around her.
“Finally.” Jabberwock sounded bored.
This wasn’t going to get old fast or anything.
Blake nudged open the door, and a siren blared over the speakers. It echoed in her skull and vibrated in her feet and made it impossible to hear what he was saying, despite seeing his lips move.
He frowned and left the room. She willed herself to go with him, but her mind was sucked back into the cell she’d been kept in. The blare of the TV. The bright lights.
She clenched her hand until her nails dug into her palm, and focused on the pain to stay grounded.
There was a light touch on her arm. She’d squeezed her eyes shut? She looked up, to find Blake had returned and was watching her with concern.
She gave him a weak smile, not willing to try to be heard over the noise.
He gestured to the door, and she nodded. The last thing she wanted was to be a liability. She needed to hold herself together.
When she stepped from the room, the noise stopped. The silence that settled in was almost as disconcerting. A look up and down the hallway showed her lockers—some open, some not, some without doors at all—and rooms with closed doors. They were in the condemned high school, outside of town.
“We have to check each door.” Blake’s whisper in her ear mingled with the echo of ringing.
They approached the first classroom. She tried the knob, while he kept watch. It was locked. From the resistance the door offered when she leaned into it, it was heavy. Probably too sturdy for them to pop it out of its lock.
There was a tall, narrow window, with a wooden board blocking the other side. Even if they could smash the glass, it was too far above the knob, for her to reach the lock. As they moved to the next room, Blake kept his attention on the new territory, and Reagan watched where they’d been. A shiver fell over her and her breath came out in white puffs. In the room they’d been locked in, it was warm.
Out here, the temperature was low enough to remind her it was below freezing outside and their coats had been taken. They both wore heavy hoodies, but those wouldn’t keep their fingers warm, or really any of part of them for long.
The approached a locker the door of which hung from a single hinge. Blake handed her the pistol, and she adopted an alert posture. Part of her time over the last several months had been spent practicing with a firearm. She still didn’t know that she could fire it, if the situation called for it, but she could hit her target if she pulled the trigger.
A screeching sound made her cringe. Blake was kicking the sheet metal free and prying the bar that acted as a locking mechanism from it. He handed her the makeshift weapon, and she returned his Glock.
There was a stairwell at the end of the hallway, as well as an exit. Heavy double doors blocked both. She leaned into one and then the other with her shoulder. They let in a gust of frigid air, and she caught a glimpse of sunlight and heard the rattle of chains.
She couldn’t see any details outside, and they couldn’t get to the locks holding the doors in place. But if someone came in through those doors behind them, they’d hear it.
The sirens blared over the speakers the moment she left the landing. Her heart jumped into her throat, threatening to hammer its way free.
Blake glanced between her and their surroundings, his brow furrowed.
She swallowed her desire to curl up in a ball and scream for it to stop, clenching and unclenching her fist until her thoughts were clear. When they started down the next hallway, the sound cut out again.
They repeated the lock checking, then creeped forward, around the entire floor. It was laid out like a square. They found one way out—a doorway leading up one of the staircases.
Blake led the way up. When she climbed, the sirens blared again. She jumped but stayed with Blake. Within seconds, the sound stopped. She wanted to shout, I’ve survived worse, asshole, but was afraid he’d see it as a challenge.
“I knew they were wrong about you.” Jabberwock’s casual tone was as grating as the sirens. She was going to hear the bastard in her sleep for years. “At least a couple of Blake’s former colleagues insisted they had broken you. That the loud noise would be a surefire trigger. But you’re stronger than that, Alice. I never doubted it.”
“Do I have to kill myself, to get a person in here?” Her voice mocked her from the PA system, tugging her back toward the past.
She glared at the nearest speaker. “I’ll tell you the same thing I told them—I don’t know what you fucking want.” While she argued with the disembodied voice, she followed Blake through the new floor, repeating the routine they established downstairs—check the door, check behind them, move on.
“Whatever they told you they wanted, they lied,” Jabberwock said. “They were trying to break you, but don’t worry. Like I said before, Tony is gone. As for what I want? You. I want you to push aside all your preconceived notions and indoctrination about good and bad and right and wrong, and understand you’re not restricted by those rules.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” she muttered, sarcasm dripping from her words.
“You’re welcome. But I’ll warn you—like with them, if you hurt yourself on purpose, I won’t come running.” Jabberwock’s tone was sad, but it wasn’t quite right. It took Reagan a moment to figure out why. It was exaggerated. Insincere. “You’re better than that, though. You won’t do that again.”
She wasn’t as convinced as him. Despite the voice in her head, chanting for her to keep going—to push through this—there was a part of her that didn’t know if she could. What happened the first time, when she was locked away, tore her down so much that she fought to keep herself calm now.
She refused to surrender or sink into despair. She and Blake could make it through this.
Couldn’t they?
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Blake could ignore the chill for several hours, as long as he kept moving and stayed focused on the situation. The soldier inside, the instinct that kicked in when there was danger, was torn. He didn’t know if he could simultaneously keep an eye on Reagan and pay appropriate attention to their environment.
He glanced at her, in the midst of Jabberwock’s most recent string of rambling. She looked rattled—understandable—but she was holding together all right.
He had to trust her to do what was required. I do. Admitting it helped him draw in more focus to give the school.
They moved to the next classroom. Jabberwock was herding them. Blake didn’t have any illusions about that. He didn’t see an alternative, though. It was either proceed or give up and freeze to death. The sun would set in five or six hours, by his estimates, but it would get colder before then.
Reagan jiggled the next doorknob, and something creaked.
Every muscle in Blake’s body tensed. He heard wood splinter and looked up in time to see the ceiling split open. “Watch out.” His bark didn’t do him any good. One of the timber supports cracked across his right arm.
A howl of pain tore from his throat, and he dropped the gun.
<
br /> “Blake.” The moment the dust cleared, Reagan was by his side.
He nodded at the pistol. “Grab it first.”
The speakers crackled to life. “I’m a little concerned your name is such an intrinsic part of her vocabulary,” Jabberwock said, “but I am going to admit you’re not looking so good, Blake.”
Blake tried to move his arm and had to clench his jaw to bite back another scream. He turned his gaze up toward the ceiling. The roof had collapsed, and snow fluttered down on them. They needed to move, and stay close to the walls, in case the damage spread. “Help me stand,” he said to Reagan through clenched teeth.
She nodded and—gun in hand—helped him drape his other arm over her shoulder and climb to his feet.
“God. I wish I’d planned that.” Jabberwock’s voice was filled with glee. “It’s got most of my plans beat. Is it broken?”
Blake twisted his arm again. “Dislocated, I think,” he told Reagan.
She stayed by his side until he was leaning against a bank of lockers. The icy metal bit into his back through his sweatshirt.
She watched him with concern, but the panic was gone from her eyes. “We need to bind it to you somehow. Make it immovable.”
“Yes.” If he kept it very still and thought about anything else, the pain dialed back to levels that allowed him to think. He wouldn’t be able to shoot with that arm. Fortunately, he was trained left-handed too. Not well, but it would do. He held out his good hand. “Gun.”
Reagan shook her head. “I’ve got it.”
“Come here.” He clasped the back of her neck and pulled her closer. With her ear near his mouth, he whispered, “I’m about to pull what you’ll think is a steaming bag of macho bullshit, but it’s not. I won’t hesitate to pull the trigger. Will you?”
The second-long pause before she said, “No,” was all the answer he needed.
“Gun.” He held out his hand again.
The Hatter and The Hare (Hacking Wonderland Book 2) Page 13
