Oh, she’d never looked so vulnerable as now. I’d swear her cute pink lips were trembling. I may as well go all in.
“I wanted you.” Love, that word almost broke from me, but no. It would be a bit of a mockery to throw that out there, after today.
“Jesus. Grimm. Just...” She played with her weapon, rolling it in her hand, and yes, it was a hair pin.
What was she thinking? She’d never felt the depth of passion for me that I had felt for her, but then, how could she have? I’d been robbed. I’d been her companion for months and some days all I had been able to think of was how much I wanted her to love me back. Unre-fucking-quited love. Sad, really.
“You’d find it hard to kill me with a hairpin.”
Her look turned sharp. “Hairpin or hatpin, it’s pointy metal. I could. Don’t underestimate me. Break one hand and I’d get you with the other. I’m that fucking pissed off. That...” The sob was unexpected and she caught it, swallowed it down. “Okay. Enough sentiment shit. The past is gone. I don’t know how to stop you becoming a full mesmer; neither do you. Whatever your reasons they were stupid, as far as I’m concerned. You knew what mesmers did, how they thought, and you still...” She shook her head violently. “Still poisoned yourself.”
“I did, yes.” And I would get control of it, no matter that she thought I couldn’t. I leaned forward and stated my aims. “Think me bad, if you want. I am not. I will be your knight in bloody and cracked armor if I can. If...if it is at all possible. I believe this power must be controllable.
“Besides, we’re getting out of here ASAP. Once I get this chain off the wall, or these off.” I jingled the chain where it met the manacles. “I’m dragging you out of here. I’m assuming you can’t walk out yourself?”
She shook her head. “There’s some sort of compulsion. Weird things happen out there. Up isn’t up, sometimes.”
What?
How far had she gone?
“Why are you loose? Are you sure they don’t know you’re doing this?”
Zorie shrugged. “I think the women here are almost brain dead. They expect me to do nothing without orders.”
“I see. A surveillance camera could be tiny. Don’t wander. It isn’t safe. If I can get free, I can carry you out. Then we go to the cops. Or Mavros? We show the cops this place somehow. Good plan?”
Her chest heaved as she took a breath, then she put her finger and thumb on the bridge of her nose. “So many flaws. I wish, but it’s not that easy.”
Easy? I barked out a laugh. “We need to leave.”
Zorie reached under the neckline of her top and pulled out a purple-gemmed pendant. “This, was Cherie’s.”
Ahhh shit. I glanced from her face to the pendant. “Does it matter?”
“I won’t desert her. I have to find out if she is here. They torture women, you saw that. I don’t know what else. I cannot leave her here.”
She might not be alive anymore. Or here anymore. But Zorie was determined. I wasn’t getting free anytime soon anyway. I’d been digging at the wall with a spoon I’d souvenired. It’d take me more than three days to lever the anchor point from the rock. And I had to disguise the hole.
“Let’s make a deadline. After that time, we go. We go no matter what.”
“I guess.” Zorie stared at me. “You’re making me think I can trust you again.”
I shrugged. God, that sounded good, though. Maybe my speech about being her bloodied knight had worked? “Have you wondered about what Mavros might be doing?”
“If he’s alive, he’ll be doing everything he can. I know that man. This, destroying these men, it was some sort of ultimate revenge for him.”
I wouldn’t tell her I’d seen him stabbed. She had enough on her plate. Hope was better than despair but it wouldn’t hurt to state some facts. I didn’t want her with him.
“Do you still want to be his little assassin?”
“Little assassin? Huh. Yeah, that was his aim. Considering all this, today. I really don’t understand how he thought I could succeed.”
“Exactly.” Good to see she was thinking straight. “I’m not sure Mavros is firing on all cylinders
She eyed me. “There’s something you may not know. The woman who was killed. She wasn’t just a lover of his, or one of his acquired women. She was his daughter. She suicided after...” Zorie frowned off to the side. “After something like what they’re doing here. I think he said she was sold to someone. Terrible, yes. I feel sorry for her and for him, but if we get out of here, I’m not going back to him.”
“What if he gives you no choice?”
That was always the thing with mesmers, they weren’t big on giving their women a choice.
“I’ll figure it out. Right now, we are here. What deadline were you thinking of?”
Back to we not I. Good. “Three days. I’d rather go now. If I had a weight or a sledgehammer, I could smash free of the wall. Pray they didn’t hear it, then run. But three days, that should be our deadline.”
“If I find a sledgehammer lying about, I’ll bring it to you.” She smirked. “They don’t know I can walk around. I will find her, if she’s here.”
I hesitated.
“Zorie, do you think you can do this? Be here, for three days? They’re training you, remember?”
Her mouth firmed. “They don’t harm irrevocably. I heard him say that. I’ve had sex before. I can do this. They can’t do worse to me than Reuben. I swear I’m tougher than back then. I relish the chance to destroy these two men and we need this time to find Cherie.”
Her vehemence made me pause. It was a little surreal. Only a minute ago, she’d doubted her ability to succeed. I let it be. Maybe she needed this as a focus away from the hurt.
“Three days then. Except... They’ll make me do things to you. I can’t avoid that. If they tell me to, I have to.”
Zorie grunted. Her hand clenched on her skirt, then stilled. “I can take it, Grimm, so long as I know you’re on my side. Are you?”
So direct. Definitely a new Zorie. One you didn’t mess with.
“I am.”
I realized, I could never tell her about Tom. Not after this. It’d be the straw that broke the camel’s back. The secrets that we keep, just because other people can’t see the truth in our souls.
I prayed she was right – that she could survive this. Einar and Kaage were the evilest men I’d encountered in my somewhat long life and I’d met men who would sell their own grandmothers for cash.
I prayed that I wouldn’t disappoint her. Whatever they had me do, I had to keep within limits, had to be there for her...somehow. If I hurt her, I would make good, repent again. I had to be her bloodied knight, hold her close, protect her. God, how I wanted to do that, to be her fucking goddamn hero.
But all this, the out there is weird thing? Up isn’t up? I also prayed she wasn’t going mad.
As she climbed to her feet, I flicked a finger in the direction of the door. “Where are you going? Back to your room?”
“No.” Her mouth firmed, her eyes turned to steel. “I’m exploring.”
“No. They’ll catch you.”
“Have you looked, really looked at the other women? At their faces, not their cunts, Grimm.”
I let that one pass. Warranted.
“They aren’t reacting like real people. Maybe out there, if in the real world, they can appear normal. In here, they’re almost brain dead. The guards won’t look for me. They don’t expect any women to stray outside their rooms.”
“You’re an anomaly. Yes. I still think you shouldn’t be –”
“As long as you don’t tell them and I’m careful, they won’t know I’m dangerous. This is good. I might find out things that will help.”
She was right and wrong. I hated the idea of her out there, being adventurous while I sat here like a lump. I stood, slowly sliding up the wall, straightening. I held out my hand.
She grimaced. “Why?”
“I think we need to say
hi, outside of what they make us do.”
Still she hesitated.
“If you don’t trust me now, Zorie, why’d you tell me your secrets?”
“Because I’m dumb?” Then she reached out and took my hand.
At the first touch, a little shockwave rippled in.
We definitely weren’t the same anymore. I was no longer stalwart, rock-steady, buddy Grimm. That shock had been sexually charged enough to make my arm and neck hairs stand on end, and enough to make her eyes widen and an involuntary swallow rock her throat. Other things on me had stood up too.
I shifted my stance, then let go of her hand, allowing her fingers to slip through mine. Damn. Loved the feel of her.
Her fingers had been hot, way too hot.
“Thank you,” I said gruffly, wondering about that heat. The little smile that moved her lips and the appreciative sound she made prompted me. “Don’t you ever go away, Zorie.”
“Huh. We’re still friends.”
Friends? “I’d be a cold, dead planet without you.”
“Poetic?” She grinned and her hips swayed a tad. “Or the science teacher in you coming out?”
“The librarian.”
“Figures. We’re still friends, Grimm, at this moment in time. Unless you do something so bad, I can’t forgive you, ever. Keep that in mind, Mister Librarian.”
So many ifs and buts there.
“I will.” Her words about the corridors being upside-down... “Are you feverish? Because you felt hotter than normal.”
“Flattery, Grimm?”
“No. Really. I’m concerned you’re ill, maybe hallucinating.”
She scoffed. “I’m okay. I feel good, hyper if anything. Ready to take on those assholes and beat them.”
She should be scared, not acting like this was some sort of stroll into Disneyland. “I think you should go rest.”
“No.” She hefted the hairpin, flipped it in her hand and let it do a double somersault before it smacked into her palm.
The little ornament at the end must make it heavy. Perhaps it was a lethal weapon. From the look in her eye, I’d not want to be an unsuspecting guard encountering her. If I could rip the chain off the wall and go with her, I would. Her attitude worried me.
“Not changing your mind?”
“Nope. Wish me luck.”
Shit. Determined girl.
“Be careful out there.”
“I will be. Tell me something, Grimm. Are you sorry you’re becoming a mesmer?”
My answer arrived well before I could think it through – it was a truth I’d not quite understood until that moment.
“Not yet.” I took a step her way. Despite her recent bravado, she backed up, going a foot or two out the door, which both delighted and sobered me. I smiled. “I did it so you’d see me as a man, Zorie. No. The fuck I am not sorry.”
“Huh.”
One day my honesty, and my willingness to do anything to get things done, would backfire.
Or maybe it’d get me the girl.
For a little longer she stayed, tongue tip playing on her lips, assessing me, though I couldn’t tell what she decided.
It felt good to my balls though – made me feel ten feet tall. Not because I’d scared her. I didn’t think I had – just because laying my cards on the table had set things straight between us.
Sure I was being made to fuck her, but deep down, really deep down, I wasn’t regretting it, not so long as I could keep her close and safe. Better than some other man having her.
Her knight in cracked and bloody armor, that was me.
Cards on the table. Cards on the fucking table. Telling her was good.
“Bye.” Then she left me. Out the door, her footsteps tapping, fading, down the corridor. Gone.
I went into the bedroom and found that teaspoon I’d been trying on the stone. Some guy had dug his way out of Alcatraz with a spoon, hadn’t he? I’d keep the stone fragments and make them into a paste to disguise the hole I made around the anchor point...using spit and something. There had to be something in this room I could use?
Bed. Quilt with flowers and unicorns – someone had a sense of humor. Rickety cupboard. Clothes. Wait.
Soap? Yeah. That’d do it.
A realization turned up out of the blue. The fever, her extreme attitude change – this must be the mesmer bug at work. Mavros knew what it did to women, though Zorie wasn’t just any woman. If it made her do something foolish, I would kill him.
I leaned my forearm on the wall and started scraping with the spoon, using the handle end. It’d wear to a thin point after a while. The metal used for these was relatively soft and bendable.
When I tired of this I’d go back to my book. My librarian-orientated OCD had paid off. I’d started checking out the books and alphabetizing those on the shelf. When I’d shifted away a box from the bottom shelf, wedged half under a book on Japanese pottery, I’d found a nonfiction one. It was stained and dog-eared and without a dustjacket. My heart had saddened at the poor condition of the book, but the embossed title in the dark green had looked damn interesting: copyright 1901, The Ancient Art of the Locksmith. Lockpicks was Chapter Three.
My spoon, once worn down to a point, would make a fine lockpick, as well as a stabbing knife.
I sure prayed they had no pinhole camera in here. It’d be such a waste of effort if they knew. I winced when my fingers slipped and jammed into the wall. I turned my hand around.
“And I’m ruining my fucking nails too.”
After this, maybe I should go back to being a librarian. I could always drag Zorie to work with me and fuck her in one of the deserted bookshelf aisles, whether she wanted me to or not. That might just be my favorite fantasy.
Chapter 16
Zorie
“There was an old woman who lived in a shoe...” I was telling myself nursery rhymes to keep my mind off my surroundings. “She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do.”
I shivered. My surroundings would inspire deranged thoughts at the best of times – bleak corridor made of mold-coated stone, and cold, so freakily cold down here.
The further I ventured from Grimm’s door, the fewer the overhead lights, the more they flickered, and the less light they shed. Insubstantial, was that a word you could apply to a fluoro? I glared at the one overhead. Bastard thing. It wasn’t exactly doing its job.
The ceiling fluctuated in height, by inches, here and there. The walls were rougher and dribbling with moisture, and the doors leading to rooms had become rare. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say someone was mind-manipulating me.
Clearly that was what was happening. Nothing else explained this.
Perhaps some wooo wooo ghostly noises would be appropriate?
My legs wobbled. My muscles were reminding me I’d recently been used like a rubber doll. Too much, too soon. Grimm was right. I should’ve gone back to my room.
Except, I might not get an opportunity like this again.
Einar and Kaage together had somehow managed to create a doom-and-gloom atmosphere.
Well, fuck that and fuck them. Have hairpin, will kill.
I held it out, sticking from between my clamped-together fingers like a spiky knuckleduster. If I tripped, I might impale my eyeball.
“Fun times,” I whispered, ducking a dangling shred of spider web. So cliché. Next, the headless corpse. An errant thought popped up and I paused to take the web between finger and thumb. As I rolled my digits back and forth, I felt the web adhere to my skin. Real.
The corridor dead-ended, but as I crept nearer, a left-hand dogleg was revealed. There was a closed room to my right, before the corridor kinked to the left, and it seemed promising. The door was steel not timber.
I sneaked closer.
Mary had a little lamb...
I raised myself high on my tiptoes, staggering a little as I balanced, then I looked in through the usual door grille. This wasn’t a bedroom. On the opposite wall, were a long desk, a blac
k slab of glass set into the wall, like a window into another, unlit room, and a few PC screens. Blinking lights told me the power was on and at least one computer was running.
Its fleece was black as coal.
I needed to get in there. That was information, right there, oodles of it.
It crept into her room one night...
One of the PC screens was on, but whatever video they had playing, it was so dark I could barely tell what it showed. Was it a movie or a security camera feed from one of these corridors?
Something pale swung and swung. Those were legs...tied wrists and arms. The dangling dark hair hid the features until the long, pale thing swung some more. The distinct circles of nipples.
And ate her fucking soul.
Oh god, oh god.
Not security footage.
Not Cherie... Please, not.
Hair swishing... A gagged mouth. The liquid coursing down the body was the darkest red.
No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t her. I was sure, almost. Ninety-nine point nine percent sure. But oh, that point one percent was a killer.
I ducked down, gasping silently. The pin was hurting my hand because I gripped it so firmly. That could be a porn movie. A kinky one. A very kinky one.
“Jesus.” I wiped my mouth.
The lack of sounds down here said the place was deserted.
The door was locked. I did try. I was scared but for once in my life, I didn’t let that overwhelm me. It was okay to be scared if you still held it together, and acted.
Whoever that was, they were dead.
I needed to get back to my room and think. Grimm was right. Down here might be dangerous.
Maybe it was just a movie.
Chapter 17
Zorie
After my night of independence, returning to the breakfast table was simply damn irritating.
Yet once in their immediate presence, I could feel the stickiness of the control Einar and Kaage wielded.
Mavros had thought I had the ability to do more, to reject control and still be myself.
Two mesmers. That was it.
I raised my eyes from my bowl of muesli, fruit, and milk, took in Einar at one end of the table, then Kaage at the other. I’d never before tried resisting two of them. That was my problem. Even when I was asleep, their commands entangled me, as subtle as a spider with a hundred silken lines of web leading to its caught prey. Here, almost in touching distance, it was ten times worse.
Wicked Weapon (Dark Hearts Book 2) Page 10
