“Anything?” I asked.
“Nope.”
We walked the perimeter of the building, examining every inch of the ground around it for signs of a cellar door. At the rear, by the back door, the rush of water caught my eye. It swirled around a specific spot in the ground, whirlpooling in the middle as if gushing into another dimension.
“Taylor, I found it!”
I knelt down and plunged my hand into the dirty water, feeling around for whatever lay below. My fingers connected with a padlock, cinched tight.
“Well?” Taylor prompted.
“It’s locked,” I said, teeth clenched. “We need a key.”
“Or another way in,” she suggested. She kicked at a pile of railroad ties that I hadn’t noticed before. “I got a feeling that even if you had the key, we wouldn’t be able to move this junk.”
“Fucking Emmett,” I growled. I pounded on the hatch door. “Holly! Holly, can you hear me?”
Try the warehouse.
I pushed myself to stand. “The warehouse.”
Taylor, skeptical, looked from me to the hatch door. “Am I missing something?”
“Yup. Let’s go.”
We sprinted across the abandoned tracks, boots squelching through the mud, and burst through the heavy doors of the huge storage warehouse across from the main building. On the upside, it sheltered us from the rain and lightning. The downside? It was essentially a huge, complex maze. Freight containers were stacked almost to the ceiling in a haphazard fashion, creating a labyrinth of danger waiting to topple over.
Taylor fiddled with something beneath her shirt then drew a gun from an invisible holster. She clicked on the flashlight attached to the barrel and raised the weapon at the ready to look around the warehouse. “Split up?” she suggested.
I nodded. Then, following Taylor’s lead, I pulled Mac’s gun and flashlight from my waist. I wasn’t sure how much good it would do me, but it was better than walking around the warehouse unaware. The two of us wandered off in opposite directions, and I lost sight of Taylor. I patrolled the far edge of the warehouse, sweeping the beam of the flashlight into each hidden crevice. As I moved deeper inward, a party of rats scurried by, wet from the storm. I jumped, but they disregarded me, their little paws squeaking over the toes of my boots as they made their escape from my flashlight. I let out a sigh of relief and raised the light again.
It illuminated Emmett’s face.
“Hi, Bee,” he said calmly. He carried an axe.
I leveled the gun at his chest. “Emmett. Where’s Holly?”
“Nearby,” he replied, taking a step toward me. To compensate, I stepped back, but my heel collided with the freight container behind me. “You’re so close to finding her. The second entrance to the cellar is right over there.”
I didn’t follow the line of his finger, afraid to look away from him. “She’s going to drown if I don’t get to her soon.”
He shrugged and hefted the axe over his shoulder. “I’m not worried. I am worried about you though. You shouldn’t play with toys you haven’t been trained to use.”
The gun trembled in my grasp. “Get out of the way, Emmett.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
He lunged toward me and swung the axe. I fired three times, but Emmett was too quick and my aim was less than stellar. Emmett knocked the gun out of my hand and made to grab me, but I landed a quick uppercut to the underside of his chin. He gagged, his hold on me slipping, and I scrambled through a narrow gap in the storage crates.
“Bridget!” he called, his voice raspy. “You can’t leave me. I’ll find you, no matter what. We’re meant to be together.”
“You’re sick, Emmett!” I hollered back, scanning my surroundings for an escape route. “Like your mother was. You need help.”
Emmett forced his shoulder through the tiny opening between the crates, but his muscled chest prevented him from advancing farther. “I’m not sick. I love you, Bee. While you were gone, I read all about love.” He grunted, his back scraping against the containers as he forced himself through. “Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear,” he quoted. “The strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star.”
I spotted a ladder on the far end of a crate. “E.E. Cummings. You did do some research.”
“It is better to love wisely, no doubt, but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all,” he said. Another quote, but one I didn’t know off the top of my head.
“No shit,” I muttered under my breath. I darted up the rusty ladder just as Emmett cleared the gap in the crates. My boots thundered across the top of the metal compartment. I didn’t dare to look behind me as a rhythmic thump indicated Emmett’s climb upward. I sprinted across the top of the containers, leaping from one to the next, but when I failed to clear a particularly large jump, I fell against the side of the container to the concrete floor below. My wrist buckled underneath my weight and snapped. I held in a howl of pain, biting my lip so hard that it bled. With my wrist clutched to my chest, I got to my feet and ran off again.
“The opposite of love is not hate,” Emmett’s voice echoed from above like a vengeful god’s. I tilted my head up to search for him, but his hulking figure was nowhere to be seen. “It is indifference. Do you know that one, Bee? It’s Elie Wiesel. I don’t want you to be indifferent toward me, Bridget.”
“You can’t make someone fall in love with you,” I called up to him. I staggered through another gap in the crates, emerging into another alcove amongst the containers, but a thud echoed overhead, and I knew that I was in trouble.
Emmett leapt down, landing in a low squat right in front of me. Somewhere along the way, he’d lost the axe. I swiftly turned, but he rose to his feet and grabbed me around the waist. My wrist got trapped between his chest and mine, and I stifled a cry. He took my chin roughly.
“I’m going to make you love me,” he growled.
“God, I hate that song.”
He crushed his lips to mine and bit down. A gush of tangy, bitter blood flooded my tongue. With my good hand, I reached down, toward Emmett’s lower half, and squeezed without mercy. He roared in pain, but I didn’t give him the chance to recover. I aimed a swift kick to the pressure point on the inside of his thigh, and he dropped to one knee, but as I tried to sidestep him, he lashed out and grabbed both of my legs. My feet flew out from under me, and I hit the concrete for the second time in mere minutes. Emmett flipped me over and crawled on top of me, pinning me to the ground with the weight of his body.
“That was a dirty trick,” he said, easing his knee in between my thighs. “But don’t you remember, Bridget? I like to play rough.”
I screamed when he dug his thumb into the broken bone of my wrist. A disgusting smirk played across his face as he unbuckled my heavy utility belt and ripped open the velcro at the waist of the uniform pants.
“Fox,” I gasped, fighting to keep Emmett’s hands from traveling lower. “Fox will kill you when he finds out what you’ve done.”
“Ugh.” Emmett locked my wrists together and pinned them over my head, then dipped his head to nip at my neck. “You and Christian are quite the pair. Fox this, Fox that. I’m so sick of hearing that asshole’s name. He promised I could have you, and now I’ve got you, so why should I care what he thinks anymore?”
I shuddered as his mouth wandered south of the collar of my shirt. My legs wouldn’t move, trapped beneath Emmett’s weight. He was heavier than Fox had been, all muscle and brute strength. A sob escaped me. This was Paris all over again. I hated it. Hated the loss of control. Hated that I had failed Holly yet again. Hated that Fox and Emmett and the world had put me in a position that no woman should ever have to experience. Emmett yanked at my waistband.
“I’ll never forgive you if you let Holly die,” I whispered into his ear, hot tears streaming down my temples.
And he hesitated. Just for a second. His fingers fal
tered. His breath caught. And a gunshot echoed off the aluminum freight containers.
5
Coming Home
A splatter of warm blood coated my face. Emmett crumpled on top of me, and his head came to rest at the crook of my shoulder. Taylor stood on top of one of the crates, her gun still aimed at the dead man below.
“Get him off me,” I cried, shoving at Emmett’s lifeless form without progress. Hot blood poured from the hole in his head and pooled beneath me. It seeped through the shoulders of my uniform, soaking my messy ponytail. “Taylor, please, get him off me!”
Taylor holstered her gun then sat on the edge of the container before jumping down. With a grunt, she heaved Emmett away and pulled me out of the mess, smearing blood across the concrete. “Breathe,” she commanded, taking me by the shoulders. “Bridget, look at me. We’re not done here yet. Just take a breath in.”
I opened my mouth and inhaled a wet gasp.
“There you go,” Taylor said. “In and out. Don’t look at him. Look at me.”
I stared into Taylor’s brown eyes, focusing on the black mirrors of her pupils to distract myself from the body of my childhood friend. That sense of familiarity rose again. There was something distinctly recognizable about the CIA agent, but I was in no state to question it now.
“Holly,” I rasped.
“She’s still alive,” Taylor reported. “I found the door. Follow me.”
She led me to the top of the crate she had appeared from, helping me navigate the precarious territory so that I wouldn’t bring further damage to my wrist. We crossed over a few freight containers before dropping to the floor again, where another hatch lay open. I knelt down and peered inside, but all I saw was rushing water.
“Holly?” I called.
A faint, meek voice echoed up from below. “Bridget?”
Taylor realized what I was going to do a second before I did it. “Bridget, no!”
I plunged into the dirty water anyway. The flooded cellar reeked of mold and mildew. Busted wooden crates and trash floated on the surface. My boots reached the ground, but my neck hardly cleared the water line. Holly would be up to her chin by now.
“Taylor, can I get a light down here?”
Immediately, Taylor lay on her stomach and lowered her flashlight into the cellar. It illuminated the squalid conditions, but more importantly, it reflected off of the whites of Holly’s eyes at the far end of the long, narrow room.
“Bee!” she cried. The water was up to her chin, lapping into her mouth as she tried to keep herself above it. “I’m tied down!”
I struck out, ignoring the searing ache in my wrist. Something sharp—some kind of old tool maybe—scraped against my leg underwater, ripping a hole in my pants. I grimaced as it tore through my skin but didn’t slow down. When I reached my sister, she threw her arm around my neck, using my shoulders to lift herself out of the water. I avoided looking straight at her. She was death incarnate, pale and green, and if I let myself take in the extent of the damage to her now, I would never make it back to the mouth of the cellar. A heavy, metal chain looped around Holly’s wrist and sank into the water below.
“Deep breath, baby girl,” I told her.
I dove into the water below, following the chain to where it was hooked around an old, rickety pipe. I yanked the pipe free of the wall, slipped the chain free, and returned to the surface, where Holly loosened her end of the bindings on her own. Once she was free, I hauled her away from the wall.
“Everything okay down there?” Taylor called from the opening.
“Yeah, I got her!” To Holly, I said, “Can you hold onto me? My wrist is broken.”
In response, Holly wrapped her arms around my shoulders. Together, we began to swim back to the hatch. Holly kicked her feet through the water to help, but the feeble attempt only made my heart sink lower in my chest. She was alive. At least she was alive.
At the opening, Taylor reached in to tow Holly out of the muck. Once she set Holly against one of the crates, she helped me out too, the tendons in her forearm bulging as she pulled me up onto dry land again.
“I called an ambulance,” she said, shaking off her jacket and draping it over Holly’s trembling shoulders. “Service sucks out here, and the weather isn’t helping, but I think they should be here soon.”
I shined the flashlight across Holly’s face. Somehow, she was still conscious despite her corpse-like appearance. The shirt she wore wasn’t hers. It had a lace trim around the collar that I knew would never have caught her eye while she was out shopping. It had to be Melody’s, since we had found the other girl in Holly’s Belle Dame jersey. I knelt beside my sister, pushed up the hem of her shirt, and stifled a groan. The wound from where she’d been grazed with a bullet was bright red and inflamed, and a pungent yellow pus oozed over its borders.
“How bad is it?” she asked, hardly audible.
“Pretty bad,” Taylor said, looking over my shoulder.
I elbowed Taylor’s shins. “Shut up!”
“I can take it,” Holly said, her eyes drifting shut as she leaned her head against the crate. “You can tell me.”
“It’s infected,” I told her as I rolled her shirt back down. “And you’re probably on your way to sepsis already because Emmett’s a douchebag.”
Her eyelids fluttered. “Emmett! What happened to him? How’d you get by him?”
Taylor stiffened at my side. “He’s dead.”
“Dead?” Holly repeated. “Emmett’s dead?”
I stood up and pulled Taylor aside, far enough from Holly so that our murmured conversation wouldn’t reach her ears. “Can you not traumatize her any further? She’s already lost both her parents, and I haven’t been around in ten years. It’s not going to help to tell her that the guy she thought of as a big brother has been shot in the head.”
“You think I’m all sunshine and rainbows inside?” Taylor challenged. “My superiors are going to murder me. I killed a civilian!”
“Because he tried to rape me,” I reminded her. “And you put down one of the guys that was relevant to your case. Shouldn’t that be a good thing?”
“The thing about dead people is that you can’t ask them questions in court.”
“I’m sure your superiors will understand—”
“No, they won’t!” Taylor spun away from me. “You don’t get it.”
A muted siren circled the warehouse. The ambulance was here, but in the middle of the labyrinth of shipping containers, there was no way the paramedics would be able to find us. I glanced back at Holly, who had nodded off.
“Listen,” I said to Taylor. “I’m sorry about Emmett. If it makes you feel any better, you saved me from something that would’ve destroyed me for the rest of my life. Let’s just get Holly out of here, and we’ll figure out a way to talk to your superiors. I’ll explain what happened.”
She scoffed. “You’re not even a real cop.”
Flashing lights permeated the papered windows of the warehouse as the ambulance parked outside the doors. I walked back to Holly, who was now completely out. “Please, Taylor. Help me get her out of here. I can’t lift her on my own. Not with this wrist.”
Holly’s unconscious form must have convinced Taylor to set aside her professional worries, because she pushed me aside and picked up Holly all by herself. “This way,” she said, leading me through the maze.
The paramedics found us near the front of the warehouse, rushing in to take Holly from Taylor and strap her to a waiting stretcher. One of them knelt to examine the gash on my leg, but I shook the woman off.
“There’s a body,” I told her. “Somewhere in the middle.”
Without a word, the paramedic gathered a few of her peers and went off in search of Emmett. Taylor went with them, pulling her CIA badge as she went. I followed Holly’s stretcher to one of the waiting ambulances. The storm had finally begun to die off. The rain had let up, and the sky wasn’t as dark.
“I’m her sister,” I said to the
paramedics who tended to Holly from inside the rig. They helped me up and let me sit right next to Holly as the double doors slammed shut and the ambulance ambled out of the muddy freight station and onto the road.
“Bridget?” Holly mumbled through an oxygen mask.
I took her hand in my good one. “I’m right here, Holly.”
We arrived at an unfamiliar hospital an hour later. It was painfully small, the entire building the size of an emergency room at a real hospital, but Holly’s breathing had started to fade out, and I wasn’t about to be picky about our limited health options. I watched in horror as the paramedics fed a breathing tube down my sister’s throat and hooked it up to a squeezable bag. They pumped air into Holly’s lungs at a steady rate until the ambulance parked at the bay doors of the hospital. From there, everyone leapt into action, kicking open the doors to the rig and lowering Holly’s stretcher to the ground. Patient transporters took over at the hospital entrance, wheeling Holly inside. I hastened to keep up, the gash on my leg still oozing blood, but once inside, someone grabbed my arm to stop me.
“Oh no,” a warm voice said. It belonged to a young woman in navy blue scrubs, who shook her head at me in a way that was firm without being patronizing. “You’re covered from head to toe in blood, your wrist is broken, and that laceration on your shin looks like it needs stitches. You’re coming with me.”
“But my sister—”
“She’ll be fine,” the woman insisted, tugging me along the hallway. “I know this place seems tiny, but we’re pretty well-equipped. Besides, they would’ve kicked you out of the trauma room anyway. Follow me, hot stuff.”
She didn’t give me much of a choice, her fingers clamped around my good wrist as she led me through the hospital. We stopped at a decontamination shower first, where she flipped on the water and helped me out of Mac’s ruined gear.
Little Girl Lost [Book 2] Page 7
