Decoding Darkness

by Marissa Farrar

  “Clay cares about you. He wanted you safe. That was all that mattered.”

  Tears filled my eyes. “What about him being safe? That matters to me! Didn’t he think about what I’d do with him in danger?” The image of the blood that had been pouring down the side of his head filled my mind. I saw how his legs had slumped, as though someone had cut all the tendons in his body. Hollan might not have shot him—yet—but he’d hurt him, and hurt him badly.

  “Fuck!” My scream was filled with fury and heartbreak. “There must be a way into that goddamned room! There must be!” I threw myself back at the wall again, clawing at the edges, searching for any kind of weakness or movement, but it felt completely solid.

  Isaac looked at me, and I saw a softness in his eyes. It was pity, and sadness. Like a parent breaking the news to a child that a much loved pet had died. “Do you know of any other way inside?”

  I thought of the metal room and shook my head. I was breathing hard, my chest heaving. “No, but there must be. Surely Hollan wouldn’t have locked himself in there without there being a way of getting out.”

  Lorcan pressed his lips together, shaking his head. “It’s a panic room. He’ll stay in there, with Clay, until help arrives.”

  I clamped my hand to my mouth. “Oh, God.”

  “Which is exactly why we can’t hang around here,” Isaac said. “We need to figure out what to do next.”

  “We’re getting Clay out of there.” A hint of panic and desperation made my voice too high. “That’s what we’re doing next.”

  Kingsley’s big hand touched my elbow. “Yes, we are. But we need to be smart about it. Clay wouldn’t want any of us to put ourselves in more danger for him, especially not you, Darcy. You know how he feels about you.”

  I didn’t, not really, but I nodded anyway. I felt as though the energy had been sucked from my body, and I no longer had the ability to stand on my own. Kingsley’s big arm wrapped around my waist and he held me up as I leaned into him.

  The tears came, great wracking sobs of a combination of grief and relief that I was free. I lifted my hand to cover my face, ashamed of my emotions.

  Alex caught my hand, pulling it away from my face. He inspected my bruised and swollen knuckles. “Hey, what happened to your hand?”

  I choked back a sob, but my voice came out wobbly and hoarse with tears. I spoke each word with a hitching breath between. “Dislocated ... the ... fingers ... I think.”

  “Who put them back?”

  “I did.”

  His eyebrows lifted, and he looked at me with something between being impressed and disbelieving. “Wow. That took some guts.”

  “It fucking hurt.” I debated telling him how I’d imagined them all with me while I’d done it, how I’d followed his instructions, even though they’d only come from inside my head, and how Isaac had watched out, and Kingsley had kept me calm, and Clay and Lorcan had comforted me. But he’d have probably thought I was insane, and now wasn’t the time, anyway.

  “I bet,” Alex replied, his blond eyebrows still lifted

  “Not that it matters now.” I shook my head. Nothing else mattered except getting Clay back.

  Though I felt wretched, I allowed them to guide me back up the corridor, toward the front of the building. My stomach lurched as I spotted the shape of a body on the ground. The red hair and short, solid body identified the man as Bryson. He was lying face down, and a bloom of red spread out across the back of his shirt where several bullets had punched through his torso. I thought I should feel something about his death, but I didn’t. I was numb inside. All my emotion was directed at the loss of Clay.

  We stepped around the body and kept going.

  We reached the area where the glass booth was located, and I drew to a halt. Two more bodies were sprawled across the concrete floor, both face down. I left Kingsley’s side and approached the bodies. It was the two who Hollan had called for backup. Neither of them was Otto. The realization I’d been looking out for him punched me in the chest. I hadn’t wanted to see him dead.

  I didn’t see the man who’d been manning the booth either.

  “Two of the men I’d seen here are missing,” I pointed out. “A skinny guy in glasses, and a fair-haired Swedish guy called Otto.”

  “The guy in the glasses ran,” Lorcan said. “He didn’t put up a fight, so I let him go. I didn’t see any sign of the Swedish guy, though.”

  Isaac looked to the others. “We need to watch out for him.”

  “He might have just run,” Alex suggested.

  Isaac nodded. “Possibly, but even so, stay alert.”

  Every step that took me farther from Clay hurt my heart. I wanted to run back and throw myself up against the metal wall and give myself back in return, but I knew the guys would never let me, and Clay would probably kill me himself if I tried. But it still didn’t sit right with me that Clay was in there. How would we get him back? Only by offering Hollan something he wanted, and I knew what that one something was.

  “Hollan is keeping the memory stick in the same place he’s locked himself and Clay into,” I told Isaac, suddenly remembering I hadn’t yet divulge this important piece of information.

  That made Isaac stop. “It’s in there? With Clay?”

  I nodded. “I don’t know exactly where, but it’s not a big space. It’s like a vault that’s protected all the way around. Hollan was going to show me where he kept it when you guys showed up.”

  “Damn.” His fingers went to his lips as he thought. “We need to get into that room.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The rolling shutters at the front of the building remained up, allowing us to see outside to the cracked concrete with the weeds pushing through, and the half fallen chain link fence. It was almost fully light now. Morning. I’d been kept at Hollan’s mercy for almost a full twenty-four hours, and now Clay had taken my place. Every time I thought of it, something in my chest tightened, and I found it harder to breathe. We’d get him back, we had to, and then we needed to kill Hollan. I was sick of that man coming into my life and fucking everything up. He needed to be dead.

  The vehicles I’d been brought here in remained parked in the same position as when I’d arrived. I hadn’t seen Isaac’s van—the one from the base, which I assumed he was still driving.

  We stepped out into the bright sunlight. I squinted against the light, but as my eyes got used to it, I spotted a mound lying on the ground. It took a moment for my brain to piece together what I was seeing, but then the mound gave a groan, and my stomach turned in a slow flip. It was Stewart, and the son of a bitch was still alive.

  Lorcan pulled his weapon and moved toward Stewart.

  “He was as bad as Hollan,” I blurted. “He tried to ... you know ... force himself.”

  Lorcan’s head snapped to face me. “He tried to rape you?”

  I couldn’t meet Lorcan’s eye, my cheeks burning with shame. I knew it hadn’t been my fault, yet somehow I still felt sick and guilty about it, as though I could have done more to defend myself.

  His eyes darkened with anger, and my stomach flipped. “Mother fucker.”

  Lorcan stalked toward Stewart crumpled on the ground and used his foot to give him a shove. He let out another groan and rolled to one side. I didn’t know how he could still be alive after that fall and being shot, but he was. With a bitter stab of satisfaction, I noted how his leg was bent at a strange angle, and figured it was broken.

  Karma was a bitch, all right.

  A part of me wanted to take the gun from Lorcan and finish what I’d started, but the other part had been through enough. I wasn’t sure I could stomach the thought of approaching a man I’d already shot once, and caused to fall off a roof, and put a second bullet in him when he had no way of defending himself. Stewart was a nasty piece of work, but that didn’t mean I had to lose my own humanity.

  But Lorcan didn’t so much as glance back to me to check if it was what I wanted. Instead, he aimed his gun at Stewa
rt’s head. Even though I’d been expecting it, the blast of the gunshot made me jump. Stewart jerked, then fell still, all without saying a word.

  Lorcan stayed leaning over him for a moment. He made a rasping noise in the back of his throat, then spat at the body. I felt the fury radiating off him, more anger than I’d felt toward Stewart myself. I didn’t dare say a single word. This was a side of Lorcan I hadn’t seen before. A cold and merciless side. One I was very glad was aligning with me and not against me. Was this the reason Lorcan had been given the job of weapons expert, or was it this facet of his personality that simply made him interested in guns?

  Finally, he turned and made his way back to the group. A little of the darkness had faded from his eyes.

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  We kept moving, remaining alert that Otto might still be around, or that Hollan would have called for backup by now, though I figured reinforcements would take a lot longer to get here. We passed through the broken gate of the chain link fence, moving at a jog. Silent tears streamed down my face at having to leave Clay behind, but I told myself we’d come up with a plan. We wouldn’t leave him there.

  Even so, the image of how his body had slumped, a dead weight, after Hollan had hit him kept flashing in my mind. What if we left here, only to find Hollan had left with the memory stick when we got back, and Clay was already dead?

  “We’re not going far, Darcy.” Isaac always had an uncanny way of picking my thoughts out of my head, and now was no exception. “Just back to the van. I’ve got my laptop there, and we can watch the place with the satellite feed. Hollan isn’t going anywhere, and we’ll know if new people are arriving before they get here.”

  I nodded, trying to convince myself that Isaac knew what he was doing. It didn’t stop the hurt in my heart, however.

  We passed through the gate, but instead of continuing along the road—which we must have driven down when I’d arrived, but I’d never seen due to being handcuffed in the trunk—Isaac stepped through a gap in the trees. The others followed, and so did I. Glancing down, I spotted tire marks through the mud. Kingsley must have noticed them as well, as he used his boot to scuff them as we walked, kicking fallen leaves over the tracks to hide them.

  It felt wrong to ask about anything other than Clay, but I had to know.

  “My aunt,” I said. “Where is she?”

  Isaac glanced over his shoulder as he answered me. “Back at base. We had to take her back there so she’d be safe.”

  “And she’s okay?”

  He nodded. “Worried about you, of course, and feeling guilty as hell, but otherwise she’s all right. Now she knows you were telling the truth, and we’re not the bad guys like she thought, she’s warmed up a little. We left her with Devlin. The two of them appeared to be getting on well enough.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  He gave a short laugh. “Yeah, they were.”

  I guessed there wasn’t a huge age difference between them. I’d figured Devlin to be in his mid-forties and Sarah was early fifties.

  “When you didn’t arrive for so long, I thought ... I thought maybe ...”

  My voice broke, choking with tears. They seemed to come too easily at the moment. I’d never been much of a crier, but now they sprang to my eyes at the slightest thing.

  “That we weren’t coming?” Lorcan filled in gently. He was back to his quiet, sullen self, the anger I’d witness before having vanished as though it had never happened. I wondered if we should have moved Stewart’s body—hidden it so if anyone else arrived, they wouldn’t be immediately alerted that something was wrong. But then I reasoned that the only people coming were the ones Hollan had called, and they already knew there was trouble.

  I sniffed and nodded. “I didn’t want to think that, but it did cross my mind.”

  “I’m sorry, princess. We had to take your aunt back, and then we had a problem with the software for the tracker. It’s new technology and had some bugs.”

  I swept my hand up to the spot behind my ear. I winced as I got my nails beneath the tiny tracker and pulled. It was exactly like I was digging a tick out from my skin. The tracker resisted for a moment, and then released with a small pop. I touched the area where it had been, and a small amount of blood came away on my fingertips. I held the tracker out to Isaac. “What do I do with this now?”

  “Keep it,” he said. “It still might come in handy sometime.”

  I hoped it wouldn’t, though I slipped the tiny tracker into the pocket of my jeans. I never wanted to go through anything like the last twenty-four hours ever again in my life. I thought I’d suffer from reoccurring nightmares for years to come, and I already had the nightmares about my father’s death to deal with.

  Ahead, a dark shape was hidden behind the trees. I exhaled a sigh. We’d reached the van. Thank God.

  Isaac unlocked the vehicle and went around to the passenger side. He pulled open the door, and climbed inside. Without another word, he snatched up his laptop from where it had been hidden beneath the seat, and opened the screen. His fingers flew over the keys, his eyes focused on the screen.

  Kingsley yanked open the side of the van, pulling the sliding door across, revealing the interior. Lorcan climbed inside, vanishing into the back.

  “Let me look at that hand,” Alex offered, turning his attention to me.

  “It’s fine, honest.” I curled the injured hand against my body protectively.

  He shook his head and held his own hand out to me. “Don’t be stupid. Let me look at it, and tell me where else you’re hurt, too.”

  “Give the poor girl a minute.” Lorcan navigated his way back out of the van, his arms full of something. I spotted what he had and had to stop myself from throwing myself at him. “I can’t imagine she was treated too well in that place.”

  He looked to me. “You hungry, princess?” he asked, and handed me a bottle of water, and then a store-bought sandwich still wrapped in cellophane.

  I nodded eagerly, accepting the food and water from him.

  Alex exchanged a glance with Lorcan, which I read as ‘I’m not happy about you interrupting, but you did the right thing,’ then he took the bottle of water from me, cracked open the lid, and handed it back. I gulped the cool water down, spilling some down my chin, splashing onto my chest. I didn’t care. All I’d had in the past twenty-four hours was the bottle Otto had sneaked into me, and I hadn’t even drunk all of that, as I’d used some of it to wash his blood off my hands. Not for the first time, I wondered what had happened to him.

  With my thirst quenched, I tore off the cellophane sandwich wrapper and ate ravenously, not caring if the guys thought I looked like a mess. I barely even recognized what I was eating—ham and Swiss cheese, if I had to take a guess—but I didn’t care. Food was food, and I’d probably have eaten almost anything by that point. Dinner had been the macaroni and cheese, more than thirty-six hours ago. I saw the timeline of my past sweeping across my vision to my left. Each moment in recent time was marked out by whatever meals I’d eaten, and there were definitely far larger gaps than there should have been.

  Alex and Lorcan watched me eat, matching expressions of part amusement, part concern on their faces.

  “You got anything yet?” Kingsley called to Isaac in the front.

  “Not yet. Give me a minute. I think the amount of tree coverage here is causing issues”

  Kingsley nodded and pulled a cell phone from the inside pocket of his jacket. “I’ll call base, let Devlin know what’s going on. The signal might be better closer to the road.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right,” Isaac said, jumping from the car, carrying his laptop with him. “I’ll join you and see if it helps.”

  Both Isaac and Kingsley moved away, toward the line of trees surrounding us. As I watched, Kingsley pressed the cell phone to his ear.

  Alex beckoned me. “Let me take a look at that hand now?”

  I nodded. My stomach was full, even if my heart was empty. It was stup
id not to let someone who was medically trained take a look at my injury. I didn’t know what he could do to help all the way out here, but the hand didn’t feel as bad as it had when the fingers were dislocated. Just bruised and swollen, though I did worry about them popping out of the joints again. There was the medical bay in the building we’d left, but I didn’t think we’d be going back there to get me painkillers or a bandage. I’d long ago lost the makeshift bandage I’d created with the bottom of my t-shirt, but I had no idea where or at what point.

  To my surprise, Alex leaned into the van and pulled out a green plastic box with a white cross on the front. “It isn’t much,” he said, apologetically, “but there will be something in here to help, just to tide us over until we get back to base.”

  “With Clay,” I replied, staring into his blue eyes earnestly.

  He nodded. “Yeah, with Clay.”

  I could see they were worried about Clay, too. They weren’t like me, in that I made my feelings perfectly clear, but I saw it in the exchanged looks, the tightness around the lips, and the drawn down brows. Not that it was surprising they’d be worried about him. They’d grown up together, and Clay was like a brother to them all. If we lost him, I knew my grief would be unbearable, but it would be nothing compared to how the other guys would feel. They’d had him in their lives since they’d been children, and a hole that big could never be filled.

  “Come on,” he said. “Climb into the back of the van. You’ll be more comfortable there, and we’ll have a bit more room.”

  I did as he instructed, climbed into the van, and made my way over to the back seat, which ran the width of the vehicle. I sat down, and Alex sat beside me.

  I held out my hand. With the utmost gentleness, he took it, examining my fingers. A frown pulled his eyebrows together as he turned my hand this way and that. Finally, he lifted my hand to his mouth and kissed my knuckles. “You did all the right things,” he said, lowering my hand. “I’m pretty impressed you managed to get the joints to pop back in again, though. That kind of thing would be enough to bring a grown man to tears.”