“Just relax,” Sharky said from behind her. “Please.”
“What do you mean?”
“What do I mean? I can see you shaking from here.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re not visibly shaking? Take a left.”
Annica took a left and was faced with another hall, the interiors all looking the same and melding together in one jumbled mess. She would never be able to find her way out. She might never even get loose to try.
“I’m not scared,” Annica said.
“There’s nothing to be scared about. You just got yourself in a little over your head.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I know.”
“And now we’ll just have to get you out.”
“I’m sorry I followed you.”
“Alright, listen,” he said. “Hold on. Stop.” His hand was on her shoulder.
She stopped and turned to see his mournful expression. “What?”
“He’s going to find out who you are. So there’s no need to keep lying.”
“I’m not lying.”
He sighed, his face moving from sadness to disgust. “Come on, really?”
Nothing made sense to her. Especially how he was looking at her. “What?” she said, her face and inflexion still the same. Still confused. Still scared.
“Alright,” he said. “Let’s keep walking.”
She stood still. A memory forming. Those numbers.
“Come on. It’s clear there’s no point in talking.”
“Are you my contact?”
“What?”
“For my story. My interview.” She waited, watching the tension across his face. His Adam’s apple bobbing hard with what seemed like an unplanned swallow. She checked his eyes again, waiting for that flicker of aversion. Deception. But he held strong.
Finally, Annica gathered her strength. “Are you the whistle-blower?”
No reaction. He took a step forward and said, “Let’s get moving.”
“Are you?”
“Move,” he said, pushing Annica backward, spinning her around. She could almost feel the nervous energy through his hands. When he held them against her, she could feel the vibrations. Annica had vibrations of her own. She was sure of that. But together, their bodies formed a nervous ball of energy. Was he as frightened as she was?
His hands pressed harder, shoving her, Annica almost spilling over onto the floor. “Alright!” she cried, speeding up her stride, separating himself from him and his chaotic energy. She was moving quickly, like he’d instructed, and navigating the building as he’d instructed. And for once, she kept her mouth shut. But she might have already received her answer. In the quiet of her mind, Annica played and replayed his reaction to her question. There was a look of suppressed terror about him.
As they climbed a set of stairs, her thoughts went to Jackson. Did he ever feel this sort of anxiety on the job? Could he feel her now? Although their relationship now was drastically different than what it once was, there was still at least some sort of connection between them. She felt it the first time she was in danger with him in Virginia Beach. When she was separated, he was there somehow, and then he found her. It was almost like a tracking device. It saved her life back then, back in that cage. Locked away and waiting. Facing death.
What would she be facing this time?
Another cage?
Or would Sharky somehow do the impossible and release her?
Sharky’s boss made the “tour” sound like a death march. A short walk that wouldn’t end in a cage, or an exit door, but a bullet to the head. Fuck . . .
Maybe Jackson could pull it off one more time. He’d always been so great with timing, with saving her ass with seconds to spare. She tried to forget the exact amount of time left on the bomb’s timer in Virginia Beach. She tried to only remember what fresh air felt like after the cage. It felt like the first time, her first breath. Her first kiss.
Everything about Virginia Beach, the good and the bad, had been wrapped up with Jackson. He’d become synonymous with rescue, with so many of her raw emotions. Her memories, the knots of worry in her back muscles, had all taken years off her life. They would also take years to even begin the process of shedding, of growing away from. Being so wrapped up still with Jackson or being captured or killed in some random Hawaiian processing plant were moves in the wrong direction.
She peered into a small room, perhaps the last she might ever see. It was certainly the last of her “tour.”
“Step inside,” Sharky said.
The wrong direction, indeed. This fucking room. This cramped, green-walled cell.
“Step inside,” he urged her, putting a little more venom in the words.
She stepped inside. Then she spun around quickly to keep an eye on him, to keep an eye on the next set of developments. Again, she’d become the cornered animal. She was ready to pounce at the first sign of trouble, the first twitch of his muscles toward his holster. It wasn’t much, but it was the only thing she had left.
“Can you take a seat?” he asked.
She didn’t want to.
It was a room just like the site of her first interrogation with Roger. Small. Two chairs, one table. Only this one had on the wall what seemed to be a trap door similar to the one she’d originally used to get in so much trouble.
Annica motioned to it and said, “What’s behind that door?”
“Just sit please.”
Sitting would take some of the spring out of her attack, quite literally. She needed to stay on her feet. Stay loose and limber and mobile. “I’ll stand.”
“Fine. Can I have your password?” He pulled out her phone and swiped it on, and then looked up at her. “I understand how someone wouldn’t trust Roger. But I’m different.”
“Different how?”
“I’m just different.”
“That means nothing to me right now.”
“Okay.”
“So you get a paycheck from that asshole?”
He shrugged.
“This is how you make your living? An armed thug?”
“No.”
“And what’s so special about this place that they need armed thugs? What are they making here?”
He shook his head. “I’m not going to comment on the business.”
“Can you comment about me? What’s going to happen to me?”
Sharky reached back for the door, pulling it tightly shut behind him. “We just need your password, to check your identity. That’s all this is.”
“Hand me the phone, then.”
“Excuse me?”
“The phone,” Annica said. “You don’t need some hacker. I can open it right now.”
“Why can’t you just tell me the password?”
“It’s my lucky number, that’s why. It’s a secret.”
Sharky smiled. “Of course it is.”
“I’m very spiritual,” she said to his blank face. “Numbers are important to me.”
“And you’re quite the bullshitter,” Sharky said.
“Yeah, and what are you good at? Hustling in pool halls?”
“Huh?”
“With a name like Sharky.”
His eyes narrowed.
“So maybe I’m not bullshitting,” she said. “I know you.”
“How do you know me?”
“I watched you.”
“On the ship?” His eyes relaxed open, softening. “On the deck?”
“What were you doing out there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Over the rails like that . . .”
“I don’t know,” he said again, this time looking even more sheepish about it. Embarrassed, almost.
“Maybe you need to talk to someone.”
“Yeah,” he said, chuckling quietly. “That’s what they tell me.”
“I mean, someone who might be able to tell your story.” She watched him take a big sigh as he evaluated her, and her proposition. She was getting to him. It wou
ld be the only way out of this, needling through the softer parts of his psyche. “You can’t honestly tell me that you’re . . . happy.”
Sharky laughed, but it was grim.
“Especially with this.” Annica had her hands held up, palms outstretched, motioning them gently around the dingy little room. “How can you be happy living like this?”
“Living, in general,” he said, “is the problem.”
“Only if you can’t change things. Only if you lack the courage.”
“I do lack the courage,” he said, “as you saw on the deck.”
“There’s nothing courageous about killing yourself.”
“I wasn’t really going to do that.”
“What were you trying to do out there?”
Sharky shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t seem to know an awful lot.”
“Exactly,” he said. “They pay me not to know.”
“You probably sleep better that way.”
“Trust me,” Sharky said. “Either way, I’ll be sleeping like a baby tonight.”
“What do you mean either way?”
“Here,” Sharky tossed her the phone, which she barely had time to catch. “Just don’t do anything stupid with it.”
Annica held it at her side. “What do you mean, either way?”
“Whatever happens from this.”
“This isn’t the first time I’ve been kidnapped,” she said.
“This isn’t a—”
“I’ve been locked in a fucking cage before. Do you know what it’s like to be in a cage?”
“I’ve been to jail.”
She held back an eye roll. Probably wouldn’t be in her best interests right now. “Big surprise.”
She hadn’t looked at her phone yet. Not even a single glance. Though in the back of her mind she wondered if she had time to do it, to make a call, a call for help to Jackson. Maybe even use the stupid alert app he’d insisted Tansy install on her phone. She’d scoffed at the time, but now? She only hoped her GPS was on. She ran through the timeline in her head, wondering if her fingers could hold steady enough, if she could hold Sharky at bay long enough to hit the right buttons.
But surely he suspected it. They might have been thinking about the exact same thing at that very moment.
Her fingers hovered above the phone screen, trembling at the thought. Could she do it?
“Well?” Sharky said. “You forget your secret favorite number?”
She glanced down at her phone screen, hoping to see a miracle. Maybe Jackson had already noticed she’d gone missing. Her blank splash screen stared back at her. Nothing. The soft pop of the door pushing open sounded and she jerked her head up. It was the sound of someone in a rush. Heavy breathing, too.
Sharky had looked away from her, keeping his eyes away just long enough for her to pocket the phone. She slid it in her pants and then pulled her hand away, quickly, but not too quickly. Smoothly, not to make it obvious that she’d just performed a perhaps life-saving sleight of hand.
“How long will it take?” the man asked Sharky.
“Talk to Roger.”
“I just did. He wants you there now.”
The two men were huddled together in conversation, Annica listening as the volume rose to fill the room. The urgency, too. Something was going on in the building, and it sounded much worse than just a simple, solitary intruder.
“I’m on it,” Sharky said.
“Hurry up.”
The man left, slamming the door behind him.
“What was that?” she asked. “What’s going on?” She wanted to keep him occupied. Rush him with questions so that he wouldn’t have time to notice what she’d done with the phone.
“What?” He looked distracted, eyes having trouble focusing on her. Perfect.
Annica smiled and asked again, “What’s going on?”
“I’m afraid we’ll have to speed up this process.” He finally took his gaze off the floor, staring deep into her eyes.
“What does that mean?”
Sharky reached for his side, drawing his gun.
“No!”
He raised it up to her head and she could see nothing but the barrel. Blacker than midnight. A black hole. Death.
She felt her life already being sucked down into the darkness.
“Hold still.”
6
Cole
He pulled the trigger.
The sound of gunfire in the small room was deafening, his ears immediately ringing. The room had changed somehow. It was already smoky. For him, it was the smell of death. The other change could be seen on the wall, just to the right of his target. Over Annica’s shoulder was a small black hole, the bullet burrowed into the wall.
He looked back for her, starting with that shoulder. She’d moved, a good few feet from the hole, hunched over. She was slumped back into the wall, her body quivering. Hands held together at her chest. Her breathing hard but shallow.
Cole holstered his weapon and took a good look at her. She was like a shell of her once lively, even cocky self. Finally, she was quiet—save for the gasping sounds. She looked pitiful, and he felt guilty about it already. But it had to be done.
“Hey,” he said softly. “You’re fine. You’re okay.”
She was still convulsing with terror, but with some words now, half-formed sentences, pleas rattling out of her. What was she trying to say?
“Hey,” Cole said again, walking toward her slowly like a hunter approaching a downed animal. What could he do? Should he try helping her up? “It’s okay, I’m not going to hurt you.”
The downed animal suddenly raged back to life, springing to her feet and lunging into him, screaming, scratching, and finally, biting. She had the side of his hand in her teeth, her hands coming back again for his throat. Cole’s free hand shot out to her chest, hard at her sternum to block her away from doing any further damage. The ferocity of her attack was stunning.
“You fucker,” she cried through gritted teeth.
He finally got behind her, his arms wrapped around and holding her in place against his body. A bear hug. Not hard enough to squeeze the air out of her, but at least some of the fight.
Still, she struggled, her feet kicking back at him.
“Stop,” he whisper-yelled. “I’m trying to save you.” His head was clunked into hers, holding there. His mouth near her ear, whispering, “Please.”
“What?!” She sounded insane.
“Please, stop. I’m trying to help.”
Her struggle began to ease, slightly. “Help me how?”
She was still struggling, but slower, and quieter.
“I can get you out of here,” Cole said.
“How?”
“Through that door.”
Now it felt like she really had been shot, all of her efforts coming to a quick halt. “What?” she mumbled, her body went still and loose, her head turning in the direction of the room’s trap door.
“You see it,” Cole said. “That door right there.”
“What about it?” She was looking right at it, studying it.
Cole said, “It’s an escape.”
She wriggled against him and he forced his body not to react. This was so not the damn time!
“Can you let go of me? Please.”
He took a deep breath and let go of her, his captive spilling out of his arms and back into the middle of the room. She spun around to face him, tears glistening on her cheeks. She looked beaten up. Battered. Had he really been that rough with her?
“I’m sorry,” Cole said. She must be terrified, but fuck, it had been necessary. If she wanted to live. If they both wanted to live. It was a little funny to think about, the urge for self-preservation that he so badly lacked just moments ago. It was that lack that brought him over the rails of the cargo ship. What was it now? What was it about this woman that suddenly lit the spark in him to survive? For both of them to survive . . .
“What do you mean
this fucking door? You want me to crawl though this door? What is it? Where does it go?” She kept going on and on, her face and voice growing more hysterical with each question.
“Hold on,” he said. “Can you just stop? Just stop and listen for a moment.”
“What?” she said, her chest heaving.
“You’re still not listening.”
“I am.”
“You’re not.”
He waited for at least some of the tension across her mouth to ease. For her breathing to relax. For the words to stop flowing out so thoughtlessly. He waited for her to listen, and listen carefully.
“They think I shot you,” Cole said. “Do you understand?”
She nodded, with hardly a change in expression. It was like she assumed it all along.
“That was how this was supposed to end in here,” he said. “That’s what this room is. People get shot, and their bodies get sent down that chute.”
She looked at the door again.
“They’re expecting me to dump you through there,” he said. “To get rid of your body.”
“Jesus,” she muttered, her hand and clawing up to her face, shakily covering her mouth.
“Now’s not the time to cry about it. Okay? We gotta act.”
“Yeah.”
Cole made his way to the door. “We’ll talk later. At least I hope we will.”
“What’s down there?” she asked, another flash of terror through her eyes. “What’s at the bottom?” It would be twice, just today, that she’d fallen through some mysterious chute.
“The garbage bin. One of those giant, industrial-sized bins.”
“What’s . . . What’s in it?”
“No bodies,” he said, opening the door. “Take a look.”
She crept over to the door, peering into the darkness. “How far down?”
“It’s not very steep.”
“How far?”
“You won’t go very fast,” Cole said. “I know it sounds bad, but it’s the only way. If we take any other option that doesn’t include you going out this chute, then both of us will probably wind up dead. Do you get me?”
Dark Salvation (DARC Ops Book 7) Page 5
