THE REACTOR

Shit. Claudia ran up the stairs and to the small room at the top landing, entering the code and shoving open the door. She leaned over the desk, her eyes darting over the grid of camera screens until she found the right one. A Humvee had broken through the fence on the east end. The night vision camera showed bodies moving, crawling over the vehicle and stepping over the electric wire. She spun, looking at the cameras facing the opposite end of the property, and saw another set of SUVs pull up there. Motherfuckers.

She watched the men as they crossed into another camera’s line of vision, their guns drawn, night vision goggles on. The view went black, then static, the connection gone, the camera taken out. As she watched, another monitor flashed dark, then white. She was running out of time. She straightened, looking around the room, thinking through the evidence that may exist. There were no files, no names, nothing in the room that connected her to him. Her eyes fell on a scrap of magazine, one she’d taped to the desk. She reached forward and carefully pulled it off the surface. It was a photo of Robert, taken years ago, around the time he’d brought her in. It had been published in a Vegas social publication, the image taken at a benefit, and it was one of the few photos she’d ever seen of him. He was smiling in the photo. Genuinely smiling. It was a beautiful and rare thing for her to see, especially on him and she looked at it whenever she needed a reminder of the man that lurked behind the hard exterior.

In the last four years, he had become the focus of her entire world. A focus honed and sharpened in their joint pursuit of… She inhaled sharply, her mind unraveling, his lessons already flaking, dissolving, her mind twisting into knots ever since. She hadn’t killed Gwen. She couldn’t have killed Gwen. Everything that she had said to Bell Hartley was true.

She killed Gwen. They killed Gwen. They both, in evil concert with Nick Fentes, killed Gwen and then Robert. Her family. Her family, which she had been just days, just moments, away from fully joining.

The interior alarm blared, a motion sensor tripped, and they, this brigade of men and guns and disaster—were here.

She had only minutes to make a decision. Run? Fight? Or…

Her focus settled in. Deceive.

She eyed the broken cameras, imagining the soldiers circling the building, advancing closer. Guns drawn. Twenty or thirty of them against her. Escape would be all but impossible. Except that, she knew exactly how to do it.

Reaching up, she gripped the top of her head and yanked. The blonde wig peeled away and fell to the floor.

BELL

The red light stopped, the cell falling back into darkness. I held my breath and listened, straining my ears in the direction that the crash had come from. What had it been? It hadn’t come from inside the warehouse. It had sounded further away. Almost too far away. Maybe it was a car accident on the closest road.

I heard the clatter of shoes, pounding down a stairwell, inside the structure. I tensed, my eyes on the front of the cell, and waited for her to reappear.

Nothing happened. The footsteps ceased, her path taking her somewhere else. Silence grew, and I wondered why this place was so quiet. Didn’t the other women say anything? Did they all just sit there in silence, all day long?

My thigh throbbed with pain, drawing my attention back to the knife still sticking out from my thigh. I took a long, shuddering breath and gently touched the area around the wound. My fingers came away damp and warm and I felt lightheaded, unsure if it was due to blood loss or anxiety. I could feel the blood dripping down my thigh, a pool of it forming under my leg. How much blood could I lose? I took quick short breaths and regripped my upper thigh, second-guessing the motion when more blood seemed to pool around the blade.

Something banged once, twice, and then a loud third time. I stilled, my head raised, and listened. A battering ram? The quiet returned and I yanked at my cuffed hand, testing the restraint, my gaze frantically searching over the ground, the other cuff, looking for the handcuff key. She was going to come back. She was going to come back and she’d kill me. Kill me in the final second before they found us. I froze when, through the dark open door of the cell, a flashlight beam cut through the darkness. I straightened and watched as its beam floated over a concrete pillar. My chest constricted. I hesitated, warring between silence and screaming. I took in a deep breath. “Hello?”

In my head, my call of greeting had been a shout. But it came out weak, my voice wobbling on the final note, the end result something barely audible, and not nearly loud enough. The cell walls swallowed the call, and I repeated the word, this time louder, as loud as I could manage. The flashlight clicked off. A door creaked open. I held my breath as a dark body eased in front of my cell, one step carefully placed in front of the other, a gun held out, sweeping across my cell. A cop. I sank against the concrete wall, relief seizing my chest. The man held a finger in front of his mouth and I nodded. He stepped forward, continuing on. The next figure, even in the dark, even with goggles on and features obscured, I knew. I knew it in the broad width of his shoulders. The strength of his frame. The height. The confidence in his movements. He came into the cell with quick steps and crouched beside me, pulling me into his arms.

Dario.

He brought me into his chest and the scent of him, the strong squeeze of him …. I clutched at him with my free hand, a shuddering exhale bubbling out of me. He pulled off his night-vision goggles and kissed me everywhere. Strong presses of his lips on the top of my head, my forehead, cheeks, lips. He whispered my name and I cupped his face, my nails digging into the short stubble of his beard, then his shoulders, then across his chest.

He saw the knife and froze. “Oh my God. Bell.”

I gripped his shirt, pulling his eyes to mine. “It’s okay. It looks worse than it is.”

“It looks like a shitload of blood. We need to get you to a doctor. I’ve got someone here, let me get him—” He started to stand and I yanked at his shirt, keeping him down.

“Don’t leave me. Please. Just wait.”

He kissed me again, his hand tightening on the back of my head. “I’ll stay. I love you. God, I love you so much.”

There was a shout and sudden activity. Metal doors banged open, a metallic hum sounded, and the main aisle flooded with light. A new body filled the doorway and I flinched, then perked up when I recognized him. “Laurent?”

“Yeah, chere.” The relaxed drawl of his Cajun dialect … it made me want to cry. He came to find me too.

Laurent moved aside as two more men shouldered in. The three of them blocked the light from the hall and I had to squint to see their features in the dark. At the sight of Rick and Lance’s pinched and concerned faces, I could no longer hold in the emotion. The pain, the exhaustion, the fear … the relief of it all broke a dam in my heart. I lowered my forehead to Dario’s chest and started to cry.

THE PRISONER

She swung open the door of the fourth cell, meeting the wary eyes of the blonde. The girl wasn’t chained, her shackles removed months ago in exchange for her obedience. It was a shame. Given a little more time, she might have become something worthy. Instead, she’d be the ticket to Claudia’s escape.

The blonde’s gaze flicked to Claudia’s shaved head, her eyes widening at the fresh haircut.

Claudia stepped inside and pointed the Taser. “Let’s go.”

The box had been installed first, the six-foot square cavity dug into the ground for the purpose of holding the fireproof box. An air pipe left the box and ran a quarter mile east, then came to the surface on the edge of a field. The warehouse had been built on top of the box, the entrance concealed in the concrete stairwell that led up to the second-floor office. Inside the box was a feed into the security cams and enough bottled water and provisions to support someone for several weeks, assuming they could deal with the boredom and the smell of their own excrement.

Robert’s plan had always been simple. If the warehouse was discovered, if a threat came on property that was too big to overcome—get in the box and blow the place apart. Escape later, once the attention dies down.

The plan had always sucked, though she hadn’t voiced that opinion to him. Now, she shoved the girl forward along the hall, out of the view of the other cells.

Entering the stairwell, she nodded toward the open hole in the ground, the box’s interior dark, the blinking red lights of the security system giving an occasional blood-red peek. “Jump in.” The girl hesitated and she pressed the Taser into her shoulder. “GO. Don’t make me hurt you.”

Back in the cell, she stripped off the T-shirt, then grabbed fistfuls of mud and rubbed it over her breasts and along her arms and the front of her jeans. She’d changed shortly after arriving and securing Bell Hartley. She’d washed off the clown makeup and ditched the Realtor costume, leaving the blonde wig on just in case. Just in case had been a good precaution, and the ratty jeans now worked well for her cause. She ran her dirty hands over her face and her shaved head, taking the oldest cell in the back and locking the ankle restraints into place. Her hands… she hesitated, and then left them free.

It had been four years since Robert first shackled her and Tanaka up in this exact same cell. Claudia had pulled at her restraints for weeks. Every girl in that place had only had one form of restraints, their wrists or ankles. She hadn’t understood why, out of everyone there, he’d used both arm and leg restraints on her. When she’d earned her way out of the leg restraints, she’d cried. The arm restraints had taken so much longer. Tanaka had died before Claudia had been able to leave her place by the wall and move around freely, without the iron weight dragging her hands down.

Over three years had passed since her shackles had been removed, and she still couldn’t have anything around her wrists. A bracelet, a watch, even a hairband caused her chest to tighten and her panic to swell. Now, she tested each ankles shackle, making sure they were convincingly secure. From a distance, one of the women called out, the sound echoing along the warehouse. Taking a deep breath, Claudia slid down the wall, her tailbone knocking painfully against the concrete floor, and brought her knees to her chest. They must be inside. They were probably creeping slowly through the building. Looking for her.

It was to her benefit that she’d spent those two days running from Robert. Skipping meals, torturing herself with guilt. In just days, her cheeks had thinned, her belly distended. Her muscles, developed from several years of strenuous workouts, had wilted.

She looked like death. Had felt like it. Earlier, when she’d lifted Bell Hartley over her shoulder to carry her out of the house, she’d struggled, the weight almost too much for her.

Close by, a footstep crunched. She immediately tensed, her arms wrapping around her knees, her face hidden behind her forearms. A man eased into the doorway, his head sweeping left to right, examining the small cell, and returned to her. She peeked out at him, and he lifted a finger, telling her to stay quiet.

She smiled, the gesture hidden behind her knees. Idiot.