Wake up.Bossy. Demanding. Unyielding. This voice was new, and he gave her no quarter.Open your eyes, princess.No mistaking the command, the instinct to obey had Eve digging down deep to comply. With a significant amount of effort, she opened her eyes to the brilliance of a halo in her otherwise dark world.
Confusion reigned, and despite a parched throat, she parted chapped lips to speak.
The bird’s delicate wing brushed against her mouth. “Shh, we stay quiet.” Executed as a whisper, the heavily accented chirp cut through the haze, and a dawning awareness had her heart tumbling around her chest.
Yolande!Eve attempted a nod and stifled a moan as the slightest of head tilts set off an avalanche of pain. Stars burst across her field of vision, the fight to remain conscious a battle she came close to losing.
“Big storm,” Yolande whispered, removing her fingers and swinging the blinding light to glint off shiny metal. “No power. No cameras. We go fast!” The judge’s new housekeeper had come prepared. The small key Eve would have sold her soul for held her stare as it slid into the handcuff’s locking mechanism.
Hope surged.Please! Oh God, please!With the barest of clicks, her wrist fell free, and her arm, long since dead to any feeling, dropped to the mattress, her hand hitting the plastic cover with a smack.
“Hurry,” Yolande said, taking hold of Eve’s left bicep and helping her to stand.
Overcome with vertigo, her head spun, her knees buckled, and Yolande’s body sagged under her weight. Wasting no time, the shorter woman wrapped her arm around Eve’s waist, and wedging a shoulder into her armpit, she got them moving toward the door. The beam of the flashlight leading the way, the two women tripped and stumbled into a dark hall.
There was only one direction for them to go.
Up.
Metal rungs affixed to a concrete wall led to a dark hole in the ceiling.
“You go,” Yolande whispered urgently when exhaustion forced Eve to hesitate. “Go!” she prodded, putting Eve’s hand on the rail.
Survival instincts kicking in, she climbed. Her grip white knuckled, and her shoulder coming alive to the searing burn of red-hot pokers, her legs strained to push her higher. Lungs about to explode from the exertion, she’d neared the top when calloused fingers closed around her bruised wrist, yanking her out of her prison.
Eve cried out in terror and pain, but before she could react, the rough hand moved to clamp over her mouth stifling the sound.
“S’okay, s’okay,” Yolande said as she emerged from the ground at Eve’s feet. “Help her,” she said to the man before setting a rapid pace. With a grunt, he pulled Eve’s arm over his shoulder, and supporting her they fell in behind.
They moved swiftly, heading for a windowless door on the far side of the building, the beam of the flashlight reflecting off multiple chrome bumpers as they passed. When they paused by the judge’s Bentley, her father’s orange GTO parked beside it, the mental fog lifted, and Eve finally recognized where she was.
The manor’s garage!Bryan had kept her prisoner, underground, not a hundred feet from where she grew up. Her stomach heaved, sending what felt like a flood of bile into her throat, but when she doubled over and vomited, only a small amount of liquid hit the floor.
Forty minutes later, Eve stood in a small bathroom in Yolande’s tiny apartment. Alive, free, and mad as hell, she stared at her reflection in the speckled mirror above the sink. Sallow skin. Chapped lips. Eyes dark hollows. Hair a tangled mess.
Her bruised cheek too painful to look at, she dropped her gaze to the scrap of fabric clutched in her trembling hand. Eight days handcuffed to a rail turned her wrist every shade of purple. Welts in some places, skin rubbed raw in others.
With slow measured movements, she rinsed the blood from the terrycloth, watching but not really seeing the red swirl disappear down the drain. When the water ran clear, she wrung the excess and pressed the rough square to her face with a heartfelt groan.
Bliss.
Heat, familiar and reassuring sank, into her skin, offering comfort and healing while the wind, merciless and violent, battered heavy rain against the window. The fragile glass withstood the incessant beating, wave after wave. Unshattered. Intact. Defiant.
On the other side of the bathroom door the argument continued, the intensity matching the storm outside. Their fear palpable, Yolande, a French Canadian, wanted to flee north. Her boyfriend, Carlos, a citizen of Mexico, pushed for south to Culiacán where he had cousins to protect them.
So far, they only agreed on two things.
No police and no taking Eve with them.
She couldn’t blame them, the judge was a powerful man, and he wouldn’t be doing his own dirty work. If there were bodies to bury, guaranteed, he wasn’t the one digging the graves. He had help. Someone hiding behind an LAPD badge made perfect sense.
Not knowing who might be involved in the cover-up limited her options. At least, until she got herself safely away from Los Angeles. But no way would she allow Bryan and his father to get away with imprisoning and murdering twelve women.
Hell no.
She was taking them down. She just needed to stay alive long enough to do it.
The absence of yelling, and a couple of slammed drawers, preceded Yolande’s terse knock. “For you to wear,” she said, entering without waiting for a response and placing a pile of folded clothes on the counter.
