“How many girls do you think Schmidt’s got here?” Carlo, my second, looks at me, his mouth tight with disgust.
I put my hand on his shoulder and shove him out of sight as two of Schmidt’s guards come clattering down the stairs.
“You think he would share,” one grumbles. “Why do we have to wait until he’s bored of them?”
Whatever his partner’s answer might have been is cut off as I end them both with a quick bullet. Looking up, I see the amber light blinking on the security camera. Good. Casey’s inserted a video loop, it will take fifteen minutes or so for anyone monitoring the security feed to spot the anomaly.
His next step is remotely disabling the biometric locks on each door. I take one side of the hall, and Carlo takes the other while our other men guard the stairs and entryway.
The first two rooms are empty, both gray stone rooms fashioned to look like a dungeon, right down to the chains bolted into the floors. The next door opens and Lorenzo’s breath leaves him in a sigh. “We’ve got one, but she must be gone. These injuries… there’s no way. I’ll check her vitals to be sure.”
Rooms four, five, and six are empty. Room seven is not. The girl is sprawled face-down on the mattress.
“Ah,cazzo,fuck!” I hiss. “Edoardo, get in here! I think this one’s still alive.” He’s our medic, the horror on his face makes my heart clench as he pushes past me, kneeling by the mattress, picking up her limp hand to search for a pulse.
Rooms eight and nine hold the reminders of the women who were once trapped there, marks on the walls, scraps of cloth. I’m at the last door in the nauseatingly white hallway and about to open the door when gunfire sprays down the stairs.
We all take cover, and I dive through door number ten.
“Sorry brother, you’ve got eight guards charging down to the basement,” Yuri’s voice crackles in my ear.
“Yeah, thanks for letting me know,” I snarl, shooting one of the new men wielding an AR-15, and then the one behind him. “Where did these fuckers come from?”
“Through the front gate,” he said grimly. “We must have missed one of the pressure sensors during the approach.”
“Get Schmidt and go,” I said. “Pull the charge off his helicopter and fly him out. You’ve got your pilot with you, yes?”
Yuri snorted, “Don’t waste your time getting noble on me now. We came in together, we leave together. Can you take out those eight?”
“Oh, yeah,” I assure him.
My men are barricaded in the doorways, shooting back at the newcomers as I shout into my headset, “Cover your ears!”
Whistling, I pull a flashbang grenade from my belt and hurl it down the hallway. The resulting shockwave of noise and light shorts out my earpiece, and I’m a little disappointed I can’t hear the screams of Schmidt’s men as my team mows them down.
As the gunfire dies down, I turn to sweep the room, rifle up and I see her.
Painfully thin, her ankle horribly bruised from her shackle, and enormous green eyes. Too wide, like a spooked horse.
I clicked on my headset again. “We have another survivor!”
Chapter Two
In which Cora is saved. Sort of.
Cora…
“We have another survivor!”
My cell is very well soundproofed, because I never hear a thing until the horrible metal door opens and I can see the chilly white gleam of the hallways and sometimes, I can hear the screams of other women.
My chain rattles as I shriek and fall back against the terrible little mattress as the door slams open and an enormous and very loud man dressed in black military-type gear comes rampaging through. I can hear the roar of gunfire and then a violent shock of blue-white light and a painfully loud, percussive shockwave, big enough to make my eardrums bulge dangerously.
After shouting about his discovery in his headset, the man strides over to where I’m chained. I scrabble back, crablike, banging into the wall.
“Don’t! Don’t touch me. Who are you?” I gasp, heart pounding hard enough that I’m desperately sucking in air.
Crouching, he offers me one huge hand. “It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you. We’re here to get you out.”
