Just blackness. Just a void of sight and sound and memory.
Now, the blackness was fading. And abject terror rushed in to fill the space it left behind.
She tried moving her hands and couldn’t. Tried moving her feet and couldn’t. She was bound to a chair, ankles secured to the legs, wrists cinched tight behind her back.
She willed her eyes open further, and the light drove into her brain like a spear. All she wanted was to close her lids and return to the void, to the soft nothingness.
But she couldn’t.
She had to take stock.
She had to think.
Being careful not to bring too much attention to herself, she glanced around and realized the space she was in was enormous. Hollow. Old.
An abandoned warehouse, maybe?
No, she decided. Some sort of factory or plant.
Hulking, rusting machinery sat like mechanical dinosaurs on the rough, concrete floor. She didn’t have a clue what the beasts might have done back in the day. Now, they rotted with the passing of time.
The soft light of a new dawn painted the filth in pale streaks of gray and grit. Brick walls, stained and crumbling, wept with mildew. The multipaned windows were now just jagged teeth where rocks, wind, or the steady march of years had shattered the glass.
The air was fetid with the smell of neglect and?—
Sabrina saw her then.
The woman. The blonde. The Banshee.
The bitch who dosed me with who knows what?
She stood in the shadows at the edge of a shaft of light, a specter pulled from some terrible nightmare. Her black clothes fitted her frame like armor. Her platinum hair was slicked back from a face sharper and crueler than any Sabrina had ever seen.
But it was also…beautiful.
Beautiful like an oleander is beautiful. Like a poison dart frog is beautiful. Allure mixed with venom, she thought.
Breath catching, pulse thundering, Sabrina knew she’d been here before.
Not here, here. But in a situation like this one. Where the person standing before her smiled as they approached.
But it wasn’t a smile of kindness. It was a smile of malice.
A smile that said they looked forward to hearing her scream.
5
Black Knights Inc.
“Hew.” Graham Coleburn kept his voice low but firm. “Brother, you’ll wear a hole clean through that floor if ya don’t quit that pacin’.”
It was like watching a lion prowl its cage.
Or, Graham corrected grimly, like watchin’ Mama when her stash ran out, twitchy and strung out, eyes wild for somethin’ she couldn’t get.
“Why don’t ya come sit?” Graham pulled a chair out from the conference table, motioning like he was coaxing a skittish colt into a stall.
Hew didn’t even glance his way.
