Soon, she’d hear that eerie voice. Soon, she’d receive her final instructions. Soon, there’d be nothing left to do but the doing.
She was ready.
She was past ready and?—
“I’m hungry,” Vance declared, cutting into her thoughts. “And it’s still hours before the drop. I saw a Wendy’s three blocks back. I’ll make a run.”
Vance. Cool-headed. Steady. The only one of them she never had to ride roughshod over.
She’d fucked him once. But she’d been too drunk to really remember much about the experience. And he’d never indicated he wanted a repeat of it.
That pricked at her pride. But only a little.
“Walk it,” she instructed and watched annoyance flicker across his face. “I know it’s hot as hell, but Bishop says the Knights have access to the city’s CCTV grid. If they were able to retrace her route as she was leaving the city”—she tipped her chin toward the bound woman—“then they might’ve zeroed in on us tracking her and have eyes out for the van. It stays parked where it is until this thing is done.”
The rest of the group easily rattled off their orders—baconator this, frosty that—and Vance took it all in without writing it down. After he sauntered through the bottling plant’s massive steel door, blond hair catching a shaft of light on his way, Vivian returned her attention to the seconds ticking by and the unease growing inside her.
The waiting was always the worst.
Diesel went back to the weapons and gear spread across the table; he liked the feel of steel in his hands. Hummer ambled over to the case of bottled water stashed by the wall. And Kurt strolled purposefully toward their captive.
Because of course he did. He never missed an opportunity to torment.
Vivian didn’t know if Kurt had been born a bully or if he’d matured into one once he stopped growing and developed a Napoleon complex. Either way, he was a dickhead. A thorn in her side on a good day and a severe pain in her ass on a bad one. She’d have kicked him to the curb long ago if he hadn’t been such a crackerjack shot.
Unfortunately for her, trained snipers—talented snipers—were few and far between.
Sighing heavily, she lifted her hair off the back of her sweaty neck. The heat inside the building was suffocating and?—
“Water,” their hostage croaked. She seemed to be shriveling into a human raisin right in front of their eyes. “Water. Please.”
“Water, please,” Kurt mocked in an exaggerated falsetto.
“Cut it out, Kurt!” Vivian barked. She had little sympathy for Sabrina Greenlee. But she had less than zero patience for Kurt’s bullshit. Especially today. Especially in the oppressive heat that made her brain feel like it was stuck inside a pressure cooker set to high. “Give her some fucking water.”
“I got it.” Hummer grabbed a second bottle from the pack and cracked the seal on the lid. He ambled toward their hostage in that slow, loose-hipped way of his.
Mark “Hummer” Keslar could be as ruthless as the rest of them. But he was capable of humanity when it counted.
She figured his humanity was what led him to dive headfirst into the bottle when they weren’t on the job. He was human enough to be haunted by what he did. By what they did.
She didn’t quite understand that about him. But she liked it.
Opposites attract and whatnot, she thought. Plus, he has that Coke bottle cock.
She felt her phone jangle to life inside her hand before she actually heard it. She ignored how her pulse leapt as she answered with a crisp, “Yes?”
“Everything proceeding as expected?” came the warped, soulless voice.
Before she could respond, a screech pierced the factory’s stagnant air like a hot blade through soft flesh. It was a harpy’s scream. A wraith’s wail. The kind of sound to lift the hairs on Vivian’s arms.
Then Hummer bellowed. A raw, shocked roar that made Vivian’s stomach bottom out.
The phone was still to her ear when her head snapped around. But she dropped it to the floor the instant she saw what was happening.
Hummer’s hand clutched his throat as blood pumped hot and red between his fingers. The hostage was still in the chair, but her arms were free. A bloody smear marked her right hand like war paint, and her eyes were wide. Feral.
Vivian had been on assignment in Wyoming once and had come across a wolf with its paw caught in a trap. The blood on its muzzle had been thick and oozing, but that was nothing compared to the blood on the beast’s mangled foot, where it’d been gnawing away its own flesh in a desperate bid to escape.
