One by one, they were going to pick off her friends. Her family. The people who were willing to risk everything to bring her home.
The Black Knights would be forced into a gauntlet of bullets and betrayal, and she couldn’t stand the thought of it. Couldn’t stand the thought of being the reason?—
“What if they don’t have the money?” Kurt asked as he shouldered a wildly evil-looking weapon with a scope that belonged on a National Geographic photographer’s camera.
“Then I tell them to bring what they can and come anyway,” Black Widow explained. Her pale skin looked luminous in the faint, flickering light of the nearest lantern.
Sabrina studied the woman across the expanse, thinking she was elegant in the way vipers were elegant. Then, she turned away when a fly landed on Hummer’s face, crawled across his cracked lips, and disappeared inside his open mouth.
Why hadn’t they thrown a tarp over the body? How could they stand to look at it? How could they stand to smell it?
Didn’t they care?
“Bishop’s paying us plenty,” Black Widow went on, and Sabrina glanced back over to find the woman eyeing her phone’s screen. “Especially now that it’s split four ways. So whatever the Black Knights bring to us is just icing on the cake.”
The blonde looked directly at Sabrina then. And just like that, Sabrina no longer felt the heat in the air.
She was chilled to the bone. Goosebumps rose along her arms, the little hairs lifting like they were trying to pull out of her skin and retreat from the assassin’s cold, emotionless gaze.
“Remember, she’s mine,” Black Widow hissed.
“How are you planning to keep her from warning the others?” Vance asked.
“Don’t you worry.” Black Widow’s eyes were still locked on Sabrina as she pulled a syringe from her hip pocket. The capped needle still looked wicked. And when Black Widow winked, Sabrina couldn’t help but shiver. “I’ve got a plan for that. I’ll dose her again right before they get here.”
After that portentous announcement, she waved a hand. “Now, go take up your positions. I have a call to make in ten minutes, and I don’t want any distractions.”
Weapons rattled as they were shouldered or stowed. Boots echoed around the crumbling walls. Then, one by one, the men disappeared through that yawning metal door and slunk into the night.
Sabrina was reminded of mountain lions vanishing into a tree line.
And now she was alone with Black Widow.
Somehow, that felt even more dangerous than anything she’d suffered yet.
The blonde sashayed across the floor with that feline precision Sabrina had first seen when she’d raced down the muddy embankment after Sabrina plowed into the tree. When Black Widow made it to Hummer’s body, Sabrina expected her to pause.
She didn’t.
She stepped over his corpse like he was a fallen branch in her path. Like he was nothing.
Then, she bent, and Sabrina flinched—she couldn’t help it—when the woman’s fingers clamped around her jaw like a vice.
“I’m not going to knock you out,” Widow whispered, her voice like acid. “I’ll give you just enough to make walking and talking tough for you. But I won’t knock you out like before. I wouldn’t want you to miss the show.”
17
12,000 feet up
The outskirts of Chicago glittered like someone had dumped a bucket of diamonds over black velvet. Red brake lights on the roads and highways were gridlocked arteries. The streetlights shone in straight, even rows like ribbons of gold.
But none of it mattered.
None of it drew Hew’s gaze.
Only one point on the map below meant a goddamned thing to him, and that was the dark square sitting at the edge of it all.
No light penetrated the bottling plant or its surroundings because no one paid the electric bills. The city had written off the whole place long ago. And, seen from above, it resembled a strangely geometric black hole in a sea of twinkling stars.
