Why did she feel like giggling? She pushed the irrational impulse down and spun, hands out.
He wasn’t far; she could feel him. The prey instinct ratcheted unbearably high.
Desperate, she scrabbled at the walls. Stuck. Caught like a rat. In a maze, no less. She ran her hands up and down, to the ground. A sob had just crested her chest, about to break through her tight throat, when right above the floor, her gloved hand met nothing but air.
A hole. So low she almost hadn’t found it. Afraid to feel even a glimmer of relief, she dropped, just as the light hit the wall opposite, and backed into the pitch-black of an unknown void.
Chapter 9
Trapped in a slot no bigger than the space under a kid’s bed, Angel counted his footsteps, trying to remember how long this section of tunnel was. Ten steps? Thirty? She’d come too far, taken too many random turns to tell. She’d been running when she’d veered down this way, but Bradley Sampson walked at the pace of a Sunday stroll.
At some point, his footsteps interwove with her heartbeats, until suddenly, she couldn’t count anymore. Couldn’t tell what was him or her or the creaking of the ice around them.
Crunch…BOOM. Crunchboom. Crunch, crunch. Closer. Closer. Careful steps, carrying out a methodical search.
“I know you’re around here somewhere, Angel, darlin’.” Crunchboom. “Wanna know how?” A long, low chuckle that would have sent shivers down her spine if she wasn’t already a shuddering, spinning mass of goose bumps, suspended here waiting. “You’re bleeding.”
Was she? She almost shifted to check the place where the door had slammed into her nose, then stopped herself. There wasn’t room to move in this hole she’d stuffed herself into. It would scrape her coat against the ice and give her away.
Something clanged. “Ow. Fuck!”
Angel went very still.He’s right here.
Was her hood sticking out? Her hands? Would he trip over her? Breathing much too fast, she resisted the desire to ease back, to curl tighter. If she shifted now, he’d hear her.
Something tickled her nose. Blood, dripping out. It stopped almost immediately, froze on her upper lip. Just as she’d managed to ignore the itch, his voice cut through their shared silence.
“Followed her into the tunnels.”
She startled, her whole body jerking so hard that the scrape of knee and boot and glove to ice might as well have been an explosion. She was so sure, in that moment, that the jig was up that she almost breathed a sigh of relief.
Almost.
But then she heard another sound, so ordinary, so completely out of place in this horror-movie moment that it almost didn’t register—the crinkle of a wrapper, followed by the crunch of a Life Savers in Sampson’s mouth. It was so clear, so loud, that she could have sworn she caught a puff of that telltale cinnamon flavor.
He was breathing hard, which struck her as almost funny. Here she was, quiet as a mouse, while he huffed and chewed and cussed his way around.
“You clean ’em up?” This time, when he spoke in that curt boss voice, she didn’t react. Didn’t move a muscle. “Yeah. Fine. I’ll be right there.”
There was a beat of silence, of stillness, and when Sampson spoke again, it sent a shiver down her spine. “Know you’re in here, Angel, darlin’. No place for you to go. No way out.” He released a long, annoyed hiss. “Why’n’t you come on out, huh? Promise I won’t hurt you.”
Yeah right.She knew better than to believe this psychopath.
“We’re about to take off and we could really use your skills where we’re going, so…” Sounding impatient, he went on. “Look. There’s no time to wait around for you to make up your mind.” His feet crunched slowly past, so close she could reach out and grab his ankle. The beam of his flashlight hurt her eyes.
“You either come with us now, or I lock you in and you’re de—” He muttered a curse under his breath, then louder, said, “Tell him to hold his horses.” Another pause, while he waited for the person on the other end to respond. “Fine, I’m coming up.” He exhaled loudly. Took a step. “Last chance, Angel.” There was a long silence this time—so complete that she held her breath with it, strained into it, hoping. Then, on a laugh, “Got you.”
Light and sound and pain ripped through her all at once.
One second, she’d almost made it; the next, he had her by the arm, dragging her out, his painful hold nothing compared to the angry backhand to her temple. She flew back, landed on her rump with a heavyoofsound, head ringing, vision strobing. Instinct pushed her into a few frantic crab-crawled steps, but he was on her, spewing curses, his hands grasping her like claws, tearing into her.
This was it. She shut her eyes, used every muscle in her body to pull away, to shrink back from his blows, only they didn’t come down. Instead, he shoved one hand into her hood, seized her ponytail, and pulled.
She screamed and grabbed on to his forearm, flailing to stay on her own feet as he dragged her back through one long hall after another.
The cursing had faded into grim silence by the time they made it back to the door. “Shit. Idiot said he’d cleaned up.” He tightened his grip, drawing her face close to his. “Don’t try anything or I’ll leave you down here to freeze to death.”
Abruptly, he dropped her like a sack of potatoes and turned to shove Jamie Cortez’s stiff body out into the arch. The fall knocked the air out of her but not her common sense. Fast. Faster than she’d moved in her life, she flipped to her stomach, pushed up onto hands and knees, then up to her feet, and ran.
