Without warning, Reaper put his gun to her forehead and fired.
Caroline jerked and buried her face in his neck, wrapping her arms around his throat. Oh God. Oh God.
He’d shot her. Winters dropped like a stone, her glasses flying off her face.
Caroline’s already skittering heart pounded and she trembled in his grip.
“She deserved to die for what she did to my men.”
Too shocked to process the information, Caroline huddled against him, seeking comfort from the death dealer as her mind fought to cope with the situation.
Winters had basically held her hostage and tortured her. Caroline should be ecstatic the woman was dead. But the horrifying image of the black hole forming in the center of the doctor’s forehead played on a broken reel in her mind.
Too much. It was too much. She wasn’t cut out for this. She was a United States senator’s daughter, for crying out loud. Before the kidnapping, the scariest thing she’d ever done was take Taekwondo.
Mercilessly Reaper pried her fingers from around his neck and forced her to lean back and look at him. Tears flowed down her face unchecked, but she had no control over that, Caroline realized she had no control over anything.
“I’m sorry you had to see that, but I’m not sorry she’s dead.”
Her lip trembled, but she firmed up her chin and nodded. The look in Reaper’s eyes left her with no doubt he believed in what he’d done. And after bearing personal witness to Dr. Winters’s evil nature, Caroline had no trouble believing it was true. “I-I’m not sorry you killed her,” she stammered out uncertainly, “I was just shocked to see it happen.”
He stared at her with that hard expression on his face. His jaw could’ve been chiseled from granite, his nose as hard, his eyes black as the shadows that double-crossed his jaw.
He was so handsome it hurt to look at him.
“There’s a tunnel above our heads. I need to lift you up into it. Do you think you can climb out?” As he spoke, he reached above them and grabbed a handle, turning it and pulling open a small, round porthole she hadn’t noticed.
The dimly lit tunnel would be barely wide enough for Reaper to fit inside. She could see the first few feet up, but the rest faded into darkness. Caroline paused. Small spaces had never been her thing. “How far?”
He shifted her in his arms until he was holding her in front of him, her feet hanging straight down. “As far as it takes for you to get out of here.” There was no compassion in his tone this time, just a cold slap of reality. Part of her recoiled from his ferocity, but she sucked it up. If he started treating her with kid gloves right now, she’d probably fall completely apart.
Besides, he was telling her the truth. If she wanted out of this mess, she’d have to enter the tunnel. “Yes, lift me up.” She tried to insert a little bravado in her voice but couldn’t tell if she actually accomplished it.
Whatever she sounded like, Reaper lifted her like she weighed nothing. As soon as her shoulders crossed the threshold, she reached up and grabbed the first metal rung she could feel. The ladder was maybe a foot wide with evenly spaced metal bars disappearing up and overhead. She tried to pull herself up with the strength of her arms but failed miserably. Then Reaper wrapped his hands around her feet and hoisted her higher, communicating his strength in a quick, easy move that left Caroline scrambling to grab the new bars she now faced.
“Lift up one foot and put it on the ladder. I won’t let go until you’re secure,” he said.
His palms felt rough against the bottoms of her feet, but they held her steady. Biting her lip, she lifted her right foot and blindly searched for the ladder. The end of her toe made contact with the bar and she let out a whelp of pain.
“Caroline, you’ve got to move it. They’ll figure out our location before long,” Reaper said.
Caroline wriggled her toe to make sure she hadn’t broken it, and then, biting down on her inner cheek, planted her foot firmly on the ladder. As soon as she levered herself upward, Reaper let go. The pounding in her skull returned instantly. She was bombarded with sounds and could actually feel the weight of the earth pressing in around her. What was wrong with her?
She just felt different. Her skin went hot and clammy and her heart continued to race. And then Dr. Winters’s words drifted back to her and she remembered the adrenaline.
She wasn’t a scientist or a doctor by any stretch of the imagination, but she knew that adrenaline would pump her full of energy. Maybe Dr. Winters had given her so much it was causing all these other side effects.
Caroline gritted her teeth, fighting off the nauseating sensations as she concentrated on lifting one foot over the other. She had managed to climb up four rungs when she heard a thud and felt the ladder vibrate. A quick downward glance revealed that Reaper was hanging directly beneath her. He had jumped from the floor through the ceiling, and the ceiling had to be over ten feet tall. Dear God, the man was strong.
“Come on, climb up. I’m right behind you.”
“How did you do that?”
His brow furrowed and annoyance was clearly written across his face. “I jumped.”
“But that ceiling was over ten feet high!”
“Do you really want to stand there discussing my workout routine?” His gaze flicked from her face to her body and then back to her face. She’d swear his pupils were dilated.
