He felt the floor beneath his feet crack no more than a few steps into the room. A yellow caution sticker on part of the broken door caught the corner of his eye. All Darius could do was hold Eve tight as the floor gave way.
And what he thought would be a quick fall into some kind of crawl space turned into a long plummet into darkness.
Chapter Ten
Eve ran through the hallway, one hand pressed hard on her shoulder, and the other holding a gun. Darius labored behind, his wheezing becoming more pronounced the farther they went into whatever maze they had fallen into. She wanted to stop, to check all his injuries, but there wasn’t any time.
Whoever the second shooter was might have followed them. Though, their way down into the underground corridor had been less than ideal.
Eve had still been processing the fact that she had been shot when the two of them had collided against debris and concrete. Or, really, Darius had. He’d taken the brunt of the impact beneath him.
It’s why she was the one holding the gun.
“My—my hand isn’t working,” were his first words once they both realized they were still relatively in one piece.
Their only stroke of good luck had been the sliver of light that had shown the hallway they were now currently stumbling through. Darius must have also spotted it. They pulled themselves up together, only pausing long enough for Eve to pick up the gun.
Now she was heading in the direction of the female residence hall, sure that they had stumbled into an old storage system or water-pump holding corridor that had long since been boarded-up.
That was, until she almost hit a wall.
“Hold on,” she breathed out. Eve felt Darius’s body heat against her back. She used the arm holding his gun to rub it against the stone in front of her. “This is a dead end? We need a light.”
“My phone is in my pocket.” Darius kept his voice low too, but the sturdiness in it had crumbled. He was in pain.Painpain. “G-get it for me.”
Wherever they were was quiet enough that the simple action of placing the gun at her feet and feeling for his phone were as loud as yelling.
Which was good because that meant they should be able to hear their pursuer if they came their way.
Eve managed to pull the phone from his pocket with one hand, careful to keep her other pressing against the wound on her shoulder. Her hand was soaked, and she knew it would hurt like hell once her adrenaline started to ebb.
But now wasn’t the time to mentally hover.
Instead, she felt a wave of gratefulness at the fact that Darius had the same model phone as her. Eve had the flashlight function on and working within seconds.
Darius was smart to shy away from its beam.
From the quick flash she was still able to see a lot of blood.
“There’s…there’s two ways to go,” Darius breathed out.
Eve and her pounding heart turned to give the discovery more light. They had, in fact, run into a dead end whereupon you had to turn left or right.
“Wherearewe?” she asked herself.
The light showed a path to the right that was almost identical to the one to the left. No sign of life either way. Both dark and seemingly endless. The path to the right had a few wooden-looking crates stacked on one side. The other to the left looked like it sloped slightly downward.
Eve motioned to the left.
“This would go toward the main part of the mill? The other way would be toward the woods? I don’t… I don’t know where we are.”
Darius’s body heat intensified as it pressed into her back. The sudden weight made her stumble into the stone wall.
“Sorry, I—” Darius was close enough that her hair moved at his words, but he couldn’t have sounded farther away.
“Darius? What’s wrong?”
His head dropped to the top of her good shoulder, weighing it down enough that she had trouble turning to face him. Eve wasn’t able to get the light directly on his face, but she saw enough to know asking what was wrong had been a silly question.
