“Delilah, what happened?” Gallagher’s voice was so deep I could hardly hear it and so gruff it must have scraped his throat raw. His grip on the bed frame tightened until his fingers were white with tension. Until the metal began to groan. “I’ll killevery last one of them.”
He’d said it. He couldn’t take it back. And as tears burned twin paths down my face, I realized I didn’t want him to. I wanted him to tear into everyone who’d ever made me do anything against my will. Who’d ever put me in chains, touched me without invitation, drugged me or locked me up.
“Put the bed frame down and put your hands in the air.” Pagano aimed his remote at Gallagher with one hand and pulled his gun with the other. His real gun. Nervous sweat dripped down his forehead. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if I have to.”
Gallagher’s fist tightened. Metal squealed in his grip. His biceps bulged with tension, his gaze trained on my handler.
Pagano raised his pistol, aiming at Gallagher’s chest.
“No!” I cried.
Gallagher lifted the bed frame.
Pagano put his finger on the trigger.
I lunged between them, blocking the handler’s shot, but Gallagher leaned around me. His arm rose so fast I saw only a blur of motion on the edge of my vision. Something long flew across the room, end over end.
The handler pressed a button on his remote, and Gallagher made a stunned choking sound. He fell to the floor with a heavy thud just as the broken end of the metal bed frame punctured Pagano’s chest like a pencil through a sheet of paper, driving him backward until he hit the wall.
Pagano coughed up blood. Then he slid down the wall and fell over sideways, staring sightlessly at the doorway.
“No!” I sank onto my knees next to Gallagher. His legs were shaking, his heels crashing into the floor over and over; he was having a seizure. “Gallagher! What can I do?”
His eyes rolled back and his teeth clacked together.
“Get the remote!” Claudio growled, fighting his restraints in a vain attempt to get out of the bed. “It’s still shocking him!”
I scrambled across the floor and pulled the remote control from Pagano’s limp hand, silently apologizing for his bloody death, after the relative kindness he’d shown me. The remote had a smart screen, with half a dozen “quick touch” options. An icon at the bottom of the display read End Voltage.
I pressed it three times before I was sure the device had accepted my command.
Gallagher went still. I crawled back to him with the remote control in hand. His eyes were closed. “Gallagher.” I bent low to speak into his ear. “Gallagher. Please wake up! We have to move.” We weren’t going to get a better chance to escape, and we had no choice.
He’d killed a handler.
If Vandekamp caught us, he would have Gallagher killed slowly, brutally in the arena. In front of a crowd. And he’d make me watch.
“Is he okay?” Claudio asked, still straining for a better view.
“I don’t—”
Gallagher’s eyelids twitched. Then they opened. He blinked, and his gaze focused on me. “Delilah. Are you—” He sat up with no sign of vertigo, and when he saw Pagano’s corpse, he exhaled. “I got him.”
“He didn’t hurt me, Gallagher.”
“He wasn’t...?” His gaze fell to my stomach.
“No!”
Gallagher shrugged. “Pagano was keeping you locked up. That made him our enemy.” And for him, it was truly that simple.
He pushed himself to his feet, then reached down to help me up. “We’re leaving.”
“Okay,” I said, and he looked surprised that I wasn’t arguing. “But we can’t leave all the others.”
“We won’t.” Gallagher turned to Claudio. “Can you walk?”
The werewolf’s cuffs rattled when he shrugged. “Not quickly.”
