Betrayal's Shadow (5 page)

His actions appeared purposeful, though the hair across his eyes hid his expression.

Mia held her breath. To challenge the creatures was insane or stupid or both.

The feat of taunting his captors earned him a punch to the shoulder from a tentacle. His brutal crash to the floor landed him where she had appeared from home only moments ago.

With one harsh pull, the man and his captors disappeared from her sight. In sick relief, Mia shrank against the wall of her dark hallway. The cold stone floor chilled her feet, and the rough-hewn rock gouged tiny spikes of pain into her flesh. Both confirmed her dream a reality.

The dark felt safer, but pools of light on the floor from the adjoining hallway swam too close. The white puddles shivered from left to right, holding concert with an increased volume of shuffles and grunts from the far end of the corridor. The disorienting motion of the lights and echo of noises reinitiated the bitter churn of her stomach and tight clench of her throat.

Repetitive gunfire rang out in the corridor, followed by a string of shouts and high-pitched screams. She froze, crouched on the floor, arms gripped about her legs. Her pulse thrummed in her head; its rapid presence gave no comfort.

She prided herself on calm and logic, but the shivers that racked her arms bordered on hysteria. She scrambled farther back and hoped fight or flight would be an option instead of immobilization from terror.

The group that passed in the connecting hallway was human. The man in the lead carried an assault rifle, nose aimed at the ground. Two machetes crisscrossed over his back were an advertisement for his deadly career choice.

A second man in black fatigues dragged a body by the scruff of its shirt collar. Death a certainty, given the corpse was headless. Blood speckled the khaki shirt in a morbid camouflage pattern.

Those things eat humans
. Mia covered her mouth and nose to keep from vomiting.

Not far behind several more men followed, all weathered with tans, each dressed in the same khaki outfits minus the blood. The men’s necks strained beneath the burden of the wooden crates on their backs. Their heads swiveled while searching in the dark recesses of her tunnel. Wide eyes and dilated pupils identified them as recipients of terror overload.

She recognized the signs. She braced for an unexpected attack, tension locking her joints. Every noise registered, but the entourage moved farther away. Prolonged silence finally confirmed she was alone.

Mia sank to the floor and lifted her shaking hands. She turned them back and forth. They looked the right size. The bandage was still there from the packing box cut. Definitely hers.

Too bad.

The dream would be less threatening if she’d evolved into someone who could take on a big gross squid with metal teeth.

She exhaled, leaned her head against the wall, and closed her eyes. Her body remained tense, her attention still focused on sounds from the hallway.

Priority one: figure out how she had ended her dream the first time? She needed to be done with nightmares.

One slow, deep breath filtered into her lungs, a hard struggle against the tight ribbon of fear. She counted to ten and tried to relax. The first was easy; the second impossible.

In an effort to empty her mind, she searched for the blue skies while she flexed her hands on her knees in forced calm. Last night she’d gotten home. She could do it again.

The cold brace of the rock against the back of her skull and beneath her feet signaled no success.
Have to do this.

Focus
. Clear the mind. Breathe. Count.

Slow in, two, three, four.

Slow out, two, three, four.

Seconds passed, and she counted. At some point, her hand fell from her knee to the floor. She acknowledged the cold rock on her knuckles at the same time a pressure pushed against her chest and disorientation rose with nausea from her belly.

Not giving in to the temptation to open her eyes, she waited and counted. Forty long counts and then Mia opened her eyes.

The comfort of her bed was beneath her and tiny bits of stone dust covered her feet.

CHAPTER 4

Mia didn’t want to go sleep. Not with two nights of horrors behind her and a potential third looming ahead. If she couldn’t control sleep, she damn well wasn’t going back to that hellhole in bare feet and a nightgown.

Back rigid, she sat on the couch and clutched her water bottle, dressed in jeans, a sweatshirt and hiking boots. Okay, the boots were a bit over the top, but the rock and stone had leached cold into her bones that no amount of hot water washed away.

She closed her eyes a minute in thought. No. It wasn’t the cold. Fear saturated every pore of her body and kept her tense in anticipation of the worst, because daylight only had minutes left.

With careful focus, she reviewed her next steps and managed to organize her racing thoughts.

A weapon had been a brief consideration—a kitchen knife, maybe her grandfather’s old baseball bat. Yet anything she could pocket or carry would be too easy to turn against her. Her lack of experience with weapons was another problem.

She’d written a few articles on the subject of self-defense and spoken to enough subject matter experts to understand the dangers of naïve assumptions. Without constant practice, she wouldn’t be prepared to use a weapon when the adrenaline spike hit and would likely end up a victim.

Even a gun, which offered her distance from her attacker, wouldn’t work. Time was necessary for the registration to clear, to develop proficiency, and to force her fingers to override the instinct to flinch.

She didn’t have time. Night came too soon for long-range plans.

Eyes gritty and heavy, she focused on the TV’s inane blare and took a deep breath. She’d spent the morning busy with errands and then wallowing in denial. The rest of the day, she had vacillated between distractions in her office and the construction of a plan. If her nightmares escalated, she refused to allow fear to drive her actions.

The coolness of the insides of her eyelids soothed the burn of her eyeballs for a second. Her breath rose and fell in a moment of peace.

“Back again?” The low, deep voice jarred Mia alert. The sound vibrated across her skin in an odd shimmer of comfort and heat.

Shit, it happened again.

“Not by choice.” Mia cringed. So much for blending into the shadows.

“You have a voice.”

He shifted across from her and she tucked herself farther into the darkness. She couldn’t credit this man with her fear, but the drag of his chains against the stone floor was a clear reminder she wasn’t safe.

“You come and go at will, and you’re threatened by me?” The light mocking in his voice was a stark contrast to their surroundings and his circumstances.

“This isn’t
my
choice,” she said.

Silence wrapped uncomfortably around Mia. With a surge of bravery, she decided to ignore him and check her options in what appeared to be a small cell. She scooted to the door, pushed once, and then again, hard. No give.

The door, thick metal with high, thin window slats, was roughly three inches deep. Three stubborn, unrelenting metal inches that barred her from the hallway. Granted, after last night, distance could be good.

Whoever kept this man caged wasn’t lax with his security. Cold, stone dungeon, strong door, thick chains. What crime warranted such action?

“So instead you sit out of sight and judge me?” The light humor disappeared.

Mia let out a breath of exasperation. Mind reader was obviously at the top of the list of his skills. “You’d have to admit locked and chained doesn’t give the best impression.” She waited on his response. Instead the silence grew and she struggled to dispel the strange unease she sensed at his displeasure. “Why are you here?”

“An error in judgment. I followed some bad advice.” Despite his flip response, his tone was weary.

“You should take whoever gave you this advice off your go-to list.” The words were out of her mouth before she had time to think.

“Her fate was worse than mine.” The thread of sadness in his words took her by surprise, as well as the uncomfortable twinge that pulled at her heart.

“What happened to her?” She swallowed a curse. Her words echoed with accusation and she didn’t even know this man. He might be a cold-blooded killer or not. Either way, he hadn’t done anything to indicate he meant her any harm.

A brief scrape of his metal links split the emptiness. “She died.”

Quiet words, followed by a quick wave of anger that was almost palpable against her skin. An indication she’d crossed a line with her question? No, his emotion didn’t feel directed at her. And yet… “Because of you?”

Damn, she’d never lacked finesse at asking questions—no, in this case interrogation. Her regret increased with his elongated silence.

“Perhaps, though I wasn’t present for her death.”

“I’m sorry.” It seemed an odd response for someone she didn’t know, but the echo of regret in his voice spoke to his feelings. Mia waited and considered leaving off with the questions. Yet she couldn’t. This was night three of her visits to the bowels of this dungeon, and there was a gap of logical explanations. Right now, she was subject to random fate and he might have answers. At the least, he might provide forewarning, which couldn’t hurt because she was tired of surprises.

“Did the people who put you here kill her?”

“I suspect not.”

Mia exhaled her exasperation. This was worse than pulling teeth. “She must have been someone close to you.”

“A friend.” His voice trailed off at the end, almost in uncertainty. “No. She was family.”

Hmm, bad advice from family. More likely betrayal from a lover. It happened. Mia knew firsthand, though these stone walls implied more than a relationship gone bad. “I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt, but it’s a little hard if you won’t open up and talk to me.”

“Why does it matter to you?”

“Honestly, I seem to revisit you each night like a bad movie. I want it to stop. Does that qualify me with enough stake in getting to the bottom of whatever is going on here?”

“Then we need give and take. I won’t answer your questions if you don’t have the courage to come close enough for me to at least see you.” He raised his restraints toward the shaft of light, chains strung through hoops on the wide manacles around his wrists. A sign of captivity, yes, though not a good indication of the limits of his reach. From her guess, there was plenty of length to the coil of metal.

“You could be here to force my betrayal,” he added.

Betrayal of what? “That’s farfetched. I don’t even know you.”

“From your point of view. From mine, you are another potential instrument of torture and deceit.”

Okay, maybe he had a point. Cautiously she moved a few feet, just outside the circumference of light from the hallway. Her vision adjusted to the change, acknowledging the pale grays that illuminated his space. They were close enough to discern each other’s outlines in shadows, but not close enough to distinguish expressions or read emotions. The dim light highlighted his broad, well-muscled shoulders and chest.

Big guy, even bigger than she remembered. Visual recognition confirmed the man who had antagonized the creatures in the corridor and probably the angry prisoner of her first visit. If he was larger than she’d remembered then so were the creatures. She dug her fingernails into her jeans to squelch a visual flashback.

He waited quietly on her scrutiny of him. His hair hid half his face as he leaned back against the wall. She could make out his lightly bearded jawline and feel his gaze burn across her skin while he assessed her in return.

“So why
are
you here?” she asked again and forced her question past a crack in her voice.

“I wanted answers. I walked into a trap to get them.” He inhaled and swallowed hard. “One I can’t escape from.”

Her voice had broken from stress. His sounded raw and rough, no doubt from abuse. “Here.” Without a second thought, Mia pushed her water bottle toward him across the stone floor.

“Ouch.” She jerked her hand to the light and checked the slice cut by the uneven rock floor. One thin rivulet of blood trailed down her finger, black against white, oil on snow.

A rough scraping noise filtered into the cell.

She squeaked in surprise as the man’s hand whipped out, grabbed her wrist, and pulled her close. The strength of his hold dragged her with shocking speed and wedged her against him despite the yards of chains. His palm squeezed over her mouth. “Hush. Stay still.”

Her struggles faltered under the iron band of his arm about her back. With his cheek pressed against her temple, he flipped them both, pressing her beneath him into the crease of the rock wall and the floor.

Mia panicked and bucked against him. His chest blocked her arm’s movements, his hand her breathing, and his thighs trapped her hips, restricting her lower body.

“Listen,” he hissed in her ear.

Her muscles contracted as she wound her body tight with the determination to fight and scream, with breath or without.