Hotter Than Wildfire (19 page)

Kerry’s breath was caught in her chest like hot rocks; she couldn’t breathe in or out. Sweat dripped down her face, fell between her breasts, between her shoulder blades. It dripped down into her eyes, big salty drops, stinging her.

She couldn’t clear her eyes.

She needed her hands.

The instruments gleamed brightly, as if brand new or recently polished to a high sheen. You couldn’t even pretend they weren’t for hurting. Every surface came to a point or a sharp edge. The handles were made to augment the strength of a hand. These two men’s hands were plenty strong. The instruments would only allow them to hurt her more.

The man across from her, Mr. Elegant, simply waited, one leg thrown over the other, one expensively shod foot flexing every now and again, his only concession to nerves.

Kerry had no doubt that her nerves would snap first. Her nerves, her bones. She could be reduced to a mockery of a human being and he wouldn’t break a sweat.

Quiet. Utter and complete silence.

For the first time since coming to, Kerry wondered where they were. Someplace where no one would come galloping to the rescue, that was for sure. Rescues were for novels and movies. No one was going to rescue her.

There was no one to come. The deep silence could only be that of a place that was utterly deserted. Where? No clues at all. Bare concrete floor. Small Formica-topped table, inexpensive wooden kitchen chairs. That was it. She couldn’t even see the walls beyond the pool of light thrown by the spotlight.

This place could have been a basement, a storage space, a warehouse. It could be anywhere.

“So,” Mr. Elegant said finally. There was no impatience in his voice. No impatience, no anxiety, not even curiosity. Nothing. “Are we ready to talk, or do we have to use these?” He flicked at the table holding the instruments. “It makes no difference to me, because the end result will be the same.”

She needed her
hands
. In her worst nightmares, she’d always had the use of her hands.

As if he’d heard her, Mr. Elegant picked up what looked like needle-nose pliers, only of a superior steel, coming to a sharp point. He weighed it in his hand, turned it this way and that in the bright spotlight, as if admiring its workmanship.

“Perfect for pulling out fingernails,” he murmured. “Designed for it, in fact.” When he lifted his head to look at her, there was no menace. He wasn’t making an idle threat. He was stating a simple fact.

She shivered.

“Now.” Mr. Elegant put his open palm over the instruments and looked at her. “Are we ready to talk?”

The shivering took her whole body, as if she’d been suddenly plunged in ice. She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

He waited.

“Y—yes,” Kerry choked out. “I—I’m ready.”

“Excellent. Where is Ellen now?”

“I don’t know.”

His hand fisted over the pliers.

Kerry wheezed to get air into her chest. “I don’t! I don’t know! I haven’t seen her in days! Last time I saw her I was coming off the day shift and she was coming on the evening shift. More than a week ago. She hasn’t come in for work since then. Our boss is worried. It’s not like her. She’s always been very reliable.”

He drummed his fingers once on the edge of the table, processing this.

“Where do you think she is?”

Running away from you.
“I don’t know.”

His eyes slid sideways and the man behind her pinched that point on her shoulder. The pain shocked her so much she jumped in her chair, lifting it off the ground. This time he kept his fingers there, on and on and on.

She was rendered down to rock bottom by the time he lifted his hand away from her. Her head hung down, curly hair forming a dark curtain around her face. Tears spurted out of her eyes, mucus ran out of her nose, both dripping down onto her knees.

She could barely stand stage one. Stages two, three, four and beyond were right here in this room.

The shivering was beyond her control. She looked down at her knees, knocking together, though the movements were hampered by the duct tape around her ankles. Her breathing was loud in the room, sharp intakes of breath and sobbing.

No way out.

Except one.

“I need to go to the bathroom,” she mumbled. She could barely get the words out.

“The
bathroom
?” Mr. Elegant asked, black eyebrows raised, as if the very concept were foreign.

“Please.”

She couldn’t stand another session of pain. And they’d only just begun. Kerry didn’t have much information on Irene. Irene had been very closemouthed about her story and now Kerry understood exactly why.

But the fact that she knew so little would just enrage the man sitting across from her. She could feel it. Years with Tom had taught her a lot about male rage. This type’s rage wasn’t explosive like Tom’s. This type had rage hidden under the skin, cruel to the bones. Even after she’d told everything she knew, he’d punish her for knowing so little.

Kerry couldn’t do it.

She had two things to give. She’d give one, then beg to go to the bathroom.

Her hands, she needed her hands.

“Bathroom,” she mumbled again, trying to dry her eyes on her shoulder. “Please.”

“How did you two communicate?” the man asked abruptly.

It was a question she was expecting. Still…
Don’t make it easy.
She let her head hang for a minute, then raised her eyes. She tried to look shaken, disoriented. It wasn’t hard. Her muscles held the memory of the red-hot pain and a pounding pulse had set up in her head.

She opened her mouth.

His voice dropped, became ice cold. “And don’t tell me by cell phone, because you didn’t.”

Actually, they had. Kerry should have realized the type of man who was after Irene by the precautions she took. Irene had three cell phones, prepaid, untraceable. One to communicate with her, one to communicate with her agent and one for their boss, Mario.

These men didn’t know that. Oh God, every piece of information she could withhold—if only she could get to the bathroom!—was something that might help Irene survive.

Her own life was lost, she understood that. Given a choice, she’d have chosen to save her own life instead of Irene’s, but the choice wasn’t hers.

Life, fate, destiny. Whatever you wanted to call it, it was operating here. She was already gone. A ghost. Her thirty-two-year journey from Denver to Vassar to marriage in San Diego to life on the run was over. She’d never know the love of a child, of a good man. Never feel the rain on her face, never rock to Aerosmith again. Never eat ice cream, never finish
War and Peace
.

Her life ended here. Her only choice was between betraying a friend who could fall into this man’s hands, after hours and hours of unspeakable pain, or controlling the situation in the only way she knew how.

“How did you communicate?” he asked again. He wouldn’t be a man to ask three times.

“Computer.” Kerry coughed the word out. It tasted bitter, like betrayal. But of the two, this was better than giving a cell phone number. Or—God!—forcing Irene out in the open to save her. “Message board.” She gave the access data and password.

Mr. Elegant nodded to the man behind her. The man whose hands held such pain in them. An electric whir, a faint bluish light reflecting off the concrete walls. The trill of Windows firing up. The tapping of keys.

“Got it. Yeah.” The way he spoke was weird. Clipped, the vowels all wrong.
Yiah.
“Scrolling through. Mostly messages about meeting up. Nothing interesting.”

No, there wouldn’t be anything interesting there. Both she and Irene would never have committed anything potentially dangerous to writing. So no, these two dangerous men wouldn’t find what they needed in the message board. Which meant they’d probe, hard, for the next thing.

Pain, much more pain, was coming. With death at the end of it.

Kerry suddenly bucked, the back legs of the chair coming up off the floor. She opened her mouth, tightening her stomach muscles, retching with forced dry heaves.

“Please,” she whispered. “I’m going to throw up. Please let me go to the bathroom.”

They exchanged glances. They were going to kill her. But disposing of a vomit-drenched body was going to be marginally more unpleasant than disposing of a body that had been allowed to throw up into the toilet.

With a disgusted sound Mr. Elegant waved his hand. “Take her to the bathroom.” He pinned her with his black, crocodile gaze. “Try anything and you’ll wish you’d never been born.”

Forcing herself to retch had brought up bile, made worse by his words and the images they conjured up. She nodded her head. The man behind her came around, bent, pulled out a long, sharp knife, as gleaming as the instruments on the table. With a smooth movement, he sliced through the duct tape holding her ankles together and the tape around her breasts anchoring her to the chair.

With a strong hand he lifted her up out of the chair. If he hadn’t kept a grip on her arm, she’d have fallen straight to the floor.

For the first time, she got a good look at him. He was the man on her rainy street. The man she’d thought was Tom for a horrified moment.

Turned out he was worse than Tom.

“Hurry it up,” Mr. Elegant said sourly.

Tears pricked at her eyes. Yes, she should hurry up and die.

“Okay,” she whispered.

The blond man holding her arm in a tight, unbreakable grip, Kerry shuffled more than walked to a door in a corridor she hadn’t seen before. Her legs were extremely weak, from being bound, from the terror she felt.

The man with the funny accent almost carried her. When her knees buckled, he just picked her up with one arm around her waist and hustled her to the bathroom door. Inside was a malodorous cubicle, stained and filthy.

Kerry stopped at the door, shuddering deep inside herself, long deep tremors. Oh God, this was it. Her life, stopping now. However awful the past year had been, on the run from Tom, once or twice she’d thought that somehow some day it would all stop.

She could start her life up again. He’d forget about her and she could move on, into the sunlight, into a regular life, instead of huddling in the shadows. Maybe even start an interior decorating business. Maybe find a nice man to marry. Maybe—maybe even have kids.

And even in the fear and terror of this past year, there’d been good moments. Tea with Irene, the odd funny client. She’d read a lot from the local library, listened to a lot of music on the radio. Solitary pleasures, but pleasures nonetheless.

All ending, right now.

A thump on her back, hard. The door of the bathroom yawned before her. “Get going. We don’t have all day here.”
Hiah.

Kerry turned, licking her dry lips. “I’m—I’m going to need my hands.” She looked at him, at his light-blue eyes, like colored marbles, just as devoid of any humanity as Mr. Elegant’s. “To…um.” Her mind whirred uselessly. “Need my hands,” she repeated in a whisper.

He’d either cut the tape or not. She couldn’t do anything about it.

He whipped out that sharp blade again, the steel whispering against its scabbard, and with one deft move cut through the duct tape. An amazing feat. He sliced through without touching skin, though her wrists were tightly bound together.

So he was handy with a knife. Real handy. She shuddered even more deeply.

He nodded sharply at the bathroom, not even bothering to waste words with her.

“Can—” Kerry was shaking so hard her mouth could barely form words. She flexed her hands, trying to get some circulation going again. It would be too horrible if she botched this. “Can I close the door?”

He shook his head.

Oh God.

“Can you—can you turn your back?”

Without a word, he turned on his heel, presented his broad back to her. Kerry suspected it was more because he didn’t want to see her vomiting than to provide her with some privacy.

This was her chance, right now. She stepped into the filthy, stained cubicle. It was dark, with only a small window way up high. There was no question of her being able to escape from it, and she knew the two men realized it as well. Even if she were athletic enough to leap up onto the toilet seat, smash the filthy glass pane and try to haul herself up and out, this man would catch her in less than a second.

No, there was no way out.

So she looked around, heart pumping with dread, tears bleeding from her heart. This was where she’d end her life, in this fetid abandoned bathroom, with only two heartless strangers to witness her passing.

Such a miserably lonely and squalid place to die.

“Hurry it up,” the man with the funny accent said.
Come on, get going, do what you have to do so we can torture you to death for information that’s not in your head.

Suddenly, a hot flush of rage ripped through her system and she welcomed it. It chased away the icy chill of fear, and even the sadness, because she was going to do what these two men thought was impossible.

She was going to beat them.

“Okay.” Kerry put soft humility in her voice, just as he’d expect. She understood very well that they
liked
degrading her, humiliating her. Just as they would
like
hurting her.