Page 34 of Deader than Dead

“Like what?”

“I don’t know.”

John levered himself away from his makeshift seat to crouch in front of me. His face was red now, the heat really getting to him. He slid his hands up my thighs, lifting blue eyes to mine. “We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t.”

I covered his hands with mine. Truer words had never been spoken. “Yep.”

John started to talk, his words more a string of consciousness than anything else. “There must be an angle, something we’ve overlooked. They’ve taken both of our phones so we can’t call anyone. Cade’s not going to send anyone to our rescue. Not when it will put his son in danger. Oh, and then there’s the fact that he’s a dick. There are no weapons in here that we can use against them.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, hoping he could hear the sincerity in my voice.

“Don’t! Don’t apologize.”

Guilt had the back of my throat tightening, making it more difficult to speak. “If I hadn’t come to you.”

John’s fingers squeezed my thighs in a silent message. “It was fate. It had to happen.”

I smiled because how could I not? “Do you really believe that?”

“I know it.” He bent forward to drop a kiss on the back of my hand. “Even if I never see another sunrise, it will have been worth it. Last night was perfect in every way. I thought that was our first and our last night together, so I’m prepared for whatever happens today.”

Not caring that it was sweaty, I slid a hand into his hair. “It was perfect. You’re perfect.”

John’s answering smile was warm enough to send the already roasting temperature in the shed up another few degrees. He craned his neck back, and we shared a kiss. It was tempting to sink into it, to turn it into more despite the suffocating heat, but I wasn’t ready to give up on us yet, my mind racing. “If they knew I’d come back to life, then why did they tell your boss they thought you’d stolen the”—I lifted my hands to make finger quotes—“corpse, when they knew that was utter bullshit.”

John shook his head. “Why do people like this do anything?” He considered it. “Maybe they wanted to renege on their deal with Cade. They were meant to give him his son back once the job was done. Technically, you were alive, so the job was. Perhaps it was an excuse to keep their leverage over him.”

“Perhaps.”

John heaved out a breath. “Anyway, none of that really matters. The only thing it affects is how pissed off I should be at Cade over this whole mess.”

“True.”

We lapsed into silence. John didn’t look so good, and I was becoming nauseous myself. How long had we been in here now? An hour? Longer? John bent forward to rest his head on my knee and I carded my fingers through his hair, lifting the blond strands. “If I didn’t know they needed me alive, I’d think they were trying to suffocate us,” I said with a sigh.

John gave a humorless laugh. “Yeah. It crossed my mind, too.”

Even breathing was becoming difficult. How long before we ran out of oxygen? Was that their plan? Despite the difficulty, I concentrated on breathing through the nausea. Neither of us wanted to be trapped in here with a pile of vomit. I kept stroking John’s hair, John leaning into it. We wanted a future together. How did we get that?

John tipped his head back to meet my gaze. “Where did you hide that damn mask, anyway?”

There was no question of me not trusting him, which should have seemed ridiculous, but it didn’t. It seemed completely right. Ushering him closer, I whispered the location in his ear. We didn’t know if one of them had been assigned to listen at the door and relay everything we said. I’d barely gotten the words out before John threw his head back and laughed. Not a small laugh, either. A great big belly laugh, like I’d made the ultimate joke. Perhaps the heat and the pressure combined had driven him crazy.

Once he stopped laughing, he was still smiling. “Fate,” he said. “There’s no other way of describing it.”

I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, but I was all for the look of optimism that had replaced the resignation on his face. If he thought there was some hope of getting out of this alive, I’d cling to it like a sailor to a life raft.

Chapter Eighteen

John

By the time they dragged us from the shed, we were both dripping with sweat and I was more than a little nauseous. So relieved was I to be out of the suffocatingly hot shed and able to drag in a lungful of fresh air that Gold Tooth’s fingers digging into my arm barely registered. Even when he pushed me to my knees and pressed the gun to my temple again, it was difficult to care. Apparently, you could get used to the feel of one. Even the direst threats could lose their sting if they got too repetitive.

“If you harm so much as a hair on his head,” Bellamy said, his voice shaking, “I swear I won’t tell you anything, no matter what you do to me. You can carve pieces off me and the secret of where I hid the mask will go to the grave with me.” Despite our circumstances, he smiled. “Again.”

They hadn’t forced him to kneel, and they weren’t pointing a gun at him. It was obvious how they were going to play this. They wouldn’t kill him yet, but they’d kill me. They’d drawn the right conclusions from Bellamy coming straight to me, spending the night there, and then the two of us exiting my flat hand in hand. The only thing they had wrong was assuming we were in league with each other and had known each other prior to me turning up at the tower block.

O’Reilly stepped forward, her demeanor just as calm as it had been before, like the three of us were sitting down to have a cup of tea together. “It’s simple,” she said to Bellamy. “You tell us what you want to know and you both get to walk away from this.”

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