Page 74 of Duplicity

Otherwise, she might never see Simon again.

TWENTY-EIGHT

“Come on.”

They hadn’t put a hood over his head this time. That was the first clue that Simon was going to die.

No way would they let him see this location and everyone’s face without ensuring he couldn’t lead the police to them later. Which meant that the only way he was leaving this place would be in a body bag.

The man grabbed his arm and dragged him from the car toward an electric car. Simon looked around, attempting to imprint it all on his memory. Concrete walls. Cars lined up in rows to the right and left. A collector’s dream showroom.

In the center in front of them was a tunnel. Behind, where they’d pulled into this industrial-looking garage—the size of a football stadium—was a gated entrance. A motor whirred, and the gates eased shut, meeting in the middle. Then, a door rolled down in front of them, on the outside.

Completely disguising the entrance.

He didn’t even know what it looked like on the outside as he’d been in the trunk for that part of the journey.

The rear door of the electric car was opened for him. Someone shoved Simon’s head down. He forced himself not toreact to being shoved around and slid in. A man slid in right behind him. Another got in on the other side, sandwiching him in the middle seat.

No one put a seat belt on. No one got out their phone and started to play a game.

The one most likely in charge got in the driver’s seat, and the car accelerated with an odd electronic whir down the concrete tunnel.

The car was washed in pitch black. The occasional overhead light flashed through the sunroof, and the headlights lit up far too little of the road ahead of them. Just concrete and darkness. More concrete. More darkness. A long, straight tunnel of nothing.

This must be the place he’d been brought before. So familiar.

They drove for… It must’ve been miles and miles. Maybe seven minutes. They’d been traveling a little over thirty miles an hour, but not much more than that. Nearly four miles. Wherever the entrance was, it was a ways from where they needed to be.

That meant all the cars were illegally obtained to keep their existence an absolute secret. Someone who lived here enjoyed the dark side of keeping their actions under the radar.

Or they just really liked tunnels.

The car slowed to a stop beside an arched doorway carved out of the stone walls. Double dark wood doors with iron ornamentation opened.

A man in a suit with an earpiece stood in the doorway.

Thirty-three miles per hour for seven minutes meant they’d gone…three point eight five miles. If they’d only been going thirty-two miles per hour for the same seven minutes, that wouldn’t shave much off the distance they’d traveled. If he had constructed something like this, he’d have used round numbers.

To get two miles of travel, that would be five minutes at twenty-four miles per hour. Who wanted to go that slow, really?

One of the men tugged on his arm.

His mind filled with the image of Cat’s arm, covered in blood. She wasn’t dead. She couldn’t be. Even if he was killed in some horrifically gruesome way, she would live.

That was the important thing. She had to live because it didn’t matter what happened to him. If he died, it would only be justice for the things he’d done.

You will keep her safe, won’t You? You’ll do that even if I’m dead?

Unlike last time, he was willing to focus on the fact God was real. God could hear him, and He would act on Simon’s behalf. None of that was in question this time. If he was honest with himself, he’d known it all along.You are therefore without excuse…

He’d been running for far too long.

Running from God.

Running from the truth of who he was.

At seventeen, he’d been unable to think of anything but the blind terror. The threat of death, or worse. Given everything that’d happened in the past six or so years, it didn’t surprise him to find that he wasn’t the same scared kid. The boy he’d been the first time he was taken still lived inside him, but he was also a grown adult at the same time. It was an odd dichotomy of who he wanted to be and the truth of who he could turn into at any moment if he lost faith in himself or his family and friends or God.

---