Page 112 of The Devil We Know

Out of the Darkness

Darius

I am relatively certainI'm not dead.

I've lost count of the number of times I've blinked, yet I remain in the darkness. I open my mouth to speak, then grit my teeth, forcing myself to swallow a few times as I do my best to peel my tongue from the roof of my mouth.

It takes a few attempts, but I manage to clear my throat and then croak out, “What the fuck?”

And then I chuckle to myself, that odd feeling of déjà vu wrestling with my bones.

“What could possibly be funny?” a voice comes out through the darkness.

“Who the fuck are you?” My words are rough, but they travel well in the silence.

The voice retorts, “Who the fuck are you?”

I groan, shaking my head and then laughing again at the ridiculousness that this could be happening a second time.

Trapped in the fucking dark.

I don't say anything for a few moments, mostly because I'm stubborn and I don't want to. And then the voice comes back, “Beast, is that you?”

“Oh, for the love of fuck, don't call me that.”

“It's me, Ivan,” he replies. “And you should be embracing that name at this point. Who knows how many times it's gotten you out of hot water.”

“Well, apparently, this wasn't one of them,” I reply dryly.

“I don’t know. You had one big moment of threatening to rip out a spine before you passed out. I think it helped.”

“Would you two yahoos shut the fuck up,” an old Irish voice says from the other side of me.

“Seamus. So good of you to join us.”

“Yeah, that's what I fucking get for bothering to save your dumb ass.”

“Just let me get my bearings, and I'll try to poke around and see where we're at,” I say tiredly.

I move to sit up, cracking my forehead on something hard, just as Seamus says, “I wouldn't do that if I were you.”

I raise my hand to my face and end up driving it into the same hard surface I bashed my head off of. Slowly, this time, I manage to rub my fingers on my forehead as I mutter, “Well, this is getting better and better.”

“Just be glad you were knocked out-cold when you got put in here. I got shoved in this thing wide awake,” Ivan answers.

I shrug and then chuckle again at the ridiculousness of my nonverbal cues. “Lucky for you, this isn't my first time trapped in the dark, nor is it my first time stuck in a box.”

“Do you have any brilliant ideas on how to get us out of here?” Ivan asks sarcastically.

“Not hardly. Seamus, what are the odds of someone leaking our location?”

“Well, it depends,” he replies. “Going by Ivan's descriptions, I think it's safe to assume they've moved us east.”

“East? Why east?”

“He said they had us in the back of a van for around four-ish hours. From our previous location, I think around four hours’ distance from there, in any direction, the most reasonable explanation would be the Boston area. That's also the only place I would consider being enemy territory.”

“That makes sense. Dare I ask what fun awaits us in Boston?”

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