Page 10 of Pay the Price

I kept banging, wanting to make sure the Beasts could hear me through the metal door and concrete walls, wanting to make sure I wasn’t drowned out by the staccato bursts of gunfire still coming from all directions.

None of it made sense. The Beasts were only three men. There was too much noise, too much chaos on the other side of the door. It sounded like a war zone.

And then, gunfire right outside my door, followed by a thud.

I jumped back instinctively, half expecting a stray bullet to make its way through the metal.

Instead I heard the jangle of keys.

The door swung open a few seconds later, a man standing in its frame in the moment before he rushed into the room.

Otis, with a mean-looking gun in one hand.

“There you are.” He said it like it was any other day, like he’d been looking for me in the house and found me in the library.

I hadn’t rehearsed what I’d do or say to the Beasts if they came for me, but now some kind of instinctual rage took over. All the pain of the days I’d spent locked up — remembering the texts on Blake’s phone, knowing the men I’d been falling for had killed him — spilled out in the punch I landed to Otis’ jaw.

It had felt explosive, all that anger and pain coming out of my body, but Otis just lifted a hand to his cheek.

“Ow.” A single pop of gunfire sounded from the hall. He glanced back, then threw me over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry that happened so fast I hardly had time to register it before he stalked toward the hall. “We have to get out of here, doll. You can kick the shit out of me later.”

And then I was floating out of the room, freed from my prison by one of the three men who’d killed my brother.

Chapter 7

Daisy

Gunfire popped intermittently from outside as Otis raced down the hall with me over his shoulder. Our escape was a blur of movement I only caught in flashes.

The hallway, smelling like sulfur and littered with the bodies of three guards.

Shouting between Otis and a man I didn’t recognize, and improbably, between Otis and Neo Alinari, who appeared at one end of the hall before disappearing again.

We rounded a corner, the far horizon of my imprisonment, the place beyond which I’d never gone in all my trips to the bathroom.

I lifted my head enough to see that we were in a shorter hall, still concrete, this one empty.

“Put me down,” I shouted, sick of being hauled around like one of the giant bags of flour Joan got from the store where she did the bulk shopping for my dad’s house.

“Are you going to punch me again?” Otis asked, still moving.

I thought about it. “Not here.”

He laughed. “Good enough for me.” He paused to put me on my feet, then leaned in to kiss me hard and fast on the mouth. “I’m happy to see you, doll. Keep up.”

He grabbed my hand and tugged me toward a yellow metal staircase. We climbed it as a single pop of gunfire sounded from somewhere behind us.

“Don’t think about that,” Otis said. “Just keep moving.”

I followed him up the staircase and into a room filled with thick cables and metal pipes. I felt like I was a mouse trapped in a maze, but Otis seemed to know where we were going, pulling me along through concrete room after concrete room, water roaring louder and louder beyond the walls until I couldn’t hear anything else.

Finally he pushed through a metal door marked EXIT and we spilled out into the night. I stumbled a little, feeling like a deer in the headlights as the lights of the dam complex shone down on us, the surrounding woods so dark it felt like I was standing on a stage, peering at an unseen audience.

I shied away from the harsh light after so many days in semi-darkness and felt Otis’ steadying hand on my arm.

It was surreal being free after so long, the night sky inky overhead, a soft summer breeze blowing off the water. I’d thought that when I got the chance to escape I’d run and never look back. Instead my mind cataloged a series of observations, trying to make sense of the situation.

I’d been right: I was at the dam, had just exited one of the control buildings at its base.

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