Page 175 of The Wild Charge

Reese’s leg kept twitching, twitching, twitching. A nerve had been clipped, somewhere deep. He stared at the hilt protruding from the pale skin of his thigh, a place never exposed to sun. Blood welled around the blade and trickled down over his knee, tickled his shin. The pain bitdeep, liquid fire along his bone. He wouldn’t know for sure if his femoral artery had been hit until the knife came out, but he didn’t think it had, based on the location.

He'd always been so good at compartmentalizing, but it was getting harder now, the edges of his vision fuzzing and blackening. The pain pulsed in time to his heartbeat, everywhere at once, choking and awful. Too strong to ignore. His outward calm was blurring with some panicked-animal inner part of him. He didn’t want to be awake anymore.

Coughing, rubbing at his throat, Jax retrieved the pipe. When he lifted it again, Reese leaned into the pain, and let unconsciousness take him.

~*~

Ian had been seated between two starlets: one mid-twenties and new to the industry, still sparkling with possibility; the other in her sixties, well-used, with a low, smoker’s laugh and jaded eyes. It was the older one who kept laying a hand on his arm as the waitstaff brought dish after dish that he barely touched; as wine glasses were refilled again and again. When the young one got up and excused herself to the restroom, the older one – Dina Van Diem – leaned in close, wine-sour breath tickling his face, “What about you, handsome? You feel like taking a trip to therestroom?”

It was perhaps the worst come-on Ian had ever received.

He turned his head toward her a fraction, and for a moment, with the smoker’s lines around her mouth, and the smudge of dark lipstick on her teeth, he was transported back to Carla’s. To the groping hands of men and women, the self-satisfied laughter. He blinked, and swore he felt the weight of glitter and fake lashes on his eyelids. Then he blinked again, and he was Shaman – the new Shaman – and he pried her hand off his arm none-too-gently.

“No offense, dear, but you’rereallynot my speed.”

Shetsked, made a sour face, and flopped back in her chair. “Ugh. You coulda just said you were queer from the start.”

“Nonsense.” He tugged on his cuffs to hide the fading tremor in his hands. Damn that bitch Carla, still lurking like a shadow at the back of his mind. “I do enjoy being flirted with. Feeds my massive ego, you know.”

She snorted.

A waiter materialized on Ian’s other side, and when he turned to say that he didn’t need a refill – his wine glass was still full from the last one – the man leaned in close to whisper in his ear. “If you’ll come with me, sir, the auction is starting soon.”

A jolt moved through Ian, a little earthquake of awareness and anxiety, but he didn’t let it show outwardly. He nodded and folded his napkin. “Thank you.”

This was it. Show time.

~*~

The Beaumont Building was thirty-nine floors, not including all the subbasement levels that Evan had described, shakily, over the phone. Eden had been able to obtain the original plans, and so they had a map of sorts, on their phones.

But no way to know where they were holding Reese.

They were going to have to obtain that intel.

From the kitchen, they moved into a narrow service hallway and a corresponding service elevator – one that only went up. No access to the basement levels. If they managed to get Reese out of here in one piece, Fox might allow himself a single stroke of guilt for focusing on him rather than the innocent girls Evan had described as being trapped…but that would be later. Now, it was all about Reese.

Through the smoked lenses of his goggles, Fox studied the panel inside the elevator, debating.

“He won’t be with the girls,” Devin reasoned. “Just like he won’t be low enough that a guest could go up a flight of stairs and walk into something they shouldn’t see. If they’re torturing him”–

Fox shot him a warning look that he ignored.

–“they won’t want anyone to be able to hear him down at the party.”

“Yeah,” Fox ground out, “I already figured that.” A darted glance at Tenny proved his head was pointed forward, straight at the doors. There was no indication he’d heard them.

Abe leaned in and pressed the button for 39. “Might as well start at the top and work our way down, then.”

“Right.” Fox took a deep breath and resettled. It was a sound idea: they had men stationed at every exit. And Ian was in charge of Waverly besides.

The elevator glided up, and up, and up. Fox felt the weight press down into his ankles and the soles of his feet, and he took the few, quiet minutes of climbing to smooth his brain clean. To push every extraneous thought from his mind and focus on the task at hand.

He adjusted his rifle on its strap, settled his gloved hand on the grip and laid his finger just inside the trigger guard.

The floors ticked by on the counter. 27…28…29…

The cab lurched to a halt.Ding. The door slid open first, and through the grate, Fox glimpsed a dark office floor, the only light the ambient glow of the city, coming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Silent. Still. Half-finished cubicle warrens could have hidden any number of attackers, but nothing made a sound save the scrape of their collective breathing inside the elevator.

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