Page 48 of The Serpent's Bride
“Sorry, miss.” John was standing by one wall, frowning at her.
“Thanks. But I know it’s not your fault. We’re only what the world makes of us, after all.” Letting out a breath, she looked up at him and cast him a weary smile. She didn’t know who she was trying to make feel better—her or him. Both. “The world kills, and so do we.”
Finally, she had the chance to take in a little bit of her surroundings. Oh. That explained the blood. They were in what looked like an old, abandoned slaughterhouse. It must be downin the depths of the metropolis, close to the Wild and near enough to the caves for the Iltanis to feel comfortable moving in and out so easily. But not in their base of operations.
The walls were the same dingy and disgusting white tile as the floor. Whoever decided to put white tile in an abattoir suffered from catastrophic optimism. And it hadn’t done them, or the room, any favors in the end. Chains, rusted and likely useless by this point, hung from the ceiling in loops and were latched out of the way with vicious, angry-looking hooks.
She hoped nobody planned on using those on her, but she doubted it.
Only three men had been left behind to watch her, everybody else had left. Which meant they likely weren’t planning on a full, all-out war. Smart. Vampires were fast, vicious fighters. And they had them outnumbered and outgunned. The Iltanis would also have no element of surprise. Raziel was a lot of things, but he wasn’t stupid.
What were the Iltanis up to?
Letting out another breath, she looked over at John and figured—when in doubt? Ask. “So. I’m curious. How’s this all supposed to work?”
“What do you mean?” He blinked.
One of the other men shook his head, clearly not liking the prisoner getting chatty. He was standing by the door they must have come through to get into the room, staring down the long hallway, his hand on his gun. He looked twitchy. She dubbed him the Nervous One.
“Well, you abducted me from my wedding. The fae said I wasn’t going to be tortured, so I don’t think you plan on cutting off pieces of me and mailing them to Raziel in the post. Besides, he…I’m going to be blunt—he wouldn’t care. He’d just be annoyed that you’d be making a mess of his mailbox.”
The third one, who she nicknamed Smiley, as he seemed to do so easily, snickered at her joke. She instantly felt bad for the fact that she was going to have to kill him. She hated that she was going to have to kill any of them. She really hoped she wouldn’t have to. But she didn’t see a way around it.
The only way she could get out of here was if she used her magic. And if they saw her magic, they’d know she was fae. And if they knew she was fae, that was valuable intelligence. And if her theory that any one of them was in the pocket of another family was right…
Down went her house of cards.
Why did life have to be complicated?
I really should have listened to Betty and retired last year. I really should.
“So,” she continued, preferring the conversation to her raging internal debate, “if it isn’t slow torture, it’s what he said—bait in a trap. But Raziel has alotof goons and alotof guns and if he’s coming at all, he’s going to beverypissed and he’s going to know he’s walking into a trap.”
The three men were watching her, various shades of confusion on their faces. Apparently, they had expected her to just sit there and weep. Not treat the situation like a thought experiment.Sorry, boyos. This is kind of what I do for a living.
“Which means you’re probably not planning to just…gun them all down. I expect—especially considering how quiet it’s grown since everybody left—we’re the only ones in here now.” She paused. Nobody spoke. They weren’t going to give her anything.
She shifted in the chair. From their point of view, she was probably just trying to stretch her arms. From her point of view, she was testing the tightness of the ropes. They were actually pretty well tied. Damn. She wasn’t going to be able to just shift shapes and snap out of them. She’d need another plan.
Looking off thoughtfully, she debated what she’d do in this situation. If she didn’t have manpower, what else could she use? “Oh!” She grinned. “Explosives!”
“Fuck.” John’s eyes went wide.
“Hah! I’m right.” She actually felt quite proud of herself. That’d been kind of a fun puzzle, even if she was now sitting in the middle of a literal powder keg. “You’re going to lure him and as many others as you can inside, run out the back, and while they’re trying to untie me, blow this place to the void, collapse it into the underground.”
“Fuck!” John swore again, pacing away from where he’d been standing. He took off his wool cap and ran his hand over his short dark hair. “Mick, ifshecan figure it out that fast, that means?—”
“Shut up,” Mick snapped. Mick was the Nervous One. Nadi preferred “Nervous One.” It suited him better. “We have our orders. You want to go back to the boss and tell him that you’re too much of a coward to go through with this?”
“N—no. But—” John grimaced.
“By the time the vampires make it down that corridor, it’ll be too late. We blow the chamber behind them, then blow this one. If they come, they die. If they don’t? They don’t.” Mick shrugged. “The end. We get out alive, either way. We’ll never even see them. We just wait for the call.”
Clever. Very clever. She’d give the Iltanis that. They were flipping one of Raziel’s proverbial coins. Heads, his ego would send him in after his abducted “wife” and straight into a known trap. Tails, he stayed away, and the Iltanis didn’t lose any more lives.
But then came another very important question.
One Nadi wasn’t fully certain she really wanted to know the answer to. “What happens to me if he doesn’t show up?”
