Page 242 of The Enslaved Duet
“I’m going to die here,” I said to myself and the earth beneath my hands, watching the grim glimmer of my tears falling with the rain to the soft, damp ground.
I curled my fingers into the soil, fighting the urge to tip my head to the heavens and howl like a lost a wolf, crying for the rest of my pack that would never come, crying for the death I knew was close to arriving at my back.
In all my experiences, I never truly thought I was seconds from dying, not like this. I wanted to press my body into the dirt and be swallowed up in the warm embrace of the soil, die at the hands of nature instead of the hands of a monster.
And that spurred something inside me, some insanity that reared its head the more I poked at it.
I started digging.
Alexander
The house was lit up like a beacon, but as empty as a tomb. I slunk through the halls, disturbed by the weight of the silence, how it filled the air like amber, pinning everything in place as if it hadn’t been disturbed since my last visit.
Only when I pushed into the dining hall did I find evidence of life.
Or, I should have said,death.
The dining room table was a half-charred, still smoking mess, and Mrs. White lay in a shroud of her own satin red blood beside it, her face tipped up to the ceiling, the faintly surprised set of her mouth open and scarlet like her head wound.
My blood went glacial in my veins.
Riddick bent to place his hand on her arm and looked up at me with grim eyes. “Still warm.”
My heart kicked and throbbed in my chest, wailing with fresh, incessant terror, terror I’d known from the moment Cosima disappeared into the back of Osteria Lombardi never to reappear. I hadn’t felt any of my own fear when I went to find her and discovered the crude, homemade bomb on the basin instead of my wife. I’d been driven forward by the cold wind of purpose, collecting everyone as I pushed out the doors, calling to Dante to do the same.
Everyone made it out, except for two souls who’d been in the back alley when the explosion went off and caught the debris in their bodies.
I hadn’t felt fear then, nor elation, not for myself or the others who had survived.
I’d only felt the huge, palpitating terror that came from knowing someone had my wife.
It took less than twelve hours to discern Noel had been the one behind the crime, that he had sent Rodger in on the private Davenport plane to retrieve my wife and ferry her away to her own personal hell.
We couldn’t go to her right away.
Not without a plan.
It seemed Noel had used the last of his personal money to hire a team of thugs and trained professionals to seal the grounds. There were so many of them, they looked like ants crawling over the fortified walls of the property from the drone’s video feed.
The police told us to stay in town while they attempted to figure out the crime, and I didn’t waste time. I called in Salvatore and Dante’s crew, I called in Simon’s anti-Order bandits and hired my own security team.
We planned, and we plotted. I saw Dante off back to jail because they briefly wondered if he had been behind the bombing. I kept mum on the truth of the event because I didn’t want the police mucking it up.
And then, thirteen long days after Cosima was taken, I finally boarded a plane with my crew and my plan and set off to get my wife.
Only, after taking out the thugs and scaling the walls, after telephoning in a delayed call to the local police and to the MI-5 unit I’d been working with, Cosima wasn’t there.
And Mrs. White was dead on the floor of the dining room.
Fuck.
I jogged out the other end of the hall and nearly stumbled over Douglas who lay passed out against the wall, a bleeding, but non-threatening wound rounding his forehead. My heart jumped into my throat as I checked his pulse, and Riddick moved after me down the hall. There was blood all over the Persian rug near the termination of the endless corridor, the wet, metallic smell of it still rich in the air.
I swallowed the urge to vomit, the insatiable need to know if it was Cosima’s blood I carefully avoided as I walked by, and pulled the remains of my habitual arctic calm around me like fucking armor.
I would not give in to emotions until I had my wife safe in my arms and our enemies dead at her feet like an offering to a God.
We arrived at the end of the hall, and Riddick pushed open the door to listen briefly to the night air before we continued our search of the upper levels.
