Page 29 of The Last Sanctuary
Raven inhaled sharply. Her face flushed hot with outrage—and fear. They could go to hell. Every single one of them. They were murderers and worse.
Vaughn cocked his head, listening to Vlad’s distant roars. “Let’s have a look around before it gets too dark, see what we can find. We’ll stay here for the night.”
“How about something edible?” Ponytail asked. His voice was deep and rough, like gravel. “I’m starving.”
Cobb sniggered. “Don’t accidentally walk into the bear cage, Rex, or you’ll be the edible one.”
Cobb flashed an ingratiating smile at Vaughn, as if gauging his reaction to the insult. Vaughn ignored him. Beside him, Dekker sneered down at Cobb and waved a hand at him in dismissal. Cobb slunk several paces away.
There was a hierarchy among the bikers, with the same jostling for power and dominance as a wolf pack. In this case, she doubted the alpha treated his pack like family.
“Gentlemen, a treat just landed right in our laps, thanks to Dekker’s quick thinking.” Vaughn gathered the men around him. “Let’s go see just how sweet it is.”
Cobb grabbed the bars of the gate and rattled them. “How we gettin’ inside, boss?”
Rex narrowed his eyes at the bioscan lock. “No way to hack this.”
“Grab the hook,” Vaughn ordered. “And the chains.”
“What are you waiting for?” Dekker clapped his hands at the lower-tier men. “Get to it.”
Raven watched with barely contained panic as several bikers jogged back to their motorcycles. One pulled a large metal hook and chains from a case attached to the rear of the bike. Rex grabbed a bolt cutter and went to work on the gate’s hinges.
Cobb and Damien wrapped the chains around the gate, then attached them to the rear of several bikes. They revved the bikes and pulled away with a squeal of tires and roaring engines. With a sickening shriek of metal on metal, the gate wrenched off its snapped hinges and fell to the asphalt with a thud.
The bikers strode through the opening in the fence like they owned the place.
Vaughn turned to Damien, Rex, and a third guy—a slight, stoop-shouldered Latino in his forties, wearing a khaki jacket and a floppy brown fishing hat pulled low over his forehead.“Damien, find us a place to sleep. Rex and Gomez, you’re on food patrol. Scrounge up something decent to eat.”
Damien nodded. “We’re on it.”
The bikers dispersed, laughing and conversing among themselves. Three of them found the main path that circled the perimeter of the park. As dusk fell, they flicked on their flashlights.
Rex and the black-haired guy in the fishing hat—Gomez—strode up the path that circled the lodge. They would skirt the side of the lodge and reach the rear in a few moments.
Raven had to move. Now.
The growing darkness would help shield her. She knew the layout of this place like the back of her hand. The darkness gave her a slight advantage—an advantage she needed if she was going to survive the night.
Chapter Twelve
Raven rose cautiously to her feet and backed away slowly, making her footfalls quiet the way her father had taught her when they went hunting together.
Like all predators, rapid movement would attract attention and trigger their prey response. If she stayed small and still, she could creep behind the buildings, head to the back of the park, reach the rear gate, and escape into the woods.
Without her pack, she had no food, water, or shelter. She wouldn’t last long. But a single night while these thugs took what they wanted before going their merry way—that was doable.
They’d take some of the food, but there were only ten of them. She prayed they wouldn’t hurt Kodiak or the other animals. Either way, she had no choice.
She was out of options.
It was completely dark out now. Stars winked to life overhead. Thin clouds drifted across the moon like filmy ribbons. Without electricity, the automatic security lights strung along the path were dark.
Moving carefully within the shadows, she managed to reach the maintenance shed without detection. The air had grownchilly, temperatures dropping into the forties at night. Her adrenaline masked the cold, but she would feel it later, alone in the woods at night, exposed to the elements.
She crouched, eyeing the twenty yards of open ground she had to cross to reach the cover of trees between the shed and the food storage buildings. Once she reached the trees, she’d be invisible?—
Footsteps sounded nearby. Three men rounded the corner of the lodge, not thirty yards distant. They approached from the far side. Their flashlights swept the ground along the wrought-iron fence. In the dark, their shapes were only vaguely human.
