Page 73 of Hidden Chaos

The second elevator dinged, alerting me that I had a visitor. A guard stepped off, acknowledged me with a curious glance but turned in the opposite direction. Every few seconds, he would glance back like his sixth sense told him something about me wasn’t right although we wore the same uniform. Once I was out of sight of him, I doubled back around to find him peeking into one of the exam rooms that had been secured.

“Aww! I don’t know!” a shrill yell sounded and the guard who had left the elevator laughed. I hadn’t heard a sound until the door had been opened, indicating the room had been sound proofed.

Whoever was in that room was torturing someone and not even our invasion had torn them away from their job. I crept closer to the cries of the suffering man while the guard was standing in place peeking in and holding the door open.

“Did you find out anything?” he questioned whoever was inside the room dishing out the punishment.

The person’s voice carried, but I didn’t understand the words that drew the guard further into the room. More screams sounded and the guard let the door go, unable to resist the temptation of seeing someone else’s pain.

I caught the door with a few inches of space remaining, placing my fingers in the crack. I was set to push the door open when the shrill whine of an alarm sounded.

Baah! Baah! Baah!

Someone had triggered another alarm, but I wasn’t intimidated by the sound. Instead, I smiled, confident that our teams were already inside the building and descending on their destinations. The alarm was silenced seconds after it had sounded.

I pushed the door open, letting the elongated creak announce my presence. Four sets of eyes found me, including the man on the table dressed in a filthy hospital gown, breathing like his lungs were in flames and bleeding from multiple exposed areas of his body.

“Who the hell are you?” one of the devils wearing a white coat dotted with blood yelled.

“My name is the Giver, and I was sent here to ask you one question.”

“What question?” the other white coat asked, staring at his friends before putting his questioning gaze back on me.

“Would you please accept these bullets in my honor, so you can see how much harder death can fuck you when you deserve to die?”

I eyed the tip of my pistol and lifted a brow to glance at the two white coats and the guard.

“Or I can give you a preview of the hard fuck death has planned for you at a slower pace with this knife. I pointed at the blade strapped to my waistband. “Your choice. I’ve always been a firm believer in giving choices.”

The guard’s right hand, hanging near his weapon, twitched with the anxiousness he failed to hold back. Since no one had answered my question, I suppose this would be a decision I would have to make for them.

I holstered my pistol and unsheathed my blade, loving the way the light bounced off the gleaming tip to show off its sharp intentions. I took deliberate steps into the room and the victim appeared to have forgotten his pain and studied me with as much interest as the rest of the group.

The first person to make a move was the guard, reaching for the weapon holstered under his arm. My knife was in the back of his hand before he touched the butt, leaving the blade sticking out of his hand like I had been driving a nail through a piece of wood.

“Aww! Mother—”

I cut him off with a four-finger jab to his throat. He gripped his neck with his good hand and his gaze flashed to the knife, unsure about which pain to nurse first, his knifed hand or his failing throat that had him choking and fighting to get air flowing through the damaged area.

One of the white-coat torturers made a run for it, but the room wasn’t big enough and he wasn’t fast enough. A few steps and I pivoted with a round-house kick, sending the heel of my black boot into his face, so hard, the sound of a tooth hitting the floor found a way to break into the symphonic sounds of agony spreading throughout the space. The man sunk to the floor, falling to his knees and gripping his bleeding face in his trembling hands.

The guard had recovered enough to launch a half-hearted attack, managing to draw his pistol and aim it unsteadily at me. All I’d been waiting for was a good enough excuse to gift him with the bullets I had promised when I’d first entered the room, sending one into his chest and the other dead center of his forehead. His mouth formed an O, his eyes wide with surprise, and his body a leaning tower before he went crashing to the floor.

“What do you want? We have many resources at our disposal. Money, supplies, connections, name it and you can have it,” the other white-coat wearing torturer offered. Instead of responding, I bent over the lifeless guard and jerked my knife from his hand. A few steps across the room placed me at the hospital bed of the victim.

“You look familiar. What’s your name? Why are you here?” I asked him.

“Evan Gamble. I look familiar because I’m syndicate. These nut jobs have a big hard-on for our organization. They’ve killed at least three of us, and I’ve only been here a week,” he said, his words slurred since his face and mouth were so badly swollen.

I sent my blade slicing through the thick black straps binding his right hand to the bed. Once his hand was free, I handed him the blade to finish the job of undoing his other hand and feet.

I had no way of verifying if what the man told me was true, but instincts suggested he had no reason to lie. Plus, he had recognized me as syndicate. Once he’d freed his other hand, he peeled back the tethered and bloody hospital gown and flashed me his family crest.

He was one-hundred percent syndicate. He jumped from the bed with renewed strength after I gave him a perceptive nod.

“If you don’t mind, can you leave these two for me?”

I nodded.

“The others took the woman you’re here for to a safe area on the level up,” he announced, pointing at the ceiling and confirming what Rhi had already told me.

I cast a last glance at the man and flashed a smirk at the two who had been torturing him. Based on the devilish gleam in Evan’s eye, those two were about to find out that mercy had been stripped from whatever time they had left.

When I cracked the door open and prepared to exit, three white coats came charging down the hall, making a mad dash toward the stairs. I didn’t bother taking care of them because they were running straight into the uncaring arms of our team who was sweeping the stairway.

Boom!

The loud blast rocked the building enough to vibrate my insides. It meant the blast was close, at least a level or two below me. Our people knew not to call attention to us, so the blast had come from one of the building’s security crew and would no doubt send up a red flag for outside onlookers and alert this groups’ backup. It would also alert local fire and rescue, so we were now facing a strict time constraint.

Rhi hadn’t found a way in yet, so the only question I needed an answer to at this point was, “Could the safe room on level fifteen be breached from the outside?”

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