Prisoner of Night (The Black Dagger Brotherhood #16.5)(48)

Overhead, red lights started to flash, and off in the distance, an alarm began to wail.





29




DURAN LOOKED UP AT the red lights and wanted to punch a wall. “That sonofabitch.”

In his brain, he triangulated where they were and prayed like hell he had the storage room located right. There were a number of them in the facility—or had been twenty fucking years ago.

Grabbing Ahmare’s hand, he pulled her into the corridor and broke into a flat-out run. Unlike the fluorescent tubes that had been in use constantly and were failing, the red lights, also inset into the ceiling, were fresh as a damn daisy, no blinkers or dead soldiers among them, their strength overpowering the weaker illumination and leaving everything stained the color of blood.

Seemed fitting.

When they got to the spoke he’d been looking for, he ran them back toward the moth room and the entrance they’d infiltrated. And as they pounded down the hallways side by side, he kept a count in the back of his head. Three minutes was nothing when your life depended on it—it was even less when you needed to save someone else.

There was still one minute forty seconds left as he got her back to the door they’d entered through, the one with the code, the one he’d left open for Chalen’s guards, who had yet to materialize.

“Come with me,” she said when he halted. “We’ll hunt your father together.”

“That’s not why I’m going back.” He kissed her hard. “I’m not leaving my mother’s remains here.”

“I can help!” When he shook his head, she gripped his shoulder. “Duran, you’re not going to make it out of here alive.”

He stared at her panic, at her pain, and wished there was another fate for her, for them.

“I’m at peace with that.” He searched her face for the last time. “I love you. I wish there was more for us—”

“Come with me!”

“Go! I’ll find you.”

It was a lie, of course. The chances of him getting to those bones and getting out in time? Less than zero—and he knew damn well she was doing that math in her head, too.

She paused for one last heartbeat. “I won’t forget you. I promise.”

He closed his eyes as pain lanced through him. When he reopened them, she was entering the escape tunnel.

She didn’t look back and that gave him comfort. She was a fighter, and she was going to make it—and he almost pitied Chalen. The conqueror was not going to live through what that female was going to do to him.

Turning away, Duran broke out into a sprint and headed back for the Dhavos’s private quarters.

He couldn’t leave his mahmen’s bones behind—even if she technically wasn’t there anymore. That Fade ceremony was going to happen or he was going to die trying to get what he needed for it.

He might have sacrificed the chance to kill his father to help Ahmare.

But this was different.



Ahmare ran through the escape tunnel like her life depended on it because duh.

And she found the first of the bodies about halfway to the vault door. It was one of Chalen’s guards, curled on his side and unmoving, the scent of blood thick as if his throat had been cut.

She didn’t waste any time checking into the particulars with her cell phone’s light.

That alarm grew dimmer the farther she went out, but that was a function of distance, not a change in detonation. She jumped over the second of the bodies. Another guard. More blood. And a third.

The fourth was just as she came up to the vault, the robes pooled around the cooling corpse.

There was only one explanation: As Duran’s father had escaped, he’d been good with a knife, even in his weakened state.

He’d also closed the heavy steel door, and her hands shook as she trained her light at the keypad and punched in the series of numbers.

And the pound key.

Ahmare’s eyes were teary, and her heart was skipping beats as she prayed that the—

The rumble was dull at first. Very distant, like thunder still miles away. But the earth shook under her feet.

The explosions were starting to go off.

“Damn it! Work!” She punched in the code and hit the pound key. “Come on!”

Another rumble, more tremors, and now there were cracks and creaks in the tunnel, fine dust coming down and making her eyes sting.

“You have to work!” As she tried a third time, her eyes teared up as she remembered Duran saying the exact same thing.

But maybe those were the magic words needed because the vault lock sprang, the air lock hissed, and Ahmare yanked open the steel panel.

Bars. There were bars blocking the way out. Bars that had come down and were covered with a steel mesh that meant she could not dematerialize away.

She was trapped, either because his father had known this was the way they would try to get out, or because this was part of the doomsday scenario, a safeguard to make sure that even if the hemlock didn’t work on everyone, there wouldn’t be any survivors.

“No!” she screamed as part of the ceiling collapsed on her head.





30




AHMARE PULLED AGAINST THE bars. Scratched at the steel mesh. Screamed in frustration and dropped her phone because she needed both hands to try to get through the grating more than she needed illumination.