Slow Agony (Assassins, #2)(61)

I went over and picked it up. It had my name scrawled on it in Griffin’s handwriting.

What was going on here? Griffin had left me a note?

I sat back on the couch and unfolded it.

“Doll,” it read, “I know that you won’t understand this, but I have to go to Marcel on my own. It’s the only way I can end this. I have to come to him alone. If either Sloane or Silas were with me, he wouldn’t accept my surrender. I knew there was no way that I could convince you of this, so I’ve gone without your agreement. I’m sorry. If there’s a way that I can come back to you, I will.” He’d signed it with his characteristic scrawl. I could only make out a ‘G’ clearly.

I let the letter flutter the ground, my hands going to my mouth.

That idiot.

What was he thinking?

I was on my feet in a second. He’d left me only minutes before. Maybe I could find him and stop him before he got to Marcel. How far could he have made it by now, anyway?

Finding my jacket, I left the waiting room and hurried down the hall to the elevators.

One was in use, but the other was open, so I got inside and punched the button for the bottom floor.

The doors closed. The elevator lurched to life. I twisted my hands together, willing it to go faster.

I didn’t even know if he’d go to the bottom floor, anyway. For all I knew, he’d go all the way down to the furthest underground level of the parking lot. I really had no way of knowing.

But when the door opened on the bottom floor, I saw him.

He was heading out of the front door, one of those spiral doors that travels in a big circle.

I leapt out the elevator, going after him. “Griffin!”

He didn’t turn around. Maybe he hadn’t heard me.

I picked up my pace, careening through the hospital lobby as fast as I could, dodging the people who were milling about.

I pushed my way through the front door.

Griffin was standing on the sidewalk, ahead of me.

“Griffin,” I yelled.

No response. I was a little out of breath, but I sprinted the rest of the way to him, placing my hand on his shoulder. “Griffin.”

He turned.

I stepped back. He wasn’t Griffin. He was wearing the same clothes Griffin had been wearing, and he had a shaved head, just like Griffin’s. But he was a different person. “I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

“No problem,” said the man, smiling amiably.

A white van pulled up in front of him. The side door swung open. Two men jumped out. “That her?” said one of them to the Griffin lookalike.

The Griffin lookalike nodded. “That’s her.”

Wait. Why did they know who I was? Was the man dressed like Griffin on purpose?

I hesitated for a second, looking back at the hospital.

It was a second too long.

One of the men grabbed me by the arm.

“Let go,” I said. “I’ll scream.”

He laughed.

I struggled, letting out the highest pitched, most bloodcurdling scream I could manage.

Another man from the van had gotten a wheelchair out of it. He opened it up. “Transferring an unruly patient, folks,” he said, waving to the people who’d stopped at the sound my scream.

They wouldn’t believe that, would they? I screamed again.

But the people were already moving again, going about their business.

The man shoved me into the wheelchair.

I thrashed, trying to get up.

He held me down.

The other man had a syringe with a needle in it. He brandished it.

I redoubled my attempts to escape.

The needle was coming for me.

I shied from it, trying to keep from getting stuck.

It was no use. The man plunged it into the top of my arm.

The pricking feeling wasn’t that painful, but I shrieked anyway. Almost immediately, my limbs began to feel like rubber.

The men wheeled me into the van.

“What was in that syringe?” I whispered.

“Just something to calm you down,” said the man. “Relax, Leigh. We’re taking you to see Griffin. Isn’t that what you want?”

So they had him already. And now they had me too. Griffin had tried to sacrifice himself to protect me, and he hadn’t even been able to keep me out of it. I slumped in the wheelchair, despair overtaking me.

*

The van was moving, and I wasn’t in a wheelchair any longer. Instead, I was on a heap on the floor. The lookalike was crouched down next to me. “It’s great how you came down the elevator like that. We weren’t expecting that. I was going to have to go up and find you, lure you down to the van. You made our job so much easier.”

I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t move.

He reached down and pushed a lock of my hair out of my face.

I wanted to recoil from the intimate gesture, but I couldn’t do anything. I glared at him instead.

“You’re the one who killed Wolfman, aren’t you?”

I wished I could talk.

“You’re tougher than you look.”

Whatever I’d been injected with seemed to be some kind of paralytic. I had lost all control over my motor functions.

I didn’t know where a person could get something like that, but it seemed like it might have come from Op Wraith. Wolfman had said that Op Wraith had moved. What had he meant by that? And if these guys were from Op Wraith, what did they want with us?