The Wolf (Black Dagger Brotherhood: Prison Camp #2)(76)

“Lucan . . .”

If it had been anyone else, he would have fucked them off. Except just as the Executioner had discovered, and Lucan knew all too well, the aristocrat was someone he couldn’t help but take into account. Even if it was just going to be briefly. Like it had to be at the moment.

Going over to the draping, he yanked it back—and turned his face away for a second. Every time he saw the male, it was a fresh horror.

“Hey,” he said, “I’m dealing with something, but later I can—”

“She is with Apex,” came the frail interruption. “Your female.”

“What.”



Lying on the floor of the workroom, Rio tracked the guard or whatever the hell he was as he progressed down to the dumbwaiter. Clearly, he knew something was out of place, but then again, she couldn’t have left a bigger clue if she’d gone neon with a Las Vegas arrow flashing at the damn thing.

Glancing behind herself, she measured the drug bundles in their cage—and discovered that the load was on a platform with wheels.

That just so happened to have the same amount of clearance as a car.

With as little movement as possible, she flattened herself onto her stomach and pulled herself forward using her bare palms and her knees. As she closed in on the undercarriage, she tilted her head to the side, and prayed—prayed—that she didn’t jostle the cage or—

“It’s some kind of—I don’t know what the fuck it is. It’s like a box in the wall. No, it wasn’t like that before. No shit, I’m not going up there—”

The words stopped short, but she couldn’t tell whether it was because the man had noticed her or just been interrupted by whoever he’d called.

When boots started stomping in her direction, she feared it was the former.

Staring out from underneath the cage’s platform, she tried not to breathe at all as a set of military-grade footwear come down to the bin—and stopped right in front of where she was hiding.

“Do you think I can’t smell you, human?”

There were a series of grunts and her cover was moved off to the side, rolled clear away. As it revealed her, Rio wondered what kind of lead shower would fall on her head if she pulled a pivot-and-trigger. But considering that was her only chance—

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a little red dot skating across the floor—and as it went out of her field of vision, she’d have bet both her eyeteeth that the laser sight was pegging her in the back of the skull.

“Get up.”

There was no reason not to comply—and one very trigger-finger-ish reason to do so.

Rising onto her hands and knees, she looked around her arm. The man was standing right next to her, about three feet away, the toes of his boots pointed at her just like his gun was. Above his thick neck, his face was bored.

“You’re never making it out of here alive,” he said.

His eyes were some shade of blue, and they were moving over her body, but not in a sexual way. More like he was measuring her for a coffin—

“I fit in small spaces.”

“What?”

“I’m retractable.”

He shook his head. “Shut the fuck—”

Justlikethat, Rio sprang to her feet, palmed his weapon between her two hands, and diverted the muzzle. As the guard caught up with what was happening, she ripped the gun out of his lackadaisical grip and jabbed it right up into his crotch.

“You’re going to want to move really carefully,” she gritted. “Anything fast, I’m going to get nervous—and jeez, I get twitchy when I’m anxious. Click, click, oopsie.”

She jumped back so that he couldn’t grab at her.

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” he said grimly.

He was still looking disinterested rather than alarmed, clearly in the camp that women were never much of a threat. And maybe she should feel complimented that he’d called her a human—as opposed to all the other derogatory nouns in his playbook.

Backing up, she went as far as the nearest table—

From out of nowhere, a strange confusion hit her like it was a tangible blow to the head, her thoughts scattering to the point that, as the gun she’d taken from him lowered of its own volition, she couldn’t stop it: Even though she ordered her arm to stay up, it refused to obey the command—and as she started to fight to keep the weapon pointed at the guard, a piercing headache flashed across her frontal lobe.

The man walked up to her and said, “Give me the gun.”

“No . . .”

And yet sure as if she had a remote and it was in his hands, Rio turned the weapon around and placed the nine millimeter grip-first into his palm.

The guard smiled now, revealing sharp canine teeth. “As I was saying, you don’t know what you’re doing.”

Rio opened her mouth to—God, she didn’t know what. She couldn’t think at all. The impulse to communicate was there, but her entire vocabulary was unavailable.

And then things got worse. Her feet started walking, taking her forward . . . toward the door across the room, the one he’d come through.

As her body routed around the tables, she told herself there had to be a way out of this. She just needed to think—

“Open the door for me, would ya?”