Capture (Siren Book 1) (11 page)

Denise's panicked breathing pushes against me, but she shoves away from me the moment she's safely on the ground. “
Move
,” she says, before the words peter off into a violent series of retches.

I waste no time in mounting the rail, and flinging myself toward the tank. I barely need Milla's guiding hands, but they're still appreciated. With both of us up there, it's close-quarters. The light catches on her upper lip, and it's a strange relief to see that she's sweating, too.

Allen and Alex yell back and forth in the background, but I don't have attention for them. The opening is almost directly overhead, but Denise was right; it's higher than any of us could reach on our own. Milla stands, and I crouch behind her. “One chance to get this right. Count of three.”

She nods, and pats my shoulder. “I'm not the one you should be worrying about.”

“Then pay attention so I don't have to worry. One.”

She braces for the leap, and gestures for me to get on with it.

“Two.”

Allen yells something, and it takes everything I have in me not to look, see if he's okay. “Three.”

Milla springs, and I catch her hips, wrapping my arms around them to boost her at the peak of the jump. Her arms and shoulders disappear into the opening, and she scrabbles for purchase. “Sorry—this is gonna get personal...” I apologize, and my hand is on her firm backside, levering her up, before her harried “Do whacha gotta do—” makes it back to me.

It works, and she gets the last inch needed to pull herself up. She crawls a short ways in, disappearing from the opening, before her face pops back up. “It's clear up here. If you wanna jump, I'll catch you. C'mon.” A series of coughs overtake her, and it occurs to me that the smoke's probably a
lot
worse up there.

“No. I'll get the others. Go on, go wherever it takes you. I'll be right behind you.”

She looks at me like I'm crazy, and I turn away. I don't have
time
for this.

Twenty-one

Milla

It's playing out more beautifully than I could have dreamed. It takes everything in me not to whoop loud enough to drown out their screams.

A tragedy's playing out below me, in slow motion. Alex, his own fear hamstringing him is in the last few moments he'll
have
to leap. Some part of me coolly wonders if his shoes' soles are strong enough to withstand the heat, should he not make the jump. If they're softened, and the red-hot grating pushes into his flesh... my
god
, I can practically smell it. I'm so glad I didn't lock him in his bedroom, and leave a cigarette in the sheets, like I thought I might, before I got the courage to lead them to the
Siren
. Letting them die alone would be
so
much less satisfying.

I cough, and the cough turns to something that
would
be a gag, if I had anything left to hork up. As effective as my show this morning was, it hasn't exactly left me in a good position for this. The smoke burns my lungs, and my body's attempts to expel whatever it can, hopefully including smoke, make my abdomen hurt, fierce muscular aches as though I got in a sit-up contest.

Even now, I could leave them to die, crawl through to the next room and wedge the pipe shut, let them suffocate, trapped. But that wouldn't be real enough for me. No. I'm going to watch, riveted, their agony giving me a thrill almost sexual, to be able to break them so thoroughly.

“
Now
,” Calder commands, his voice the epitome of authority and dominance. How many women have succumbed to that spell, only to discover him walking past them the next time they met? How many of them gave him privileged information that he could use for his own profit, hoping to see his smile?

Alex take a running start, as best he can, and jumps. He stumbles on the preparation, though, and his leap doesn't carry him very far. He swears as the heat melts his shoe, trying to stagger to their temporary oasis. But he makes the mistake of looking back to see how close he is, and is horrified at the results. The fear in his face cuts me to the soul, and I cry rich, cathartic tears, as his weight carries him forward past his feet, and he tumbles to the grating.

His scream rends our ears, and Denise's soon joins him. She's sitting on the railing as best she can, her balance obviously shaken. But from the way Allen's shuffling, their oasis is already drying up, and their time is running out.

Alex pries himself off the grating, but leaves a third of his face on it. The flesh simply pulls apart, the skin seared to the metal. Allen stretches a hand toward him, to try to help him the rest of the way, but either he can't reach, or Allen is too preoccupied with his own nausea and impending suffocation to be able to stretch it very far.

Alex falls to his knees again, and then his palms slap the flooring. Though his body is twitching, and he's still screaming, he doesn't have the wherewithal to get up again.

Denise sobs, nearly in hysterics, as Allen shifts, foot to foot.

Alex's corpse is blocking the rail they need, to get back to Calder. “I'll carry you,” Allen offers Denise, glancing at her bare feet, but she shakes her head. “You can't walk on that, either.”

They trade a glance, and a look of horror comes over Calder as he realizes what they're contemplating.

And then those beautiful, sick fucks do it.

Twenty-two

Calder

Numbness spreads through me, the electric horror of Alex's initial fall replaced with utter shock. He may not even be fully
dead
yet, and Allen's helped Denise to leap onto his stocky shoulders, pushing the flesh into the floor and making it sizzle. The smoky air has nothing to do with my urge to vomit this time. A few seconds later, Allen jumps after her, and there's an audible crack—something in Alex's ribcage. He nearly overbalances, but catches himself with the rail.

“What the
fuck
are you two doing?” My voice doesn't sound like my own, and I sure as hell am not shaping the words. “
What the fuck are you doing
?”

Denise's brown eyes plead for understanding, though her jawline's tense and defiant. “I'm
not
going to die here, and he already
did
.”

Milla's voice floats down, loud and disjointed. Under another circumstance I might think it's gleeful, but in this moment, it's just adrenaline and a need to act manifesting as intensity. “How long do you think before he catches fire?”

Indeed, Alex's clothes are already smoking, and there's tiny flames licking up his sides.

“
Shit
,” Allen says, and gestures to Denise to climb on the rail. “You ready to catch her?” His eyes are suspicious, as though he thinks I'll trap both of them there for their sins.

They're just trying to survive. They aren't bad people. And I'm not a killer, even by inaction. “Yeah. Send 'er up.”

He nods, and Denise bites her lip, squeezing her hands to stop the shaking. “Up you go,” he says, and then her arms are in my grip and I'm hauling her up alongside me. Allen curses, as the flames creep up to the hem of his pants. He bats at them to put them out, while I turn to boost her into the pipe. She shakes her head at me and points up. Milla's face, pale and wide-eyed, is still up there.

“Milla—follow it wherever it's going. We're right behind you.”

She looks at Allen, and what's left of Alex, her attention consumed. “
Milla!
” I yell again, hoping she can shove free of the shock long enough. “I can't send her in there without some space.
Get moving.
”

Her eyes meet mine, and then her face vanishes from the opening.
Thank fuck
.

*              *              *

It's short work shoving Denise up there, especially with Milla still close enough to catch her hands and pull her where her own grip might have failed. And once she's gone, Allen wastes no time in breaching the tank. “You go first,” he says. “I might need you to catch my arms, help me up. And I'd trust you with that more than me.”

I'm not sure that's a good idea, given how dizzy I already am from the smoke. Fuck if I can get a deep enough breath to argue, though.

“Yeah.”

He crouches and locks his hands together, presenting his palms for my foot. He pushes up as I push down, and then the lip of the pipe is in my hands. For a moment, I swear I'm about to fall, and then I manage to get first one forearm, and then the other over.

The pipe is wide, wide enough that Milla's still up there. She seizes my hands and I brace myself against her, relieved to have her help. She talks, in a breathless voice, as she pulls me the rest of the way in. “Denise's going up ahead. I thought you could—”

“You thought right.” I lean back over the opening, and gesture at Allen. “Your turn,” I call, and turn back to her. “Catch my legs, to help anchor me.”

She nods and obeys, and I dangle my arms to him. “Grab on.”

He jumps, as high as he can, and then the last of us is free, on his way to whatever awaits us next.

Once he's safely in the pipe, we waste no time in crawling away from the smoke. Alex's body is
definitely
on fire at this point, and the smell has gone from awful, to something so far beyond it there's no word for it. Soft crying echoes ahead of us—Denise. It sounds like ordinary tears, though, not tormented or agonized cries, so at least she's safe.

Twenty, thirty, forty feet... I have no idea how far we've gone, until the pipe ends, and there's only another opening below us. Denise is curled against the side, glaring into it. There's a metal grate covering it. Even the sight makes me queasy. “
Shit
,” I yell, and kick it.

And it wiggles. I don't waste any time. Denise's foot's still injured, but Allen's okay, and Milla is strong enough. “You two, here.” I tug Milla's arm, planning to tug until she's on my other side, and it jerks her primary support out from under her.

She moves toward me, yes, but faceplants in my lap. “Fuck, sorry,” I offer, while still tugging her across me to my other side. The pipe really isn't big enough for this. Allen takes the hint, crawling until he's sitting next to me, all six of our feet over the grating.

“Count of three?” he says, with a weary smile.

“Count of three.”

*              *              *

The room below is almost jarringly comforting, after the hell we've escaped. The pipes here are mostly white, with a few painted bright colors. The air smells downright
clean
without human filth.

And sitting on a row of waist high pipes, within easy reach from the main floor, is a cooler, stuffed with food and water. Better yet? My eyes land on a small box, a short ways past it, the distinctive red cross a beacon. I stumble over to it, and tear it open. It's mostly empty, but there's an individually wrapped dosage of painkillers, and some neosporin, though I barely recognize it from the packaging. Who knows how long
this
has been here, or if it's even still effective.

I take it over to Denise, planning to give her the choice. She's hardly said a word to anyone, wrapped up in tears, and the pain of her burned ankle. “What do you think?” I pass my thumb over the faded spot that should have been an expiration date.

“Any port in a storm,” she says, and smears some on her charred flesh.

With the help of the painkillers and the adrenaline fading, she fades too, her light snores echoing through the surprisingly tiny room.

Allen finds his own spot to lay, and his breathing evens out.

Milla's out of sight, but from her silence, she's probably asleep, too.

Some part of me rebels—
shouldn't we talk about what just happened?
—but I can't blame them for being exhausted. My muscles ache, my breaths come short, and my skin feels cracked and raw, as though the top layer had blistered away. My shoes are useless shreds of leather and rubber, too thin in some places, too thick in others, and I grit my teeth as I discard them and the air hits my sole—apparently at least some of that rubber burned to my feet, too.

We're safe, for the moment, and I wish I had faith in some kind of god so I'd have someone to thank for that. But now we know, beyond a doubt, the nature of this. We won't starve to death, forgotten.

We're going to die, one by one or together, in some excruciating way. We're being hunted.

I can't sleep. Even if it won't do anything, I
have
to protect them. Maybe I should've been able to protect Alex. If I'd just stayed on the ground and gotten him moving faster, or if I'd pushed him to make the jump when it was less dangerous...

The what ifs consume me, until I pace the room, looking at everyone as they sleep. Any one of them could have been burned to death, or fallen to the subfloor. Allen's arm is over a waist-thick pipe, as though there's someone it's usually draped around.  Denise tries to kick out in her sleep when changing position, but the flooring catches her burned flesh, and she comes awake with a yelp. That won't do.

I pull off what remains of my linen shirt, and pick through the threads until I can tear strips away. She helps hold them in place while I bind her wound, nodding her thanks. But, maybe since everyone else is sleeping, she doesn't try to talk to me.

That should be a relief.

Alex's flesh sizzling, then sizzling louder, as first one, then the other of her feet land on him, crushing him into the fiery floor. Her eyes, pleading with me for understanding
.

I walk on, my footsteps bringing me closer to the last of my flock, propped against a wall, clearly enjoying her rest.

Milla... Milla's resilient. Almost scarily so. Her face is peaceful, not a trace of our misadventures on it, aside from a little dirt crusted to her cheekbones and temples.

I can't help it; she's so close to serene, unmarred by any of this. I kneel by her shoulders, and wipe the dirt off her forehead.

She sighs, arching slightly so that my fingers are along her nose and cheekbone.

I pull my hand away, as though bitten. I don't deserve whatever comfort I could try to seek in her flesh. I don't even know if she'd be
willing
.

Still, she's soft. No matter what's left for us, I'll die to preserve that softness.

And if I meet the one who's done this to us, I'll even kill.

Siren will continue in
Torture
, coming in August.
Preorder your copy today
.
Turn the page for a teaser from
Torture
. If you've enjoyed
Capture
, please consider leaving a review, as reviews are invaluable to readers deciding whether the book may be their cup of tea.

Siren

Capture
(July 2016)

Torture
(August 2016)

Restrain
(September 2016)

Mindfuck
(October 2016)

Ravage
(November 2016)

Deathwish
(December 2016)