Lucky in Love (16 page)
Authors: Kristen Brockmeyer
The hallway was a surprise. Based on my room, I'd have figured I was tucked away in a creepy gothic mansion somewhere, but overhead, plain old fluorescent office lights buzzed. The hallway stretched down a good distance, carpeted in plain beige, with four heavy oak doors on either side. Going to the door immediately next to me, I fumbled with three keys before one finally clicked and the door swung inward.
The room was dark.
"Chance?" I whispered. "Julian? Is anyone in there?" I had the sudden thought that maybe the other guard was inside and scooted backward just as a weak light clicked on to illuminate a bare room with a linoleum floor, a small table with a lamp on it and a bed. Nothing else.
A girl that looked to be about sixteen was sitting up, eyes dilated with fear. I was baffled.
"Who are you?" I whispered.
The girl clutched her thin blanket tighter and I saw that she was
naked, her arms blotched with deep bruises that looked black in the dim glow of the lamp. "Please don't hurt me," she whimpered. "I just want to go home."
My heart wrenched and I slipped cautiously into the room. She cringed away from me as I
moved slowly toward the bed until I was close enough to see needle marks in her arms and her eyes so dilated from terror that I couldn't tell what color they were. She was fine-boned and china doll pretty, with a tangle of golden hair that flowed down her back.
"
I'm not going to hurt you," I said softly. "I'm trying to find my friends and get the hell out of here. My name is Lucky. Can you get up? Are you hurt?"
She just stared at me
with fear-deadened eyes.
"
He sent you to do this, didn't he? To make me think I could get away? But he's going to punish me if I really try to leave."
"
He, who? One of the guards? Dominick?"
The girl paled when I said Dominick
's name and shook her head frantically, pressing back against the headboard of the twin-sized bed.
"
No," I said forcefully. "I'm not with him." I tried to think how to explain the situation to her quickly, but that instinct was warning me to move again. I summarized as quickly as I could. "Dominick kidnapped a friend of mine and I was trying to rescue him with another friend and some FBI agents when we were caught. I'm hoping to God that everyone else is still alive and here someplace, because I just beat the hell out of one of the guards and I'm sure the other one is out there somewhere and I'd really like to turn this over to the professionals to handle so we have to go now." I reached for her hand, pleadingly.
"
But the way you're dressed… old-fashioned, like him," she said uncertainly.
"
I dress this way because I'm cool. He's just crazy," I retorted impatiently, my heart drumming in my chest with the need to hurry. "Please, you need to either come with me or I'm going to have to leave you. The other guard could come any minute to see what's taking Big Ears so long."
It was an empty threat, since I
'd sooner club the poor girl with the lamp and drag her out by the ankles if I had to, but she scrambled out of the bed and wrapped the blanket around her like a toga. The skin she revealed while she was knotting it at her chest was mottled with more of the same ugly bruises that were on her arms.
She stopped me at the door
with one small, pale hand before we went back in the hallway. "My name is Kristy Williams." Her words came out in a rush. "If he catches me, please, please tell my mom I'm sorry."
"
You can tell her yourself," I said firmly. "We're getting out of here."
With Kristy hovering anxiously beside me I got another door open, only to find another young and frightened girl, this one also blonde and painfully thin. I sent Kristy in for her and went to work on the next door. This one was Julian
's.
His room was a carbon copy of mine, and he was sitting at his table, finishing his pork chop when I burst in.
"Oh, thank God, I didn't think I was going to find you."
He dropped his napkin and pushed to his feet.
"Who are those ladies with you?"
"
It looks like Dominick is a collector," I said shortly. The two females supporting each other behind me looked like they were on their way to a frat party in full Greek regalia, except for their ravaged faces. "Let's go," I said. "I've still got to get these other doors open."
Julian grabbed the pill bottle on the table and tucked it inside the pocket of his jacket, and then followed me out.
The first room across the hall held a woman this time, a brunette, maybe in her early twenties. It was hard to tell. Her face had been badly beaten, recently, judging by the colors and the swelling that left her eyes mere slits. Her features were probably unrecognizable to her own parents. I left her staring after me for Kristy and the other girl to collect. Two doors later, I had added two more to my bedraggled entourage—a voluptuous Latino woman who spoke very little English and a tall black teenager—and my revulsion mounted. Dominick either trafficked in the human trade or he was operating his own harem. Any one of these women could have been me. Still could be, if we didn't get out of here.
Only one door remained. Peeking cautiously around the doorframe to the room I
'd been locked in, I checked on Big Ears, who still hadn't budged, and then went to work on the last lock. "Please, Chance, be in here," I murmured as I tried to jiggle a key in the lock. But the door opened under my hand. This room looked like the dressing room of a 1930's Hollywood ingénue, all pink satin frills and fussy luxury. It was also empty and my stomach plummeted.
Where the hell was Chance? There were more keys on the ring, I told myself. I just had to find the rooms the others were kept in. Which were probably
downstairs. With the other guard.
Wishing
for the umpteenth time that I had some kind of a weapon, I motioned for Julian to come forward. He was helping to support the badly injured woman and he gently handed her off to two of the others. "We have to go downstairs," I murmured. "And I really don't like knowing where the other guard is."
"
Or the woman that's been with them," he muttered darkly. "But this is probably her room, so maybe she's with Dominick and we don't have to worry about her."
"
I'll go first," I said, glancing toward the dark stairwell.
"
Not without me, you won't," Julian replied, taking my arm. "Remind me to ask you later how in the world you managed to take down that ox in there," he added as we began to descend the steps, five traumatized women shadowing us. "And to stay on your good side from here on out."
When we reached the lower level, it was identical to the upper, except for an open door at the far end with the noise of a television—one of those daytime court TV shows, from the sounds of it—spilling out. Overlaying the sound of the television was the unmistakable thunder of a snore. Before I could stop him, Julian slipped silently down the hallway to stand nearer to the open door, posting himself as lookout. He nodded his head back toward the first door, indicating that I should get a move on.
Cupping the keys in my palm so they wouldn
't jingle, I carefully tried four of them before I found one that worked. It was a room like the ones the girls were held captive in upstairs, bare except for a bed, and the lights were off. I thought I could make out a shape on its side.
I
moved into the room. I don't know what alerted me to danger, whether it was a sixth sense or dumb luck, but I ducked backward just in time to miss having my head bashed in with a lamp. It whistled by about a millimeter from my nose, and the cord whipped back, catching me in the cheek. It stung like crazy and I gasped and covered the sore spot where the tines of the plug had caught me.
"
Son of a bitch," came a low voice and then I was being crushed in a rib-bruising hug. "I almost killed you."
"
God," I murmured when Chance finally let me go long enough to pull back and look at me. I ran my hands over his face, feeling the firm warmth of his skin and the scratch of whiskers beneath my hands. "I really thought you were dead." It was true, and until this second, I hadn't acknowledged the huge part of me that hadn't believed I'd see him again. He smelled like sweat and his face looked like he'd used it to stop a speeding cement mixer, but he was alive.
Kristy poked her head into the room and frantically gestured toward the hallway.
"Who—" Chance started to ask, but I pulled away from him and darted back to look. The girls had melted back into the dark stairwell. Julian, pressed against the wall, gave me an agonized look. The snoring had stopped and the TV volume had been lowered.
Chance stepped around me, assessed the situation, and then moved toward the open door, waving Julian back to where I stood. I wanted to go to him, to help somehow, but I knew he didn
't need Lucy Ricardo as backup and I was fresh out of vases. Tense, stomach churning, I watched as he pressed his back against the wall and waited.
But the way this was set up was all wrong
—it wasn't going to work. The guard would come out, turn to the left and immediately be face to face with Chance, and he was probably already suspicious and armed. Without giving myself a chance to think it through, I ran down the hall, past the open door, screaming shrilly as soon as I was even with it, counting on the noise and my bright red dress to act as a distraction.
The guard
bellowed for me to stop, and I did, spinning around because there was nothing at the other end but a blank wall. He came out of the room at a run, but my distraction worked, because he turned right and gave Chance the opportunity to jump on his back. There was a quick twist, a gurgling noise and then the guard was on the floor, his eyes wide in surprise. I think I passed out when I realized that he was also very dead.
Julian's was the first face I saw when I opened my eyes. "Come on, Lucky," he said sternly. "We don't have time for this fainting bullshit." He gave my arm a quick, comforting squeeze to take the sting out of his words and pulled me to my feet.
"
Give me the keys." Chance was standing behind Julian, his face unreadable and his eyes flat again.
"I think I'm turning into my mother. I never faint." I took a shaky breath and darted a cautious look behind Chance, handing the key ring
over.
"
It's okay," he said shortly. "I dragged him back into another room."
"
I'm going to make sure there's no one else here," he finished, and left me standing there, my knees feeling almost too weak to hold me up in the aftermath of the last half-hour.
Well, there goes our romantic reunion scene
, I thought inanely.
Pretty soon, I was
too busy to worry about it. Kristy was there, pulling on my arm. "It's Tamara," she said. "I think she's hurt really bad."
Sure enough, Tamara, the twenty-something woman, was bent double, clutching her abdomen. There were bloodstains
spreading slowly across her sheet. The others girls were crowded protectively around her and I had to push my way through.
"
Sweetheart, what's wrong?" I asked, putting my arm around her. She was crying silently, tears leaking out from beneath her swollen lids, and I gently pushed a tangle of chestnut curls back from her face.
Her voice was tortured and barely a thread of sound.
"The last time—the last time he was in my room—he…"
She couldn
't finish and I pieced together my own conclusions.
"
He hurt you inside," I said flatly. Sudden, blinding rage overwhelmed me and I wanted to kill something.
She nodded, her hair slipping back over her face, shoulders
trembling.
And then Nate was there, face pale under his dark tan and limping badly on one leg, but still looking like the
same huge, hard-as-nails cowboy he had the first time I'd seen him. Gently, he scooped his arm beneath Tamara's legs and lifted, cradling her face into his the stained tee shirt stretched over his broad chest. My heart fluttered a little. That's what I'd pictured Chance doing to me when I found him, but oh, well, guess I was mistaken.
"
You're going to have to take Fisher," he said, and I turned around to see Chance standing behind me silently. "He's not good."
Chance nodded grimly.
"We're in what looks like the converted lower levels of an underground garage. Fortunately, we have our choice of vehicles, each with neatly-labeled car keys on a pegboard in the office in there." He nodded toward the open door and looked around at the crowded hallway. "And it looks like we'll need more than one."
Julian returned.
"The rest of the rooms are empty."