Promises in the Dark (35 page)

He was in a goddamned holding tank—a silo for water, he thought … and one hand was manacled to the wall in a steel grip above his head. He was shut in this place—and completely alone.

After a few minutes of being awake, he knew he had to get up and move, in order to get the drugs out of his bloodstream as quickly as possible. He pushed himself to his feet heavily and attempted to get the feeling back in his bound arm.

It tingled painfully, but that wasn’t nearly as bad as what he figured the future held for him.

He looked up to see if it was day or night, but the opening at the very top had been closed, so he couldn’t tell, which meant he had no idea how long he’d been out, or if he was very far away from where he and Liv had been staying.

Fear coursed through him, more fiercely than adrenaline could. He had no choice but to keep it together, because his mental strength was his most important asset right now.

He would do that for himself. And for Liv. God, had they grabbed her too? She hadn’t been in the car with him—he would’ve known, would’ve seen her. But they’d moved him quickly off the garage floor into the vehicle and they’d sped off within minutes of shooting him with the dart.

He pulled at the chain, having already realized that was useless but unwilling to give up that easily.

He’d been stripped down to his boxer briefs and a T-shirt, so there was nothing on him he could use to pick the lock. He searched the ground around him in vain for a loose nail or screw, the walls, found nothing.

No, they’d swept the place clean.

So basically, he was screwed. Either they’d keep him here until he died from exposure, or starvation, dehydration, or—the big
or
that he felt gnaw at his gut—at some point they’d turn the goddamned water on and let him drown in here.

He eyed the ladder—it was at least fifteen feet away, but he noted that the bottom piece was rusted at the bolts.

That could come off the wall—how, he didn’t know, unless …

Jesus, he didn’t want them to bring Liv here, but she was his only shot now. Unless she hadn’t been captured. Even then, it would take her and Dylan and Riley longer to get here and help him.

He leaned against the wall for a second, forcing himself back to calm. Panic never helped sort anything out, and he wouldn’t succumb to it now. Better to conserve his energy in case one of the men who captured him came close enough to fight.

The thought was a good one, because the door across from him opened about twenty minutes later, by his calculations—trying to keep track of time was one of the methods they utilized in training to remain calm and in control.

All control was nearly lost when he saw the man who’d stood over him earlier, now carrying an unconscious Liv in his arms.

He moved as if his body could follow through to her, ended up at the end of the chain growling like a rabid dog.

It made the man jump a little and he was glad to have some modicum of success. And then he laid Liv down on the ground, about nine feet away, just frustratingly out of Zane’s reach if he stretched all the way.

“She wanted to see you again,” the man said. “Hope she wakes up in time.”

“There are people tracking you,” Zane told him.

“Not fast enough.” Then the man was gone, slamming the door behind him.

“Liv—Olivia—you need to wake up,” Zane told her, his voice loud and firm. A few seconds later, he repeated his request, even as he heard the squeak of metal being turned and the sound of pipes rattling against one another.

The water came in slowly at first, from a pipe close to the door. And then it started gushing from several others.

Zane looked around and realized with a sickening clarity what the man’s plans were.

He had to wake Olivia if there was any chance of getting either of them out of here alive.

And she was cold, so cold all the time. She wanted to curl up in a ball, to try to get warmer, but her body wouldn’t cooperate. He must have put something in her water—and she’d had to drink it, because she’d been feeling weaker
.

“Olivia, wake the hell up.”

The man with the eerie voice never used the word
hell,
only forced her to live in his own personal one. She was shivering now, teeth chattering
…
floating
.

The freezing cold surrounded her, so frigid it hurt
.

“Olivia.”

The voice
…
it wasn’t his
…
wasn’t the man with the tarot cards
…
but it was familiar
.

“Olivia, wake the hell up.”

Zane!

She turned and nearly breathed in a lungful of water. Sat up, coughing, and realized she’d almost drowned in less than four inches of water.

But more was rushing in. She looked at the pipes across the way, with water rushing from them at an alarmingly fast rate. She would drown, she thought, wrapped her arms around herself in a ridiculous attempt to warm up, because she was already soaked to the skin. The water from the pipes above splashed her and she moved away, nearly tripping over her own two feet.

“Olivia, focus on me.”

Zane
.

She turned and saw him, standing against the wall, one wrist shackled to it, so he was helpless to do anything but talk to her.

“Are you okay?” She sloshed through the water toward him. Put her hands to his face.

“I’m fine. But we’re not going to be for long. So listen to me—do exactly as I say.”

She was staring at him. The drug haze was hard to fight, despite the dash of hard, cold reality.

“Olivia, listen up—you need to do what I tell you to. Understand?” His eyes met hers, and in that horrifying moment, she realized exactly what would happen if she didn’t.

And still, she couldn’t move. There was no way …

I won’t survive this a third time. I told him I would break
…

“Can’t, Zane … can’t …”

When he spoke to her again, his voice was hard, almost unrecognizable. “I guess Elijah was right. He told me you’d never be able to do this, to save me. That you were weak.”

She felt weak, but the words made her angry. “Shut up.”

“Truth hurts, right? So was the
I won’t leave you behind
speech a bunch of crap? Should’ve known you wouldn’t be able to save yourself.”

She stared at him—his eyes were hard, unforgiving … cruel even. “What do you want from me?”

“I want you to stop feeling sorry for yourself and help us get out of here. If you can’t do that, then I hope you’re prepared to watch me die. Because you can get out—climb up the damned ladder and get out of here.”

The ladder. She looked at it and back to Zane, and then realized his wrist was shackled. “None of this is good.”

“No shit,” Zane said through gritted teeth. “Can you climb to the top and open it? Quickly? Look for something that can break this cuff?”

She went all the way up, her muscles protesting. When she got to the top, she pushed the hatch. It gave, enough to let her know it wasn’t locked, but she was nowhere near strong enough to push it open herself.

“Come back,” he called. “And don’t look down—concentrate on putting your hands in the right place, feel for the rungs with your feet.”

When she reached the bottom, before she jumped into the water that was more than puddling on the floor now, he said, “The ladder—some of the bolts are rusted.”

“But then how will we get out of here?”

“Let’s worry about one thing at a time.”

“Good point,” she muttered. They’d worry about the
but then
after she’d freed Zane.

She jumped down into the now calf-deep water, noted that the ladder was really two separate pieces, the one closest to the bottom was the one that was rusting.

With the water rising rapidly, she’d have to work fast while she still had leverage.

She gripped the rusted metal with both hands and pulled, put all her weight into it. Shook the damned metal so hard it made her teeth knock together … and nothing, nothing was happening. “This won’t work,” she called out.

“Then DMH wins. If you’re comfortable with that, I guess I’ll have to be too,” he responded.

His goading made her want to punch him, but instead she pulled harder at the ladder.

Bastard. Hitting nerves left and right with his zings
. She turned back to the metal, not wanting to look at him, yanked so hard her back lurched and her teeth ached because she was grinding them together from the effort. Her fingers were bloodied and raw, as were her palms, but still she shook and pulled at the rusted metal, and finally—finally—after what had to be ten minutes the ladder began to pull away from the old bolts. She attempted to pull at the bolts themselves. One turned easily enough for her to get it out, but the other one was too tough, and the top two too far away for her to get to without climbing on the now unstable ladder. And the water was rising rapidly around her.

No choice. If she got close she could manually unscrew it. Tenaciously, she steadied herself and got one of them loose. The ladder shifted, throwing her backward into the water.

Thankfully, she’d held on, and she used the now-moving ladder to haul herself back to her feet, sputtering. She coughed the water up and out, gagged, breathed. For a second she stood there, waiting to hear Zane say something else to her. Anything.

“I know you can do this, Liv.” His words were spoken with a quiet, calm strength, and she knew he had all the faith in the world in her.

It made tears come to her eyes and it pulled her focus back to where it needed to be—on the ladder, not the rushing water.

They would make it.

One wrenching yank and she fell into the water again, the ladder free and smacking her in the face before she went under.

Learning to swim really might’ve been a good thing
.

Thankfully, she felt her foot touch the ground and she pushed herself up with a clumsy series of splashes.

In another time and place, Zane would no doubt laugh at her. For now, all he said was, “We need to teach you to swim. Put that on the
normal
list.”

The freezing cold was already affecting her. She moved sluggishly toward him, wading through the water—which had a surprisingly strong current to it—dragging the metal ladder behind her.

She pushed the ladder to him and he positioned it behind the bolt holding him to the wall. “We’ll try this first. Otherwise, I’ll have to deal with a broken wrist. Hold here, and when I say
go
, bear down on the ladder as hard as you can. Full weight.”

She did, heard a creak, but all it seemed to be doing was bending the ladder, not the piece of metal holding Zane’s chain fast to the wall.

“Shit. Okay, once more.” Repositioned, and again, failure.

“Okay, here.” He moved the ladder’s lower rods inside one of the chain links. “We’re both going to bear down.”

It was the link closest to the wall, but still. “Zane, your wrist—”

“Will heal. Push down—
now!
”

His words didn’t leave room for argument. He groaned viciously as the link broke, no doubt breaking his wrist along with it, and they both went into the water.

He hauled her up swiftly and she coughed and pointed to his wrist. “Broken?”

He shrugged. “Doubt it. I’ve had worse. Come on.”

The water was up to his chest now, and he kept her head from going under as they made their way to the remaining ladder.

“I’m going to get up there. When I get a grip, you grab my leg and hold on.”

He bobbed, jumped and missed. He did it again, and again, and finally he reached over and ripped the T-shirt off her body, leaving her in a tank top. He tore the sleeve off the shirt and wound it around his palm, twisted up the rest of the fabric in a long rope and held on to it as he tried the jump twice more.

On his third attempt, he caught the rung, and she watched him pull himself up with one fully working hand, the other arm wrapped around the rung with sheer will.

“Grab my leg, Liv. Grab and hold.”

She tried but a sweep of water knocked her hands off the wall where she’d been furiously palming it to keep from going under.

Don’t panic, don’t panic
.

She reached her hand up and saw a blurred image of his leg and she grabbed for it, made contact with his foot and held on for dear life.

“Get a better grip,” he called out. “Both arms, wrapped around my calf until you can grab a rung.”

Her hands slipped and she went down hard, under the water. She found the bottom and pushed away. She broke the surface with a huge gasp, her lungs filling gratefully. She reached for the wall, put her palms out in an attempt to hold on to something, watched Zane.

He’d hauled himself up a bit, used his weaker arm to wrap around the bar while he tied the shirt tight to his leg with one hand—a slow process as she bobbed along in the water—and then he moved up a rung to get a better grip.

“Grab the shirt, Liv. That’s it, both hands. Now hang on, okay?”

“You’ll have to pry my hands off the damned shirt when we’re done,” she assured him.

A rough hoist hauled her partially out of the water and then there was another jerking one a few seconds later, and the rungs were in her grasp.

“One hand on the shirt, the other on the rung, okay? And push up—help me bring you up a couple more rungs.”

One by one they climbed in a precariously swinging motion, with the water rising to meet them, and she was hanging on with both hands.

Stubborn refusal to let DMH win forced her to use all her upper-body strength to pull her weight to a place where she could just get her foot onto a rung of the ladder. And then Zane was hauling her by her tank top up and up, until she was even with him, between him and the ladder, and they were moving upward slowly. Together. Painfully.

Step by step, they got there until the air rushed at them. Her head cleared the opening first.

“Go on, Liv—get out.”

She did, scrambled on hands and knees, turned to watch him do the same, his wrist swollen and red, held against his body. “I’ll wrap it.”

“Don’t bother.”

The voice came from the darkness in front of them, the voice of the man who’d dragged her here and locked inside.

When she looked into Zane’s eyes, she saw the calm focus there. The promise. And she knew she wouldn’t have to worry for much longer.