Infernal: Bite The Bullet (18 page)

“Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll let you blood her
first. As a peace offering, and proof of where your loyalties truly lie.”

He looked over at me, through me, with those cold
shark eyes. The tip of his tongue probed the corner of his mouth as he said, “I
am impatient. Perhaps we three should have her, here and now. Just a taste,
before the ritual.”

In response to Dante’s suggestion, Alexei, who up
to now had sat silently drinking vodka with an expression grim as a portrait
from the Dark Ages, suddenly came to life. His flabby lips twisted into a smile
revealing gapped teeth, and his flat brown eyes lit up in anticipation.

Fear had me clenched in its grip. With my pants
trapped around my thighs and my hands bound, I was a wide-open target for
whatever they wanted to do to me, powerless against these three brutes.

“We should go,” Konstantyn announced with a shake
of his head, “before that body on the doorstep starts to stink.” He drained his
glass, slamming it on the table, and I flinched at the gun-shot sound. He rose
to his full height and I kept my eyes fixed on the wall. “You have what you
came for,” he said, “Let’s get out of here.”

Dante cut him a sidelong, calculating glance, his
thumb stroking the shot glass in his hand. “Konstantyn is correct,” he said
eventually. “We should go. The brother’s body drew enough unwanted attention,
and the alchemy will be all the more powerful for our abstinence. Alexei, take
care of the mess outside, and meet us underground.”

Alexei’s eyes squinted with bitterness, not that I
could find a shred of sympathy for the bastard.

“Don’t worry, you’ll have your time with her, as
always.”

Alexei looked at me with predatory lust in his
eyes, then nodded curtly and got to his feet, getting busy with a cell phone.

I mentally added him to my ‘to die’ list.

“Oh, and Alexei,” Dante continued, “have the
betrayer brought down too, so that Konstantyn can slit the swine’s throat.”

Poor Gracie. I’d led Konstantyn right to her, and
now they were signing her death warrant. If only I had some way to warn her,
but that was impossible. Bound and shuffling my pants around my ankles,
Konstantyn hauled me to my feet and out to a waiting car, while Alexei dragged
the pizza boy’s limp corpse inside my flat and barked orders down the phone in
guttural Ukrainian.

Once we got out of the car, it got cold, fast.
Dante held my elbow with an iron pressure that dared me to run. I had the
scariest impression that if he chased and caught me, I might never be getting
back up.

He needs you, Neva,
I told myself.
He
can’t kill you until he gets what he needs from you.
It was the only thing
keeping me going. While there was still time, there was hope, however bleak the
outlook.

Swallowing around the balled up shirt they’d
stuffed into my mouth as a makeshift gag, I felt my steps out blindly, trying
not to trip as I was hastened down a slope into the stale dampness of somewhere
underground. It smelled earthy and dank, and even blindfolded I could tell when
cloudy night transitioned to eerie, subterranean darkness. In a language I
assumed was Ukrainian, Dante barked orders to the men who met us at the
entrance, and led me deeper. It was disorienting. My terror made me clumsy and
I lost count of the times I stumbled over some object on the ground, only to have
Dante right me with a yank and lead me in a completely different direction.

Hallways, I thought, but I couldn’t be sure. My
arms, secured at the base of my spine, denied me the luxury of feeling my way
around, but when the screams started, I was grateful for the blindfold.
Somewhere to my left I heard a male voice, raised in agony. Further along, a
woman’s sobs rebounded off stone walls with a chime that made Dante hum
happily.

“Your room, pretty one,” he announced, pulling me
to a stop with a jingle of keys and the clank of a heavy duty lock. Hinges
creaked and as I was led forwards, I caught my ribs on a metal corner, my hiss
making Dante laugh.

“Ah, sorry about that. The bed. Sit.” It was both
an explanation and a command, and I eased myself down warily, feeling for the
edge of the mattress with the backs of my legs and my bound hands.

I perched blindly, fighting the tremble in my
bones. That’s when the stench hit me. It hadn’t been overpowering on entry, but
with my eyes covered, my other senses were upping their game to give me an idea
of where I was. From the nose-crinkling, gagging scent of waste and blood, I
would have said Hell.

Fingertips ran down the curve of my jaw and a male
sigh tripped a warm breeze against my cheek. A second pair of hands gripped my
cuffed wrists and I gasped around my gag, terror notching into my throat as
more hands covered my body.

Oh God, what were they
… my shirt ripped
with a forceful tug and I jerked backwards into a laughing male chest,
thrashing like a tied pig when rough hands dragged at my pants. They stripped
me, easily as you’d undress an unruly child, and when I kicked my legs out,
they simply spread them wide until I froze.

I was naked, and they had me in the best possible
position to do anything they wanted to me. For a pregnant moment the only
sounds in the room were my gagged, panicked breaths. Then masculine laughter
broke chills across my skin, and my legs were released, the hands leaving my
skin as I twisted my body away from them in a lurch that landed me face-down on
the cold stone floor. I barely registered the pain that throbbed through my
limbs with the collision, and wormed awkwardly until my shoulder hit a wall and
I curled into the corner, drawing my knees up to cover my nakedness. The laughter
quieted and light footsteps crossed over the stone. I trembled as he came
closer and I hated myself for the reaction, for being a victim. I was stronger
than this.

“I will see you later, Neva Raines.” Dante’s
accented purr screwed my gut into a roll of nausea, and I didn’t even fight the
flinch. Showing my disgust wasn’t going to worsen my situation.

There was a shuffle of movement and the door
closed with a clunk of metal and the turnover of the lock.

I tried to orient myself in the fabric-enforced darkness.
The asshole could have taken my blindfold off at least, or untied my hands, but
clearly that would make me comfortable, and we couldn’t have that.

Taking a deep, reluctant breath through my nose, I
listened to the sounds around me. The screams faded to background noise as I
hunted out any clue to my location. There was a slow dripping sound coming from
the other side of the room. The soft whirring of a surveillance camera came
from an upper corner, above where I assumed the door was, and it resolved me
against shedding a single tear. I thought of my brother. Of all the tears he’d
cried, of all the pain he’d suffered, and would never suffer again. He’d died
in this place and I would too, unless I found a way out.

Something rumbled through the wall pressed against
my flank. I cocked my head. A train? Either that or a truck, but the stifling
feel of underground led me to think it must be the former. We were near the
tracks then, which narrowed down the location to
all
of London.

Another wave of hopelessness washed over me. I was
strong, but inner strength wasn’t getting me out of this prison. I couldn’t
move. I couldn’t speak. I could barely breathe with the gag stuffed in my mouth
so deep it tickled the back of my throat and choked me. I was drowning in my
own saliva, my wrists chafed by the sharp edges of cuffs I bet weren’t standard
police issue. So, yeah, pretty hopeless.

First thing, though. I had to get the blindfold
off. The darkness would make me insane before anything else. I rubbed my face
against the wall, my shoulder, my bent knees, anything to shove the fabric up
and off my eyes. It took some work, but eventually the material slipped up to
my forehead, and I managed to shift it until it hung off my ponytail.

What I faced was what I had imagined: a stone
cell; a bare iron bed, its mattress stained with blood and God knew what else;
a solid door with the camera above; a sink and toilet in the far corner.

It was a situation I’d had nightmares about, only
in those it had been my brother, tortured, abused, and alone. Now, this was my
reality, and the only thing keeping me from screaming around my gag was knowing
Daniel was free of all this. He was somewhere peaceful, I hoped. They said
death gave you freedom. I clung to that, letting the strange numbness of
oncoming shock and emotional overload settle in my bones, until I no longer
felt the chill on my naked skin, and could no longer smell the stench of
ammonia and other bodily fluids. I huddled on the concrete in a corner and
ignored the evidence of torture around me. I refused to give them the
satisfaction of making me sick with the evidence of what they did. Lying in my
own vomit for however long it took for them to come and deal with me would be
the icing on the shit cake.

What were they were going to do to me? They were
already making me bleed. I could feel the warm trickles running from the raw
skin on my wrists down onto my hands. Occasionally a drop spilled onto the
ground, adding to the drip-drip rhythm that seemed to permeate the stone. I
drew my knees in tighter. Like that would protect me. Like that would help me
retain what little dignity they hadn’t stripped from me on entry. They had me
naked and bound. What the hell was I going to be able to do?

I stewed in my helplessness, while my gaze kept
dragging back to the blinking red surveillance camera I’d heard. The device was
a small, round thing roosting up high and looking down over the whole room. It
was the only piece of technology I could see. The rest of the room could have
been part of the London Dungeons tour.

I gagged myself trying to use my tongue to push
out the fabric stuffed in my mouth, and I was mid-heave when there was action
outside the door. Fixing my gaze on it, I was prepared for anything.

Except what happened next.

Something heavy slammed against the door, rattling
the lock.

My heart kicked up a gear. If there was fighting,
there was the chance it was a rescue party. Could Gracie have gone to the
police after we left her? Might somebody have seen the pizza boy’s murder and
alerted them? It was too much to hope for.

Voices carried into my cell from the corridor
outside.

“Please. I swear to you. I never told nobody
nothing.” Even edged with terror, Gracie’s accent was unmistakable.

There was another hard impact, the sound of a body
hitting the wall, or maybe the floor. Gracie cried out, and then there was a
dragging sound, like she was being forcefully pulled along the tunnel, and
fighting every step of the way.

“I did everything you asked. I told you, I just
gave him the drugs,” she whined. “My hair! Owww! Please, he was asleep when I
left him. I never moved him. I swear –”

Slap!

“Shut up, bitch!”

Alexei, I thought. It was getting easier to
distinguish their voices, and his had an especially sadistic quality.

“Son of a bitch!” he roared.

“What’s wrong with you?” That was Konstantyn.
Level, controlled, cold.

“Goddamn shemale clawed my face.” Alexei sounded
really pissed off. “Filthy talons. I’ll rip then out with pliers then we’ll see
how you fight. It’s rabid, needs to get taught a hard lesson.”

Slap!

 Thump!

And then a click that sounded distinctly like a
trigger being cocked.

Gracie whimpered.

I bit down on my gag.

God. This was all my fault.

 I hunched over, trying to cover my ears with my
bound hands. But the gunshot I expected didn’t come.

“Not here,” I heard Konstantyn say.

“The bitch is mine,” Alexei spat.

“Wrong. Dante promised me the kill.”

“What difference who puts the bullet in her head?”

Gracie’s pleas had completely dried up, and I
could only guess at the depth of her fear.

“You want to spend the night scrubbing her brains
off the walls? Be my guest. All the more for the rest of us,” I heard
Konstantyn say.

All the more of
me
. That was what he meant,
and it turned my stomach.

For tense moments, Alexei didn’t respond, and I waited,
still anticipating the shot that would end Gracie’s life.

“Give me the gun,” Konstantyn said eventually.
“I’ll take care of her. You’re gonna need your strength tonight.”

I could almost hear Alexei’s sneer. “You like
scrubbing brains, comrade?”

“I like to be prepared. I have a cell ready, lined
with plastic.”

“The one where you did Raider?”

“Yeah.”

“He screamed like a girl. A man should die with
some dignity.”

There was a sharp intake of breath. Gracie’s or
mine, I couldn’t say. I thought back to the screams I’d heard when Dante first
brought me to my cell. Had those been Raider’s death-cries, at Konstantyn’s
hands? I couldn’t muster even a shred of sympathy for the choreographer, not
after what Dante said he’d done to Daniel, but I was rocked by the realisation
that Konstantyn really was the cold-blooded killer I’d feared he was.

“There’s vintage champagne and sushi in Dante’s
study,” I heard Konstantyn say, “to welcome the rest of the seven. Go, relax.
I’ve got this,”

“Fine, fine,” Alexei conceded. “Only put one
between its legs, for me.”

“Da,” Konstantyn replied.

Footsteps carried Alexei’s laughter down the
tunnel, and then there was the sound of a cell, adjacent to mine, being
unlocked.

Gracie had to have given up, because she didn’t
speak another word.

Was she praying, I wondered? Would I be silent,
when my time came?

The metal door clanged shut.

I waited long, stomach-clenching moments, and when
the two muffled gunshots finally rang off the stone walls, shooting down any
residual hopes I’d had than Konstantyn was on my side, I felt nothing, only numb.