Infernal: Bite The Bullet (22 page)

Either she saw that, or Konstantyn’s backing-off
gave her some courage, because her spine straightened and her jaw thrust
forwards, and she primped her roughed up body like she was going out on stage.

“Right. I can do this.” She nodded, looking around
to orient herself.

I didn’t have time to praise her. Konstantyn had
settled the unconscious woman beside another on the floor. He snatched my elbow
and dragged me off to the side of the group.

“We might not be getting out of here,” he said
roughly.

I huffed at him, eyes narrowed. I did not need his
pessimism when I was already riding my emotional limits way beyond capacity.
“We absolutely are getting out of here. You’re Lazarus, remember? You never
stay down.”

He smiled, the green in his eyes sparkling
tenderly, and my heart absolutely did not turn over. “Da. But just in case, I
want you to have this.”

I watched as he reached to the back of his neck
and unclipped the chain holding the bullet. Then he hooked his hands behind my
neck and fixed the skin-warmed links around my throat.

I toyed with the bullet dangling between my
breasts. “Your grandpa’s last bullet? I can’t take that. I –”

“It’s not just a bullet,” he said. Konstantyn
twisted the casing. It unscrewed, and he tapped the contents into his palm.

Inside the hollow casing was a long thin capsule
that he folded into my palm.

“What is it?” I jiggled it, and peered up at him
curiously.

“Potassium Cyanide.”

My brows shot up. Definitely not aspirin for the
tattoo pain then. “Oh shit.”

A suicide pill.

Konstantyn inclined his head. “So you have a
choice. If it comes down to it, crack the capsule between your teeth. It
contains fifty times the lethal dose. Guaranteed death in minutes. It’s old
though, and fragile. Just be very, very sure.” His eyes wouldn’t let me look
away, and in that moment, I truly knew he’d been on my side all along. No one
could fake the emotion in his gaze, or the fact that he was giving me an escape
he could have used himself.

“Thank you.” I laughed at the terrible tragedy of
it all, and his fingers twitched on mine.

“It’s either the least, or the most romantic thing
anyone’s ever given me. But I’m not going to need it.” Getting up on my toes, I
used his hand to drag him down and crushed my lips to his in a hard kiss that
was everything I couldn’t say in the time we had. “I’m sorry I doubted you.”

He pulled back to rest his forehead to mine, and
his fingers played in my hair. “I’m sorry about the tattoo. I had no choice.”

My ass stung at the mention of it, but I smiled
crookedly and shrugged. Nothing we could do about it now. “I know. It’s okay.
Better it was you.”

We separated when Gracie called us off in another
direction. I took the weight of the girl I’d rescued and helped her carry on
through the tunnels. Konstantyn lingered behind, scooping up the comatose girl,
and hastening the others on. With no telling what they’d endured, they were
tragedies waiting to happen, and I kept an eye on every wobble from our
bedraggled gang.

As Gracie reached the next junction, her
excitement mounted, ringing down the corridor. “Here! I know this place! This
is it!”

She led us into a dead-end, blocked off by wire
and danger signs.

Despair rang through my bones as I realised this
couldn’t be it. We were trapped, and any hope I had left – was illuminated by a
dim light! Built into the wall, metal rungs scaled the brick, leading up a
short way into darkness.

Konstantyn caught my eyes and grinned. So damn
close now, all we had to do was climb.

“The ladder leads up under the bridge, where I
brought Danny.” Gracie beamed, brimming with her anxious pride at having got it
right. Finally.

“Okay, let’s do this,” Konstantyn gruffed. He
lowered his unconscious burden to the floor and scaled the ladder in a few
lithe moves, heaving up the manhole cover at the top. A circle of yellow light
flooded in from the streetlights above, and our fellow captives murmured
amongst themselves, an anticipatory shuffle of movement pressing them forward
as they became invigorated by the proximity of the outside world. We could
smell it now, taste the fresh cool air coming in. So damn close.

“Neva, you go first.” Konstantyn stepped down
beside me and I shot him a look.

“What about you?”

“I go last.” His accent roughened and I could hear
him gearing up to brook no argument.

“Then I’ll wait, and go with you.”

“Neva.” There it was, the guttural rumble of my
name in his chest when he got all commanding. I shook my head and stood my
ground.

“We go together, or I don’t go at all.” I wasn’t
leaving him now. I couldn’t live with myself if I got out and he didn’t. I had
to be sure.

Gracie’s voice interrupted his next protest, and I
was grateful. “You know I hate to break up a romantic moment, but this is bad
timing, don’t you think? I say ladies first.” She rolled her eyes and climbed
up the ladder, her nails clicking as she gripped the rungs. “Come on, let’s
go.”

To her credit though, she waited at the top to
help the others. We got the walking wounded out as quickly as they could drag
themselves up the ladder. Most struggled with the climb, but soon the line of
captives had disappeared, leaving only us, and the unconscious woman who couldn’t
be roused.

Konstantyn hauled her gently over his shoulder and
his strong hand curled around my wrist, urging me to the ladder. This time, I
went with a smile.

“You just want to look up my robe, don’t you.”

“Yes, I’m a dirty pervert who wants to check out
your ass climbing a ladder. Now get up there!” As my feet took to the cool
rungs, he swatted my ass, and I narrowed my eyes playfully, ignoring the heat
his touch inspired. Gracie was above me, beckoning to me to hurry. I was so
on-board with that, her smile something to step towards, knowing Konstantyn was
right at my back.

“That’s far enough.” The voice came from below,
and in the split second before I looked down, I saw Gracie’s eyes peel wide,
her smile dropping away like a cloud covering the sun. I dropped my gaze, and
as I twisted, saw a small red dot aimed right between my breasts. Mariya’s
perfect face smiled coldly up at me as she trained her laser-sighted weapon over
my heart.

For tense seconds, I couldn’t breathe, not with
that dot shimmering like a spot of blood on my skin. Below me on the ladder, Konstantyn,
with the comatose woman slung over his shoulder, had turned to stone. Finally,
my brain kicked into gear, and my head whipped up to where Gracie was still
frozen at the exit. “Close the manhole Gracie,” I whispered. “Run. Send help,
please!”

Gracie looked unsure at first, but then her hands
moved and the metal circle slid back into place with a clunk, throwing us back
into the relative gloom of the underground. That dot was clear as day though,
and my heart pounded beneath it.

“Down, now. Or I shoot the girl.”

Mariya’s voice made my skin crawl, and my feet
felt glued to the rungs as Konstantyn’s surprise rumbled back down to her.

“Mariya –”

“I said climb down.” There wasn’t a hint of
emotion in that command, and as Konstantyn descended, I followed.

“Mariya, it’s me, Kon, your brother. It’s not too
late.”

The pain in his voice broke my heart.

“Wrong. You’re ten years too late. I remember no
brother.” Hard as nails, she stood waiting for us when our feet touched the
floor and armed guards appeared from the shadows, circling us.

Mariya pressed the muzzle of the gun into the back
of my skull, and apparently that was all it took for Konstantyn to follow her
commands.

“Put the woman down,” Mariya said to him.

He handed the unconscious girl into the waiting
arms of one of the guards.

Mariya barked orders for her to be locked back in her
cell, and organised a group of the others to go above-ground and round-up the
escapees. She was fearsome to behold, and they set off without argument. Mariya
accepted some heavy-duty cuffs from another guard who appeared by her side.

I flinched back, but she didn’t come for me. Her
delicate hands manacled Konstantyn’s thick wrists, and with the remaining
guard’s guns all trained on us, he had no way of fighting the restraint without
getting pumped full of whatever they were loaded with.

“You don’t need your hands free to complete the
ritual,” she said with a shrug, the muzzle of her gun nudging at his shoulder
to get him moving down the corridor. “Come. Dante hates it when people are late
for his parties.”

I could almost feel the red pulses of the laser
sights trained on my body, and I followed as meekly as I could. Not hard to do,
considering I was naked and trembling beneath a flimsy robe.

“After it’s done, you’ll be expendable, magical
vagina girl. Nobody runs from Dante and lives. I thought you’d have learned
that lesson by now. Not such a clever slut, after all, are you?”

I gritted my teeth and tried to keep my hope
alive, when every step was making my despair rush back. We’d been so close, and
now what? The only consolation I could find was that we’d managed to get Gracie
and the others out. If they’d had the sense to run, then maybe no one else
would have to die this night. My fate, it seemed, was inevitable.

I took the small second of darkness that
accompanied our entrance into a candle-lit room to slip the capsule Konstantyn
had given me between my cheek and gum.

If I had to die, let it me on my own terms. I
wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction. Whatever Dante believed, I’d be
dead long before he got what he wanted from me. My one regret, and the only
thing stopping me from biting down on the capsule then and there, was fear for
Konstantyn, and what they were going to do to him.

As my eyes adjusted to darkness and candles, I
made out the apparatus I’d seen many times in those hastily thumbed-through
photos. Barron’s altar, Mariya had called it. The metal, seven-pointed star was
raised off the ground, to waist height. This was what they tied their victims
to when they…

I took a deep breath as multiple hands led me
towards the altar. The music reverberating around the candlelit room was
horribly familiar. It was that same Beastrider arrangement Konstantyn and I had
danced to at the auditions, and the candles seemed to flicker eerily to the
beat.

The muzzle of the gun bruised my shoulder, shoving
me roughly forward, and I trembled before the dark metal star with its chains
and restraints. Huge and heavy, the device wouldn’t have looked out of place in
a Medieval torture chamber. For all I knew, that’s exactly where it came from.

Konstantyn’s roaring curses were white noise in my
head as the robe was stripped from me, and Mariya’s hands urged me up onto the
raised contraption.

I shivered uncontrollably while multiple hands
bound my wrists and ankles to four of the star’s points, the metal so cold
against my goose-fleshed skin it burned.

I didn’t fight them, couldn’t even summon the will
to punch Mariya in her pretty face as she locked my wrists down. I was too far
gone. Through the blur of my tears, the whole scene had become a surreal haze,
while across the room Konstantyn was fighting so hard, it took six of them to
chain him to the wall and gag his mouth.

Only when he was restrained did the real menace
arrive. Five naked, aroused men, their upper faces obscured by elaborately painted
masks, filed silently into the room and circled the star. Sinister shadows and
light cut angles across their horned animal heads, but no masks could have been
more terrifying than the evil of the men hiding behind them. There were
supposed to be seven, which meant one was missing. Dante himself, I decided,
identifying the others by build and body hair.

Hands brushed along my flank, my stomach, the
curve of my breasts, every touch eliciting another whimper I had to swallow
down, another glare I had to muster, when terror had me aching to close my eyes
and block it all out. If only I could. If only I could pretend it was a
nightmare and wake up back in my apartment.

I tongued the capsule wedged against my gum. I had
my way out, thanks to Konstantyn, but once I took it, there would be no waking
up, no going back.

Not yet, Neva, not yet.

Bravery or cowardice? I wasn’t sure. This was the
final solution, a dark and lonely path I didn’t want to walk alone, and how was
I supposed to leave him behind, suffering, when he’d risked everything for me
and the others?

Over by the wall, he rattled his cuffs, cursing
and screaming around the gag. He was strength, when I was falling apart. He was
fighting, when I couldn’t even scratch my nose.

“Lazarus,” a voice said from the shadows, “give up
your struggle. Embrace your fate.”

I recognised Dante’s voice as he stepped from the
darkness into the flickering candlelight, and the creature that emerged did
bear a striking resemblance to Dante, albeit with gross physical alterations.
His eyes glowed red, the pupils deformed into reptilian slits, and a pair of
twisted horns poked through the curly blond thatch of his hair. His skin was
mottled grey and green, and the massive erection protruding from his hips would
have done a stallion proud.

Contact lenses, prosthetics, body paint, I
thought. Had to be. Very clever. My heart pounded between my ears. Very fucking
creepy. The things you could do these days with special effects makeup. The
lengths this crazy man would go to, just to uphold his psychotic charade. It
seemed to be working, though. The cluster of men around me ceased their petting
and branched out to stand at the points of the star like tongue-lolling betas,
hanging on their alpha’s command. The crazy man had the cream of London’s police,
politicians and doctors naked, sweaty and eating from his palm.