CHAPTER FORTY-ONE #2
Before Ella could make a rash decision, something upstairs took a heavy blow. The whole house felt it. A second came, heavier, the sound of a shoulder or a ram, and then a voice through the floor that Ella would have known anywhere, Ripley calling her name into the dark of the rooms above.
Doyle and Varro looked at each other. Ella couldn’t see Varro’s face, but his body language did the talking for him.
He possessed a child’s fear; the look of a boy who’d been promised it would all work out and was only now learning it wouldn’t.
He took a step back toward the stairs. Doyle laughed, and the sound of it had no nerves in it at all.
‘Time to wrap this up,’ she said, and brought the Glock up level with Ella’s chest.
She silently apologized to Varro’s three victims because they weren’t the faces that flashed up in what Ella guessed would be her last moments alive.
She thought of the three people who’d died at Doyle’s hands, three people who’d died because they’d been unfortunate to be in Ella Dark’s social orbit.
Julianne Cooper, Jenna Bradbury, Ben Carter.
Ella had failed them once and was now failing them again.
Ripley would recover, and probably find a new partner. Luca would do the same, and she hoped that her death would at least let him use the dead-ex-girlfriend angle for sympathy if he ever became desperate enough.
‘It’s been fun, Ella Dark.’
Fun.
This bitch had killed her loved ones and sewn their mouths shut, and to her it was a game played for the joy of watching Ella Dark lose.
The word lit something in her that the poison hadn’t touched and Ella decided, in the space between Doyle’s finger settling on the trigger and the round leaving the barrel, that she would not die sitting down.
If this was the end of it, she was going out swinging.
Ella came off the floor and lunged herself at the gun.
Both hands closed on Doyle’s wrist and Ella drove it up and away from her chest, and Doyle squeezed and the basement detonated with sound.
Three rounds chewed into the rafters and brought dust and splinters down in a curtain.
Ella had her by the scarred forearm and she twisted with everything she had left, felt the tendons roll under her grip, felt Doyle’s heel skid out from under her on the flagstones.
For half a second the gun belonged to neither of them.
Then an arm came around her middle like a tightening of the world itself.
Varro lifted her off her feet without effort and without anger, and her grip on the wrist tore loose and her ribs folded in under his forearm until she gasped for breath.
She kicked at nothing. She clawed at an arm she couldn’t get her fingers around.
He held her off the ground and waited, patient, while Doyle got her footing back.
But Doyle ran.
She crossed to the rear wall, to a span of brick that Ella’s eyes had read three times as nothing, and she laid her palm flat against it and a low door swung inward on a black space behind. It was painted the color of the mortar, set flush in the wall, invisible until it wasn’t.
Doyle stepped into the dark of it and looked back once. She held up Ella’s Glock and inhaled its aroma one more time.
‘Good luck,’ she laughed, then vanished
The door closed behind her, and the wall was a wall again. A horde of footsteps from upstairs suggested that reinforcements had either bashed the door in or found the already-bashed rear door. But Ella’s real problem had its monstrous forearms wrapped around her torso.
Varro dropped her, then started on her. There was no skill in it.
Varro had no guard, no stance, no idea of distance, none of the things she’d been taught to read in a man so she could get inside them.
He simply reached out with a hand the size of her chest and took a fistful of her jacket and threw her, and she went off her feet and into the rack of plates and the whole thing came down on top of her with a noise like a car wreck.
When Ella rose to her feet, Varro was already there. He swung his arm and cracked her with a meaty fist that might have dislodged her jaw. It was not the actions of a trained fighter, but the actions of 280 pounds of man. Both were lethal.
‘FBI! Open up!’
A chorus of bangs sounded on the basement door, followed by deafening thud after thud.
Whoever was up there was trying to ram through it, but it would take a lot of ramming to penetrate solid steel.
There’d be no way they could dislodge the door from its hinges, so they’d have to knock the frame out of the wall, which could take ten minutes.
Varro came at Ella again, and this time he wrapped his hands around her neck.
She was suddenly levitating off the ground, and all she could do was kick aimlessly at his midsection.
Her hits connected but bounced off what felt like a brick wall.
They had no effect at all, and Ella wasn’t sure that Varro could even feel pain at all.
‘Greaves… was… innocent,’ Ella spluttered.
Varro dropped her. Ella drew in as much oxygen as she could before his assault started again, then she crawled backward to put some distance between him and her.
Think.
More thuds came from the door, but the cavalry didn’t sound anywhere close to breaking it down.
She gestured to the door that Doyle escaped from. ‘Why don’t you make a run for it?’
He started on her again, and Ella clambered for another escape route. She jumped to her feet, backed away and found herself ten feet from the amateur torture device. She had to hand it to him. He was committed to seeing this through.
‘Innocent,’ Ella repeated.
Varro only briefly paused, because with every thud, he seemed to become more and more aware that his time was up. He was quickly realizing that he wasn’t getting out of here, regardless of whether Ella lived or died. She got the impression that the only purpose he had left was to kill her.
Ella tripped and then corrected herself. At her feet, she saw a stack of 20-pound weight plates.
Long shots rarely hit their targets, but when they did, they made the greatest goals.
She’d violated the dead once this week.
What was once more?
Ella reached down and got both hands around one of the 20-pound plates. It was all she could lift with her arms gone to water, and she didn’t throw it at him.
She summoned her best pitching stance and hurled it violently at the corpse of Thomas Greaves.
It took the skeleton across the ribs and the wire gave and the whole articulated frame came off the wall in a clattering rush, the great yoke of the shoulders folding, the long bones swinging loose and coming down in a heap on the rubber matting.
A noise emerged from Varro’s throat, although it was not a word. It was perhaps the closest thing to a scream his voicebox could muster, but despite its incoherence, Ella identified it as the overflowing of fury.
He came across the room at the fallen bones, and Ella let her knees buckle, let her head loll, let him see a half-dead woman swaying on her feet with nothing left.
He bought it because there was no guile in him to know guile when he saw it.
Varro hurtled in her direction without grace, three hundred and more pounds of him committed to the floor and the heap of his teacher, and Ella came up off her fake stagger, hauled another plate off the pile and swung it into the back of his skull with everything her ruined arms could find.
His head snapped forward. His feet kept going. His balance didn’t.
And the open iron mouth of the thing he’d built was waiting exactly where his momentum carried him.
The iron maiden was bolted to nothing. It stood on its own iron base and it had never been meant to take the weight of a charging giant, and Varro went into it with his arms flung out and the whole structure went over backward.
For a moment the two of them moved as one mass, the man and the cabinet, tipping past the point of return, and then it crashed down onto the flagstones with a noise that Ella felt come up through her ankles.
One of the hinged doors swung shut as it fell.
It came down across him before he could clear it; the inner face with its rows of blackened points, and it met the back of his shoulder and the side of his thigh where they’d landed under it.
Not the killing closure the thing had been built for, not a body sealed between two sets of teeth, only the edge of it catching the edge of him as gravity took it.
But the spikes were iron and judging by the sudden eruption of blood, they penetrated flesh without issue. Varro’s whole frame convulsed under the weight of the door, and another inhuman sound tore from the executioner’s throat.
The door rebounded off him and swung open again on its hinge, and Ella saw the dark wet points lift away from him slick to the root.
He was pinned. The base of the cabinet had come down across his legs and the bulk of the iron lay over him, and he heaved at it with both arms, and for a sick second she thought he might simply lift it off himself and stand.
The whole structure rose an inch. Then his arm gave where the spikes had found it, and it dropped back, and he screamed soundlessly into the concrete.
Ella stood over him with the weight plate still hanging from one hand, her chest going like a bellows, and she did not come any closer.
The basement door fell from its frame. Bodies emerged at the top of the staircase.
And Simon Varro lay bleeding but alive, bested by a contraption from hundreds of years ago.
Ella collapsed onto her back and breathed through the pain in her chest, neck, arms, legs, jaw.
Wounds would heal. She would live another day.
Game over.