CHAPTER TEN
Myra
I collapsed to the concrete floor and covered my head as Damian rained down on us like a monsoon of blood and bits and bone. By the time the body-part storm ceased, I was coated in him. My stomach roiled, and I heaved up what little was in it until I was just gagging violently.
“What… the fuck… was that?” But Yael’s question barely registered; I was too busy trying not to vomit again. Instead, I pushed onto my hands and knees in the sea of Damian and tried to crawl to the door. “Myra,” he called, his voice drawing nearer. “Myra—”
“I have to get out of here,” I said, my mind unraveling as what had just happened settled in. My hands scrambled up the closed door, fumbling with the knob they were too blood-slick to turn.
Then Yael’s large, blood-covered hand clamped down over mine. “Did you do that on purpose?”
“What?” I snapped at him and his accusatory tone. “No! I didn’t do it at all!”
“Well, people don’t generally blow up on their own.”
“I’m aware of that, Yael, but it doesn't change things. I didn’t do it, and as much as I’d love to stay here and argue with you about it, they will kill us once someone stumbles in here and sees how we’ve redecorated, so if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to get out of here. Like now.”
“And what? Walk out the front door looking like you slaughtered an army?” he asked, sobering me to my current reality.
“How do you think that’s going to go over with the management?
” It was a fair question, one my addled mind hadn’t yet considered.
One that sent a whole new wave of panic through me, because Yael had the backing of the fae king and the power of the fae in general, and I had nothing but Ravi’s protection—and we were a long way from Serpent’s Tongue.
The kingpins upstairs might let Yael go without a fuss, but me?
I’d receive no such favor, and I shuddered at the thought of how they’d make me pay.
The terror coursing through me must have been evident on my face as he reached over and plucked something white and shiny from my hair. “Glad you’ve fully caught up with our current predicament.”
“What do we do?” I asked, trying to suppress my growing panic. “Is there a way out of this place hidden down here in this maze?”
“Not that I’m aware of. And even if there was, we’d just get caught trying to find it.”
Not the answer I’d hoped for. “Okay… so what’s the plan, then? Stay here until we’re busted?”
He looked past me to the far wall before hauling me up to stand on my good leg.
“Not if that is what I hope it is…” Before I could ask what he meant, his arm looped around my waist, and he half-helped, half-dragged me through the carnage over to a door so seamlessly blended into the dark wall that I hadn't seen it when we arrived.
After fumbling around for a minute, he found a cleverly disguised handle and opened the door to what appeared to be a bathroom, though a crude one.
A nasty toilet sat alone in the left corner of the small space with a sink across from it.
There was a drain recessed in the center of the floor and a shower head affixed to the wall on our right with no curtain surrounding it.
And dangling haphazardly on the wall right in front of me was a variety of shackles and chains. I gaped at them for a moment while scenarios for needing them in a room with a shower and drain ran rampant through my mind.
“We don’t have time for those tonight,” Yael said, a note of dark humor rimming his words. “We need to get cleaned up and get out of here—but maybe another time.” I pulled my attention away from the shackle wall to find him stripping off his coat. “Take your clothes off.”
“Why? So I can wash off and then put those blood-covered things back on?” I countered with a hefty amount of incredulity. “Not sure that’s going to work how you want it to.”
“You have a better idea?”
“Maybe…” With no further explanation, I limped past him and his hard gaze, grimacing hard, to turn on the water. “You need to rinse the blood out of your pants and shirt. They’re black—they shouldn’t stain enough to be noticed, especially not in that dim light.”
“And then walk through the gambling pit in sopping wet clothes as though that isn’t suspicious?”
“I’ll deal with that. I may have lost nearly everything when I was cast out of the Deep, but I still have some connection to water, though I have to be able to touch it for it to work.
” I stuck my hand into the shower stream then withdrew it, pulling a thin trail of water in its wake.
“I can draw it out of the fabric when we’re done, but we need to get as much blood out as we can first.”
“What about you?” he asked, eyeing my blood-soaked jeans. “There’s no way those are coming clean enough to salvage.” One look down at the denim fabric and I knew he was right—no amount of rinsing would take the stain out of them. Fuck. “You’re going to have to lose them.”
“And wear what instead? Your overcoat buttoned up to my neck? Nobody will find that suspicious at all. And I can’t exactly wear my underwear with a leather jacket. That’ll cause an entirely different kind of scene during our escape.”
He stared at me for a moment, brow tense with concentration.
“That,” he said pointing to my black tank top.
“Wear that as a skirt, your bra as a top, and if you’re worried about virtue, just zip up your jacket all the way to your chin like a good little nun and pray we get out of here, because your virtue will be the least of your worries if we don’t. ”
I wanted to argue, but it was pointless.
Instead, I watched him jump underneath the water and start rinsing off while I kicked off my shoes and tried to wriggle out of my wet pants, a task difficult enough with two working legs, let alone one.
I held on to one of the chains to steady myself as I stood on my good leg and cursed the tight denim as I forced it over my hips.
Pain lanced through my leg, and I was already breathing hard from my efforts.
“We don’t have time for this,” he said as he crouched down next to me and grabbed my waistband. Without warning, he jerked my pants down to my knees, leaving him staring at my barely-covered ass.
“Hey!”
“Still not time for your precious virtue—”
“I’m not worried about my fucking virtue, Yael,” I argued, twisting around to face him.
He looked up at me with a wicked grin. “Aww, don’t tell me you’re shy, little mermaid.”
A million retorts danced through my mind, but none seemed to make it to my tongue as his fingertips grazed my thigh.
I silently watched him pull my jeans down past my knees and carefully extract my bad leg with a gentleness that shocked me.
Using the chain hanging off the wall, I leveraged myself up enough for him to pull the other pant leg away, then hopped out of the denim puddle at my feet.
Yael stood slowly, his body too close to mine as he smiled yet again. “I didn’t take you for a pale pink lace kind of girl—”
A quick, satisfying jab to his gut silenced him, and I hobbled past him into the water to start ridding myself of the bloody evidence of a crime I’d unwittingly committed because of his shady bargain.
He’d gotten off easy in my book.
“That’s a strange way of saying thank you,” he said as he walked over and stripped off his wet shirt in front of me, exposing pale flesh covered in a pinkish stain and a web of winding black ink.
“You’d be wise to do the same.” He dropped the soaked fabric to the floor with a splash, then started on his pants.
“We need to get rid of as much as we can.”
I scrubbed my hands over my leather jacket, hating that he was right once again. Grudgingly, I peeled it off and tossed it next to his shirt before his pants landed on top of it. My tank top wasn’t far behind, leaving him and me nearly chest to chest under the shower head in our underwear.
Definitely not how I’d imagined my evening going.
I watched as he tipped his head back to rinse his hair and tried not to notice the way the harsh cut of his arm muscles flexed as he raked his fingers through it, or the way the black swirls of his tattoos seemed to dance across his chest with the motion.
Water poured down his defined body, and even in our current life-or-death predicament, the momentary distraction was real.
Thankfully, my traitorous mind snapped back to reality, and I focused on what I needed to do to have a chance of escaping alive.
While I rinsed away the blood as best as I could, Yael looked down at me with a furrowed brow, eyes narrowed intently.
His hand slowly drifted up toward my face, and the motion caught me by surprise.
I froze for a moment as he reached for me; then my instincts kicked in, and I drew back until the wall behind me halted my retreat.
“Stay still—”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to pick more Damian out of your hair, if that’s all right with you? Or would you prefer to march through The Lion’s Den with incriminating evidence adorning it?”
I scowled and leaned forward just enough for him to accomplish the task, holding my breath as his deft hands delicately plucked bone and bits from my jet-black hair.
Once he was done, he pulled back and assessed his work, scanning the locks that trailed down in front of my shoulders and along the sides of my chest. His gaze lingered there for a moment before he reached behind his back to turn off the water.
“Okay, little mermaid, it’s time for that parlor trick of yours.”