Chapter 16 #2
Luca waited for an answer, proud of her that she seemed to have figured something out—maybe the formulas on the walls at Dr. Torres’s house.
Before Jenkins could say anything, a commotion erupted in the hallway. Through the window in the door, he saw the officer outside their room collapse.
Another officer raced toward him from down the hall. “Get a medic!” The yell sounded muffled and faraway, barely audible through the thick door and reinforced glass.
Kira jumped up and opened the door. “I’m a doctor. What is it?”
The door clicked closed, plunging the room back into quiet.
Luca got up to watch for a second through the window, then turned back and faced Jenkins.
“The operation you were running wasn’t just about you.
It was about providing the Shadow Syndicate with minerals they needed to make something.
What was it? A drug, or some other kind of substance? ”
“I told you everything I know. There’s nothing more for me to say.”
Luca stared at him, realizing from Jenkins’s expression that he wasn’t going to get anything else. If the man knew who might’ve taken Torres, he certainly wasn’t going to share. “One day I hope you can find it in you to give Mack what he’s looking for.”
“And what is that?”
“I can’t answer that question for you,” Luca said, “but I can tell you that it’s worth your time to figure it out.”
He turned to the door and looked through the window to find the hallway empty.
Luca grabbed the handle, and the door clicked. No, everything around him clicked, and the room plunged into darkness.
He pulled down the handle, but it was locked.
All the lights in the infirmary went out. Kira had seen enough when they entered to know it was empty and there were maybe two steps to the closest bed. “Let’s lay him down.”
Despite the fact it was almost pitch black, with only an emergency exit light above the door in one corner still lit up, she found her way. She and the man who’d been helping her carry the downed officer laid him onto the hospital bed.
“We need lights.” Without electricity, there wasn’t much she could do for a man who had suddenly suffered a heart attack. She searched for the man’s pulse with her fingertips. “Do you know how to do CPR?”
Right now, she didn’t even know where the other officer had gone or if he was standing right next to her. It was too dark to see.
A flashlight flicked on over on the other side of the bed, then swung down at the man on the bed. The metal casing cracked against his skull.
Kira screamed. “What are you doing?”
Someone’s arms snaked around her, grasping her tight across her hips and across her shoulders. A bigger person, wider and stronger. An inmate she hadn’t seen. And there was nothing she could do.
Except kick her legs and scream.
She let the worst sound she could conjure up escape from her mouth and caught his shin with the heel of her shoe, wishing she wasn’t wearing canvas shoes and jeans right now.
But she’d dressed for a trip to the prison, unsure what it was going to be like here.
She’d decided the goal was to keep from drawing attention to herself.
But somehow, that had completely backfired.
“Shut up.” The man holding her breathed against her ear.
She didn’t stop squirming.
He took a step back and to the side, then swung her around and slammed her into a metal storage cabinet. Her head glanced off the door—and left a dent behind, she was pretty sure. Only in the light would she be able to tell what damage had been done. He didn’t let go.
Then he tossed her onto the floor.
Her knee slammed down on the floor first, and she managed to catch herself with her hands. Pain ricocheted through her. But this wasn’t the time to be distracted by anything. She had to keep her wits about her.
Kira tried to sound steady. “What are you doing?”
The officer. He’d killed that man—his colleague.
She could still barely see, what with most of the room in darkness. Just that murderous flashlight in the hand of a prison guard. The kind of person who attempted murder in the dark so that no one could ever prove it was he who’d done the deed.
Just moments ago, she’d been riding the high of figuring out Torres’s formula. Her organic chemistry was a little rusty, but she’d worked out that lithium could be used in the way his formula had indicated. The one he’d written all over the walls of that room in his house.
Combining elements to create recreational drugs.
The lights flickered and came back on.
Two inmates stood to the left, a prison guard on the other side of the bed. It was the guard who held the heavy flashlight in his hand.
She gasped, lifting her chin and trying to sound tough. “You killed him.”
The officer who had collapsed when his heart suddenly stopped beating lay on the bed with a deadly head wound.
From the blunt force trauma of being hit by a man who was supposed to be his colleague.
The murderer said nothing. The guy had to be about forty and wore a wedding ring.
His hair was receding, giving him a high forehead and making his eyes look tiny.
He held the now dented flashlight in his hand still.
The inmates turned to her, and one said, “Looks like everything is going according to plan.”
It was the cartel guy they had arrested after Rousseau was killed in the hospital—the man Roger had been speaking with at the gala, who claimed to know nothing about what was going on.
If he was still here awaiting trial, then he hadn’t been granted bail at his arraignment.
The judge must have thought he was a flight risk.
Unfortunately for her, it turned out this man came with a lot of risk. The kind where a prison dissolved into chaos.
Kira curled her legs up in front of her, trying to protect herself. But what could she do against these men?
The other man turned, his orange jumpsuit too tight around his stomach.
She gasped again. “You.”
Frankie’s boyfriend, Stuart Parker.
He was supposed to be in solitary. How was he…? Right, the murderous prison guard.
This man had made Frankie’s life a misery until she needed to seek shelter where she could be safe. Then Stuart had followed Kira to her car and demanded to know where Frankie was. In prison, he’d stabbed Jenkins and put him in the hospital.
So had he been in all of this from the beginning, or did he get paid for that attempt on Jenkins?
He came toward her and crouched, a deadly smile on his face. “Welcome to the party.” His brows rose. “I didn’t know you were here, but when I saw you? Surprise.” He muttered a curse. “Now you get to be part of all the fun.”
Kira shivered.
“The system will be rebooting in a second,” the guard who had killed his colleague said. “That means we only have a few minutes.”
Stuart whirled around to him. “I know what that means. This whole thing was my plan.”
“Just so long as I get paid.”
Stuart motioned to the dead man on the hospital bed. “You ain’t getting his share. So you can forget about that. You did one job, you get one split.”
Kira glanced at the cartel guy, trying to keep an eye on all of them at the same time.
He had a calculating look on his face. Dark hair and dark eyes, far too many tattoos on his arms that might have deadly meaning.
Not that she had anything against tattoos.
But on him, they were menacing. Almost like another weapon.
The fear she’d felt when that covert agent was on top of her, his hands around her neck, squeezing the life out of her, rushed back up to swallow her like a king tide.
There was nothing she could do about it, and in the end, she would drown under the weight of it.
Fear would keep her from moving. Keep her from saying anything.
Fear would keep her from living if she let it.
God, help me. She was so out of her depth that she had no idea what to do.
Stuart said, “Let’s go.” He grabbed her arm and hauled her to her feet. “Jenkins needs to be dead before the system comes back online.”
He’d said this was his plan, and it must have taken some coordination to get the cartel guy and the officer to cooperate. They must have given the officer something to cause his heart to stop—possibly as a result of an underlying condition. Maybe they’d done something to his medication.
Her mind wanted to assess all the symptoms like she was trying to diagnose a disease. But how did that help her figure out what to do? She would be left floundering with no way to protect herself. Swept along by more of that fear and the tide of their intentions.
The cartel guy opened the door and peered out, looking both ways. “I see someone. It’s that new guy.”
Stuart shook her arm. “Maybe you know him. He’s one of your people.”
She had no idea what he was talking about. “Excuse me?”
“You know, Middle Eastern or whatever.”
She hissed a breath in through her teeth.
“I’m sorry, did you find that offensive?” He laughed. “Maybe you shouldn’t be so sensitive all the time. It’s not like I meant anything by it.” He was still laughing.
Kira kept her thoughts to herself. Even asking him who had paid them to do this likely wouldn’t yield any results.
They might be planning to kill her, and she wouldn’t have anyone to tell what she knew.
Or she was going to be used as leverage.
Traded for their freedom after talks with some kind of hostage negotiator.
Either way, she didn’t figure she had much time left.
Luca was in the prison as well, back in that room with Jenkins.
Would they kill him too? There were officers on staff whose job it was to respond to incidents like this.
Surely they were gearing up right now, having realized what had happened—that the staff was no longer in control of this section of the facility.
Any minute now, they would rush in and take these guys down, sweeping her to safety. That, or Luca would show up and overpower them.
If no one came to rescue her, then she didn’t like her chances of survival.
It might be up to her.
Hope was a flighty thing, disappearing before she could grasp hold of it.
For so long, she’d only had herself to rely on.
In the end, that might have saved her life, but she had taken one as well.
She hadn’t been able to do her job as a doctor the way she wanted to because she’d been working covert ops for the government.
In the end, everything had melded together, and she’d realized she needed a simple life.
A job. Margins in her life for relationships and hobbies.
But she’d come here and retreated from everything except her occupation. At the hospital, she was the doctor she needed to be, but outside that, she hadn’t filled her spare time with much of anything.
She’d lived a Christian life, someone saved from her sins.
But not saved from herself.
From the guilt and shame she carried. As if she didn’t believe that God could wash all of it away. That she had to carry the burden, even after He’d taken her sin.
Around the same time she’d been offered a board position with the foundation, she had met Luca. Even if Destiny’s foundation didn’t turn out to be a total sham, Kira would still rather spend her time with Luca.
Who else in the world would understand who she was to the extent that he did?
It wasn’t even really about their shared skin color. They weren’t from the same country, but he had seen the places she’d lived. He had walked through those same situations and done it trying to help people live free and save lives.
He was even doing it here, something she was immensely proud of him for.
Kira wanted the chance to be proud of herself for facing her fear and choosing to act anyway. To live her life to the fullest. But she didn’t know how to reach out and grab it. To accept that God had washed away everything and she didn’t have to carry the past around like a burden anymore.
Did she wait for rescue, or figure out how to fight back?
“Okay, let’s go.” The cartel guy ducked out of the room.
Stuart followed him, holding tight to her arm so that she discovered a new way she could empathize with the victims of domestic violence. She’d understood the pain involved before. But now she knew exactly what it felt like.
“You’re hurting me.” She looked at him. “Just leave me back there in the infirmary and do what you need to do. I won’t say anything.”
He didn’t stop dragging her down the hall, the four of them making short work of the distance. She needed to find a way to slow them down.
He grinned, and his rank breath brushed her face. “You won’t wanna be in there when we let everyone loose.”
Her stomach flipped over in her midsection. “What do you mean—”
“Shut it.”
The officer rushed ahead of them. “Stay right here. Wait till I say.” He ducked around the corner, and Kira heard his boots squeak on the floor. He was running.
The cartel guy looked at the reflective circle up high in the corner of the wall. She did the same and watched the officer wave his arms.
The murderous guard yelled, “They’re out! Cellblock three! They’re all out!”
A buzzer sounded and the door swung open. The officer ran through it. Seconds later, she heard a man scream.
Kira turned to Stuart. “What are you doing?”
This was about Jenkins. So why were they hurting others?
He flashed his teeth at her. “We’re taking over the prison.”