Chapter Ten
Eve ran through the hallway, one hand pressed hard on her shoulder, and the other holding a gun. Darius labored behind, his wheezing becoming more pronounced the farther they went into whatever maze they had fallen into. She wanted to stop, to check all his injuries, but there wasn’t any time.
Whoever the second shooter was might have followed them. Though, their way down into the underground corridor had been less than ideal.
Eve had still been processing the fact that she had been shot when the two of them had collided against debris and concrete. Or, really, Darius had. He’d taken the brunt of the impact beneath him.
It’s why she was the one holding the gun.
“My—my hand isn’t working,” were his first words once they both realized they were still relatively in one piece.
Their only stroke of good luck had been the sliver of light that had shown the hallway they were now currently stumbling through. Darius must have also spotted it. They pulled themselves up together, only pausing long enough for Eve to pick up the gun.
Now she was heading in the direction of the female residence hall, sure that they had stumbled into an old storage system or water-pump holding corridor that had long since been boarded-up.
That was, until she almost hit a wall.
“Hold on,” she breathed out. Eve felt Darius’s body heat against her back. She used the arm holding his gun to rub it against the stone in front of her. “This is a dead end? We need a light.”
“My phone is in my pocket.” Darius kept his voice low too, but the sturdiness in it had crumbled. He was in pain. Pain pain. “G-get it for me.”
Wherever they were was quiet enough that the simple action of placing the gun at her feet and feeling for his phone were as loud as yelling.
Which was good because that meant they should be able to hear their pursuer if they came their way.
Eve managed to pull the phone from his pocket with one hand, careful to keep her other pressing against the wound on her shoulder. Her hand was soaked, and she knew it would hurt like hell once her adrenaline started to ebb.
But now wasn’t the time to mentally hover.
Instead, she felt a wave of gratefulness at the fact that Darius had the same model phone as her. Eve had the flashlight function on and working within seconds.
Darius was smart to shy away from its beam.
From the quick flash she was still able to see a lot of blood.
“There’s…there’s two ways to go,” Darius breathed out.
Eve and her pounding heart turned to give the discovery more light. They had, in fact, run into a dead end whereupon you had to turn left or right.
“Where are we?” she asked herself.
The light showed a path to the right that was almost identical to the one to the left. No sign of life either way. Both dark and seemingly endless. The path to the right had a few wooden-looking crates stacked on one side. The other to the left looked like it sloped slightly downward.
Eve motioned to the left.
“This would go toward the main part of the mill? The other way would be toward the woods? I don’t… I don’t know where we are.”
Darius’s body heat intensified as it pressed into her back. The sudden weight made her stumble into the stone wall.
“Sorry, I—” Darius was close enough that her hair moved at his words, but he couldn’t have sounded farther away.
“Darius? What’s wrong?”
His head dropped to the top of her good shoulder, weighing it down enough that she had trouble turning to face him. Eve wasn’t able to get the light directly on his face, but she saw enough to know asking what was wrong had been a silly question.
Everything was wrong.
He was in undeniable pain.
And that pain had a terrifying consequence.
“I-I’m not dying, but I am…going to pass out,” he managed. With each word she felt him become heavier. Eve let go of her shoulder to try and help somehow, but Darius’s remaining bit of strength went to him pushing her hand right on back.
“Keep pressure on it.” He slid off her and hit the ground before Eve could stop him.
“Darius? Darius!”
In the dim light Eve saw his eyes close. They didn’t open again.
Panic as pure and solid as the ground beneath her feet grabbed ahold of Eve as she grabbed ahold of Darius. There wasn’t much she could do other than keep him from falling over totally, and even that was met with half success. He was lying more than sitting. And so still.
“I’ll get you help,” she told him, whispering as she fumbled to get the phone back on. There was no service, but she sent out the phone’s SOS, meant to go through whenever it did come back on. It would put a tracking pin on their location and alert the authorities.
Eve glanced back down at Darius.
She knew she had taken a shot, but now she wondered if Darius had too. Or had the fall been enough?
“I’ll get you help,” she repeated.
A feeling of déjà vu mingled with her rising panic as she found the gun again and switched hands. The pain in her shoulder was starting to turn her stomach. Her side hurt too. So did her head.
Who was after them?
Why?
Was it Scott?
Was it people who worked for him?
Was it Gary’s killer?
There was no time to figure it out.
Eve hovered in the cross-section of the pathways.
She needed to get out to get help, but neither direction had light or sound coming from them.
The way to the right might lead to the woods and an exterior exit…
or it could dead end. For all the times her father had spoken about his work, Eve herself had never walked the mill to know for sure where every entrance and exit was.
The way to the left went in the direction of the heart of the steel mill… But wouldn’t that mean the way out was probably farther away? And who was to say it was even accessible? Was where they were now even open to the general public, or had bad luck shown them a forgotten series of rooms?
There could be help in either direction, or there could be nothing, and Eve would have wasted Darius’s time.
Eve turned back toward the way they had come.
Escaping into the darkness then had been about getting cover.
Now it was about getting out.
Eve flexed her grip around the butt of the gun. She tossed Darius’s cell phone on the ground next to him.
“Don’t die,” she ordered him.
Then Eve ran full-tilt toward what she hoped was a good choice.
RAFE WAS DEAD. Dead as dead could be.
Lana moved along the old brick building and paused by its door, glancing in the direction of where the man lay prone. His gun, a thing that looked as old as the mill they had been circling, was at his side, but there were no signs he was going for it.
That man, that damned lawman, had gone and killed him true and through in one shot.
And her shot?
Well, Lana had been slower to it.
When she’d been asked to follow Detective Williams, she hadn’t expected to find a Mrs. And when they had come all the way here, of all places? Lana thought it was better to keep at least one of them alive to get some answers.
That’s the only reason she’d pulled her shot.
The reason the two had tucked into the building?
Lana saw the blood on the porch and guessed that for all Rafe was bad at, his first shot must have landed somewhere. But which one had taken it?
She didn’t need to peek through the door to see if the couple were waiting for her right inside. The door was in pieces and gave a clear view of a confusing development.
The floor was gone.
Some of it, at least.
Lana held her gun out, ready to squeeze the trigger, and took a tentative step toward the hole in the hardwood.
Sunlight from uncovered windows in the ground-level room gave just enough light to show there was an entirely different room hidden below.
An old metal hunk of machinery could be seen at one side while a whole lot of nothing could be seen around the rest of the debris that had caved in.
The couple who had done the falling were nowhere to be seen.
Blood was, though.
That seemed to be the only easy thing to make out from her vantage point at the edge.
Lana held her breath. She cocked her head to the side a little.
No talking.
No rustling.
They had to have survived the fall, or else she would have seen their bodies. Maybe they were hiding in a part of the room she couldn’t see?
Lana resisted the urge to sigh.
It would have been a whole lot nicer had Rafe not died.
She could have made him go down below and figure out their situation. But he had died the way he’d foolishly lived: impulsively.
That wasn’t how Lana worked.
She kept her gun ready but lowered it to her side and looked around the rest of the aboveground space.
She hadn’t been there before but knew no one came around this part of the mill anymore.
Whether they were paid to avoid it or just did it naturally, she didn’t know or care.
Her only job had been to follow, watch and report back.
Shoot if needed, only kill if you were told.
The room was large and open and looked to be a storage area that had been converted to hold several sleeping spaces.
Rusted and broken iron bunk beds were positioned throughout the back end of the space.
Nearest her seemed to have been a more general hangout spot.
A couch that hadn’t fallen below sagged low against the wall to her left.
The wall to the right had a fogged window that looked out at another building in the distance.
She wasn’t sure what building that was and, honestly, didn’t care.
What she needed to do was figure out if the detective was still alive.
Lana was light and cautious with her steps around the opening in the floor until she made it to the back end of the main room. There were two closed doors, and both complained with metallic whines as she opened them.
The smell of mold hung heavy in the communal bathroom behind the first. The second held more of the same but with an added slight rot, which made sense considering it was a small, obviously forgotten kitchen.
In neither room was there a set of stairs or another door that could lead to the room below.
Knowing there wasn’t a back door, Lana opened a window over the sink. She climbed through it with ease and walked along the back wall of the building.
There were no stairs or exterior way to enter whatever room her mark had fallen into. At least not that she could see.
Lana turned toward the fence and the woods just beyond it. Would there be an access point there, or would she have to go in the other direction?
Maybe there wasn’t an access point at all.
The mill was old, most of it repurposed instead of replaced as far as she had seen. They weren’t in the working part either. Maybe they had closed up whatever they hadn’t needed in order to skirt any liability issues.
Not that she cared.
She shouldn’t have accepted the job to come to a place like Seven Roads.
Lana gave up her search for an easier way into whatever pit had formed beneath the detective’s feet and instead looped back to the front door.
When she went back inside, she holstered her gun and took a more conclusive look at her obstacle.
She pulled her cell phone out and turned the flashlight function on.
It didn’t do much, but she could now guess the drop was about eight feet down.
There didn’t seem to be anything to help with that descent either, at least not from its concrete floor up to her.
Lana glanced around the dorm room around her.
An industrial complex surely had something she could use to get down there without having to scale around like an acrobatic.
Rope or a ladder or maybe if she could push one of the bunk-bed frames over the edge she could use it to drop onto and then climb back out of. Or maybe—
Lana had moved her gaze back to the hole as she went through potential plans.
The beam of light that was faint but clear enough was still empty. However, all thoughts stuttered to a stop when she realized that just outside of its scope was something she hadn’t seen before.
At first, she thought it was the detective, but the shape was all wrong. Smaller.
The woman, she realized.
Not only had the woman survived a potential shot from Rafe and the fall, she had managed to collect a gun in the process.
And that gun was aimed up and right at Lana.
Her words carried with absolute clarity despite the open floor between them.
“Throw me your clip and then your gun or I’ll shoot,” she yelled up. “You’ve got ten seconds.”
The woman was covered in dirt and blood. Her clothes were torn. Her hair a mess.
Her words were stone.
Despite herself, Lana was impressed.
But she was no fool.
The woman was at a disadvantage no matter how determined her voice sounded.
However, Lana wasn’t going to test her patience.
She threw herself backward as far as she could.
No sooner than she lost sight of the hole than three gunshots shot out from it.
Lana might have stayed to see if she could run out the woman’s clip, but another sound had entered the area.
Someone was coming. Their footfalls were loud in the silence that followed the last gunfire.
If there was someone other than her and Rafe, Lana hadn’t been told about them. Which meant she wasn’t going to take her chances that the detective or his woman had had the chance to call in backup.
Lana didn’t sigh as she backtracked with quiet speed. She only handled problems that were listed in her contract. Whoever that woman was hadn’t been on that list.
Though, as she disappeared into the woods behind the mill, she bet she would be soon.
Until then, Lana did what she did best.
She disappeared.