Chapter Fifteen
Tessa
The floor was cold under my cheek before anything else came back to me.
Then the scent of cedar, a sickly sweet, organic scent that nearly turned my stomach.
My shoulder throbbed where some bastard had wrenched it.
Then the room itself slid into focus and I whimpered.
Amber light along the baseboards. The walnut paneling.
The one-way glass set into the far wall at eye level.
I’d stood on the other side of that glass with a small army at my back ten weeks ago.
Now I was on the wrong side of it, wrists zip-tied behind me, cheek against industrial tile that smelled of bleach under the cedar.
I didn’t move yet, trying to keep my expression blank and vacant while taking stock of my body.
My wrists were tied, but in front of me, the plastic biting sharply.
Both my legs were free and I could wiggle my toes.
I thought one knee might be scraped from the way it stung through my jeans.
Small stinging bites ran over my skin on one cheek, my forearms, and one shoulder.
My other shoulder hurt like a motherfucker.
Then the only inventory that actually mattered. I pressed my bound hands flat as I could get them against my stomach, fingers splayed, and held my breath and waited for some kind of answer my body couldn’t actually give me. Nothing hurt low. No cramping, no wetness, nothing wrong that I could feel.
I was back in the fucking intake room. Denton had stood in the doorway the first time they’d shoved me through it, that voice describing me to somebody on a phone like I was horseflesh. I turned my head and found the source of a small, steady scraping sound.
A woman knelt at the table leg, her wrists zip-tied same as mine, working the plastic against a burr in the metal edge with small, patient movements.
When she looked at me, her eyes were flat and assessing, judging me the same way I judged her.
The trick was to figure out if we could trust each other or if the other woman was a plant to get you to fuck up.
“Two doors,” she said, barely above a breath. “Main hall and the service corridor. Guard rotation runs every six minutes, then every four after dark. It’s after dark.” Her jaw tightened. “You’re new.”
“Not exactly.” I worked my own wrists against the tile, testing the give. “I’ve been here before.”
She snorted, looking away. “Everybody’s been here before.”
“How long you been back in this building?"
"Three days. They move us around. Warehouse, a house downtown, back here for tonight." Her jaw tightened. "Big night tonight. Apparently, there are buyers coming in person or something.” She kept working the tie. “I’m Mercy,” she said.
“M-Mercy Raines?” The name landed in my chest like a fist. Mercy Raines.
The name I’d carried around for ten weeks like a stone in my shoe, the reason I couldn’t look at Casey or Grace without also seeing the woman we hadn’t found.
Here she was, alive, kneeling on a bleached floor already having planned her escape.
“You know me?”
“You’re the reason we were coming back.” I know it sounded lame, but I was stunned to have found her by accident.
She tilted her head. “Why?”
“Because you matter,” I said, still stunned. I was rapidly reaching a saturation point and I knew I’d crash soon. “My sister’s man tore this city apart looking for you. We found three other women in the raid, but not you. I’ve thought about you every day since.”
Mercy’s hands stilled against the burr in the metal. For a second, something moved behind her flat eyes, some crack in the wall she’d built to survive this place. Then it was gone, tucked away again, because feelings were a luxury neither of us could afford right now.
“Sit up,” she said. “Slow. There are cameras in the corners, but the angle’s bad near the table. Blind spot.”
I pushed myself upright, biting back a groan when my shoulder screamed at me. My head swam for a second, the drug still working its way out of my system, and I breathed through it until the room stopped tilting.
“You said you’ve been here before,” Mercy said. “You got out?”
“Yeah. Now, we’re gonna get out again.”
The corner of her lips ticked up. “You keep saying ‘we’ like you’ve got a plan.”
“I’ve got half of one.” I turned my wrists toward the table leg she’d found, angling myself along the floor to reach it.
The door at the far end opened before either of us made real progress. A thin guard in a jacket too big in the shoulders, stood in the frame with a phone against his ear, nodding at something. He didn’t look at us like we were people. He looked at us like we were lab animals in a cage.
“Yeah,” he said into the phone. “Yeah, she’s here.
” A pause. “He said to bring her up special. Not banged around, not sedated more than she already is. Boss wants her clean when she gets there.” Another pause, and his gaze slid to me for half a second, assessing, filing. “Yeah. Be there in fifteen.”
He hung up and left without another word, the door swinging shut behind him. The clock he’d just set ticked loud in my skull. Fifteen minutes to get me somewhere. Somewhere that wasn’t here, which meant somewhere worse, which meant I didn’t have fifteen minutes at all. I had way the fuck less.
“That was for you,” Mercy said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yep.” I went back to the tie, sawing it against the burred edge with more vigor, feeling more give in the plastic now.
Mercy’s own hands stilled. She was listening to something I couldn’t hear yet, head tilted toward the corridor. “Rotation’s off,” she whispered. “That guard should’ve had someone with him. He didn’t.”
Then I heard it too. A single flat crack, far off, muffled by walls and distance but unmistakable. Gunfire. Then another, and another, quick and overlapping, coming from somewhere toward the loading bay.
Boots. A lot of them, moving fast, farther down the building, away from us, toward the noise.
Someone shouted something I couldn’t make out.
The rotation Mercy had memorized down to the minute broke apart in real time while we listened from the confines of this shitty room.
Heavy boots filed down the hall past us, men shouting the whole way with overlapping conversations.
Whatever was happening at the loading bay mattered more to them right now than two women tied up in an intake room.
I gave a soft cry as I finally managed to get my wrists free. The tie gave with a small sharp snap, plastic biting one last groove into my skin before it let go.
The door opened again almost the second my hands came free. Same guard, gun still holstered because he hadn’t expected trouble from his “cargo,” moved fast toward Mercy first since she was closer to the door.
I didn’t think. I came up off the floor and drove my good shoulder into his back before he’d fully cleared the frame.
Pain exploded through my other shoulder and I couldn’t stop the cry that exploded from me.
Mercy was already moving, her own hands free, both of us on him before he could turn his weight into anything useful.
Even though I couldn’t do much more than wrap my legs round his and tangle the bastard up, the fight was fast and ugly.
Mercy kicked his head. When he flipped to his back to defend himself, she stomped his throat twice as hard as she could.
He thrashed a couple seconds before he stilled, his windpipe crushed.
I pried the gun from his holster and stood there over him with the weight of it heavy and familiar in my hand.
Mercy gave me a crisp nod. “We doing this now?”
“I mean, what have we really got to lose?”
“You know the best way?”
“Left,” I said, already moving into the corridor. “This hall runs past three holding rooms before it leads toward the stairs and splits toward the main floor. I’ve been through it.”
“We’re on the same page.” She grinned at me, then we headed out.
Mercy fell in behind me, quiet and quick, her bare feet silent on the tile where I still had shoes.
Once we made it to the ground floor we moved toward the bigger bay area the exit.
Gunfire kept rolling in from the direction of the loading bay, farther off now, punctuated by shouting that sounded like someone was getting an ass kicking.
We hit the T-junction and a man came around the corner fast, reaching for Mercy’s arm before he’d even registered what he was grabbing.
Mercy twisted into him instead of away and drove her elbow up under his jaw.
I closed the gap and brought the butt of the gun down across the back of his skull.
He dropped. I pointed the gun at his head and pulled the trigger, snarling as I did so.
Antonio came around the same corner that same instant.
He had blood across his jaw and down the front of his shirt, dark and drying, and his eyes looked completely wild, like the most rabid dog ever and he’d slipped his leash.
He didn’t stop moving until he was close enough to touch me, and then his hand came out toward the gun in my grip, the same motion I’d seen him make with Kass and Finch a hundred times.
Take the weapon. Put himself between me and whatever came next.
“No,” I said.
One word. His hand stopped an inch from mine, hung there a second too long. Then he pulled the hand back and stepped sideways instead of forward, so he was at my shoulder instead of in front of it.
“Talk to me,” he said. “Give me the rundown.”
“Main floor’s straight through that door. Stairs up are past it, second corridor on the right.” I kept moving, and he kept pace beside me.
A man came out of a side room with a rifle half-raised and Antonio put two rounds in his chest almost before I registered the guy. Another appeared at the far end of the hall and Antonio fired again. The man folded against the wall and slid down it, leaving a dark smear behind him.