The Cardinal Bird - Book 1: Reverse Harem Series (The Cardinal Series) Page 24

  My body thrashed as well as it could with two healing bullet wounds—which meant I was just twitching and flopping around like a dead fish that got its tail stuck in a light socket. I tried to contract my muscles to lift my head out of the water, but I couldn't manage it. The oxygen was burning up all the quicker the more I struggled, so I slowed my movements until I eventually stopped.

  With a deafening whoosh and the return of the rest of my senses, I was raised back up, choking and spluttering as the water was expelled from my lungs. The smell of the dank, moldy basement flooded my burning nostrils. The blinding light from the sole window obscured my vision of the menacing figure as he crouched down in front of me.

  "I have places to be. Peter has places to be. If you continue to fight like this, I might do something I could regret."

  I kept coughing and shuddering, feeling frozen in the cool air without a shirt on and a head of soaking wet hair from the icy tap water. At least the water was fairly clean.

  Grinley ran a burning fingertip along my frigid cheek. I jerked away instinctively, sending my body swaying along the rope that was trussed up to the floor beam.

  "I just want to know your name."

  I coughed once more, trying to calm myself to slow my breathing. "M-m-m-my n-name?"

  "Yes," he promised, tugging on a lock of wet hair. "Just your name. It'll be easy. Then we can get on to the rest of the questions. The important questions."

  I took another deep breath. "M-my n--name will-ll b-be the l-last thing o-on y-your mind when Aleks and B-brock see w-what you've done to--"

  "Dunk her," Grinley said, standing up.

  I was plunged down again. My brown hair floated and fanned out around me in the cold water. Something, probably Grinley, hit the side of the iron sink making the noise reverberate through the water. It reminded me so much of the lid slamming down on the tank, that I actually managed to use my stomach muscles enough to lift myself out of the water. I didn't get to take a breath though because hands wrapped around my throat and forced me back under. The hands clenched around me tight, hairy forearms scratching at my chest.

  At some point, I wondered why I was struggling so hard. Sure, I was a survivor, but that didn't have to apply to Free-Callie if I didn't want it to. I was actually guilty of what Grinley thought I was. I had killed people. People had died because of me. That wasn't okay. Why did I have to keep going? CJ had the thumb drive and this Delta organization to back him up. Maybe they could take over the fight against Ivanov.

  When I opened my mouth to get it over with and breathe in the water, all that happened was that my mouth filled up. I couldn't actually get any of it into my lungs because Grinley’s fingers were wrapped so tightly around my throat.

  I stopped moving, my eyes opening up to the blurry colors of the iron sink until even that blacked out. Until I blacked out.

  Something pounded on my chest, and I woke up with a gasp. I was swinging from the hit, and it made me nauseous. My head was pounding from being upside down for so long. How long had we been down here? It felt like hours. Daylight through the window had slowly crawled through the room as the position of the sun changed, letting me know that at least a good chunk of time had passed.

  A bright light flashed across my face, but I was too disoriented to decipher what it was.

  "Welcome back to the living," Grinley said. "Ready to answer some questions."

  I was completely drained of energy after blacking out, unable to even shiver anymore, so my words came out with satisfying clarity. "It's sort of an oxymoron to strangle someone underwater. Takes away the threat of drowning." It probably looked funny, but I shrugged a shoulder to the best of my ability while hanging upside down with bound hands. "Seems like a bit of overkill to--"

  "Ack! You insolent--" Grinley took control of the rope and pulley from Peter, dropping me down so hard that my head bottomed out on the sink with the full brunt of my weight behind it. I was disoriented, trying to fight through the pain in my head.

  I shook, thankfully having the foresight enough to not try to breathe. My time in the tank had taught me at least one thing.

  My legs were tied still, but no longer taut on the beam. Theoretically, I would be able to get my legs under me and push myself out of the bath-sized sink. But I was too hurt, too tired, too weak to move. Too everything.

  I went to inhale water, but thick arms wrapped around me and pulled me up. Sound blasted me.

  "--you think you're doing? Leave her there. She's not giving us any information. She'll just die in a prison cell in Gitmo anyway! She's a cyber-terrorist, a mass-murderer!"

  "You do not know that," the voice rumbled beneath my wet back as the massive arms held me close to a warm chest. "Not for sure."

  "Yes," Grinley gesticulated wildly at me like I was a nuclear warhead about to go off. "She won't tell us her name. That is not something that an innocent person would do! Besides, you saw it yourself. She opened her mouth to swallow water. Twice. Normal, innocent people sing away; they don't just allow the torture to continue on or let themselves die. She's guilty as hell!"

  "Nyet, no. You do not decide on own. We take her to agency. Do this right. Maybe--if lucky--we won't get fired for this," Peter turned towards the stairs, carrying me bridal style now.

  "We can't get fired if there aren't any witnesses!!"

  Peter ignored him, walking out into the kitchen. "My name is Petya Sokolov. You can call me Peter." He adjusted me in his grip, setting me down on the island in the middle of the kitchen. He leaned down to eye level to look at something on my head. When he touched it, my nerves lit up in pain.

  I hissed in a breath.

  "Sorry?" he said with a shrug. "You have bump on your head. There is much blood. Normal for head injuries."

  I frowned and allowed his examination. "Petya is your name though?" I croaked, my hand going up to my throat in mild surprise. Grinley must have been squeezing harder than I thought.

  He nodded frowning down at my throat as well. "Da."

  "Then I will call you Petya," I said, forcing the words out, my voice wobbly and deep.

  He smiled at me, but then a shot rang out. Blood splattered all over my face. The smile faded from Petya's face.

  He started to fall forward and collapse to the ground like a sack of potatoes. Only pure instinct alone had me rolling backward over the counter and dodging what sounded like a second shot as it buried itself into the marble on the counter.

  I landed in an ungraceful heap on the floor only a fraction of a second before Petya's body thundered to the ground beside me. I thanked my instincts for having the foresight to roll back and not off to the side so that I wasn't trapped under the deadweight of Petya’s large body. Because that's all he was now. Deadweight. Much of his face was missing. I'd just been talking to him--a person with a soul and life, and now there was just a body.

  This up-close killing was so much different than being behind a computer screen. I could feel the signs of myself going into shock, and I didn't really do anything to stop it.

  Another shot rang out, zinging by my ear, and startling me enough to jump-start my senses.

  I scooted back against the island, hiding from doorway to the basement where Grinley must have stood to have taken the shot at his...what, friend, colleague, acquaintance? I just found out that he didn't even use the guy's given name. Petya wasn't any more difficult to say than Peter.

  I stared at a growing puddle of red that made its way towards me. I was trapped behind a small counter, barely three feet wide, hiding from a madman. It was a terrifyingly familiar situation, right down to the slightly cooled puddle of blood that had nearly reached me now.

  "Little girl, come on out. Let's have a chat. I promise I won't hurt you."

  Chapter 22

  Iwon't hurt you, little girl," Agent Grinley taunted. He was perverting the name that Aleks so fondly called me. And lying too, saying I wouldn’t get hurt.

  Right, because that second shot where I had been sitting was meant to make sure that, what, the almost point-blank headshot had indeed killed his fellow agent? Not.

  I wanted to curl up and cry in frustration at the unfairness of the whole thing. I had just survived one psychopath. How much bad luck did I have to fall right into the hands of another?

  I jerked my hand back when liquid brushed against it. I looked down. It was the puddle of blood. It had reached me. Petya's blood. It was soaking into me, but there was nowhere I could go to escape it. And I was complaining about my luck like I had a right to?

  There was a gas stove in front of me. Surely this far out of town, it had to run off of a propane tank, not a gas line. There could still be gas in there if it was a tank.

  The hairs on my arms stood up when I realized that Grinley hadn't made a sound in a while. I had no idea where he was. He could be standing right behind me, pointing the same gun at me that had so effortlessly killed Kaz--no, not Kaz. Petya.

  Focus.

  Petya would probably have had a gun on him as well. I glanced over at his body. I tried to ignore it but was helpless to it as my mind mentally calculated the differences between Kaz who had been shot from the front, leaving his face mostly intact. That was not the case with Petya. Exit wounds were much, much messier, and even avoiding looking at it directly didn't stop my mind from processing the ground meat that had once been a face.

  Petya's gun was out of the question. Only his upper back and above were visible and reaching for the holster at his waist would put me in the direct vision of Grinley if he was still lurking in the basement doorway.

  Stove it was then. I leaned forward as quickly as possible and turned the knob, smearing blood all over them from my slick grasp. Hopefully, this wasn't a myth that Ivanov's ring of personal assassins had made up. If it was a tall tale they’d shared with their co-workers, then maybe Grinley wouldn't know for sure either. Maybe I could negotiate with him.

  I glanced back over at Petya's body.

  Scratch that. There would be no negotiating with him. He wasn't exactly acting rationally.

  Why was he so quiet? Where was the monologuing? Was he still on the stairs? Was he right on the other side of the island? I had no way to know.

  As soon as I turned all the knobs, the pungent smell of gas hissed into the air, filling the room with propane and me with relief. I turned back around, soaking my knees in the puddle of blood. I tried to open the cabinets to the island, but my hands kept slipping off the wood, the handles long since gone. I went to wipe my hands on my shirt, remembered I didn't have one, thanked whoever might be listening that I still at least had the sports bra Bryce had given me, and wiped the blood off on my tights. The white fabric was quickly becoming soiled in red, a stark reminder of why I usually wore black.

  I was finally able to get the doors opened. I was tempted to just hide inside, but it would be a death sentence. I scoured the inside for a stainless-steel pot or any surface that I could use as a mirror to try to find out where Grinley was.

  But nothing.

  "What's that smell?" Agent Grinley asked. He was closer, but not by much.

  I continued staring at the pots and pans inside, trying to figure out how they could possibly hold up in a gunfight.

  "Is that gas?" he laughed coldly. "That's rich. I'll give you credit. You're resourceful." He sounded much more relaxed. Maybe he realized that I was desperate if I was relying on the stove to save me. "You'd need a lot more time to get the right air to gas ratio to make the room go boom. And what would you do then? You're still here. Or are you just that ready to die? Why are you so guilty? You really are that hacker then? Byte-Syzed?"

  Now that he finally was monologuing, I wished he would be quiet so I could focus. Instead, the steadily growing volume of his voice as he inched closer only served to make me more frantic.

  The smell of propane was thickly suffocating now.

  My eyes flew back to the stove.

  Maybe I didn't need a big boom. Maybe all I needed was a small fire to make my escape. The back door was just a leap and bound away, leading out to the forest. I would have a better chance out there. I might be able to disappear. In here, I was just a fish in a barrel.

  I looked back at the cabinet grabbing a cast-iron skillet.

  I hefted it a couple of times, testing its weight and then threw it as hard as I could around the side of the island. It clanged against the wall with a deafening sound. And then three very deadly things happened nearly simultaneously: I had jumped up and headed towards the back door, already studying and planning my route to the forest as I focused beyond the glass. Behind me, four shots rang out back to back, each one clanging with lethal precision as they hit their mark before the skillet had even finished falling to the floor. And then, cutting off Grinley's curse as he realized too late that he had fallen for a ploy, the spark from the gun ignited the gas.

  And, boy, was it an ignition. The world flashed a brilliant orange and red throughout the room faster than the human brain could process. A heatwave blasted with crushing pressure as all of the lingering gas caught fire in a blink of an explosion. I raised my arms and propelled forward through the glass door in an explosion of jagged glass.

  I fell to the floor in a heap landing on my side in the fetal position, praying that the worst of it was over. I couldn't hear anything past a high-pitched ringing in my ears, but I could feel it as molten-hot glass rained down on top of me. The pieces of window that had survived my burst through it the first time were knocked from their place by a smaller, secondary explosion.

  I just lay there, my ears on high alert--sound gradually returning as they stopped ringing. Instead, I could focus on listening for any sign of Grinley. Moving hurt and only managed to help the glass shards beneath me to dig in deeper, so I stopped. Laying still, my body didn't feel any pain, and that terrified me. Usually, the longer it took your body to process the injury, the worse it was.

  I heard movement from inside, too quiet to tell if it was Grinley or falling debris. I didn't want to wait to find out though. I got to my feet, stumbling through the minefield of dagger-like shards and clutching my arm to myself. It felt numb and tingly...unresponsive.

  Still, I staggered on. Running through my head was a mantra of just making it to the tree line, then I'd be safe.

  Just 50 more yards. Then I'd be safe.

  30 more yards. I'd be safe.

  I stumbled to my knees, tripping over nothing, but I pushed back up. I was a survivor. I was still a survivor. Free-Callie would make it.

  15 more yards.

  10 more yards.

  5...

  Behind me, Agent Grinley had obviously recovered because the tree exploded to my left at head-level in a burst of splinters, blasting me in the shoulder.

  I cried out, falling to the ground but got my feet just as quickly, not feeling the pain as much as I should’ve been able to.

  I crashed through the brush, dropping to the ground and trying to dodge the bullets peppering the vegetation above my head. Thankfully, I was out of sight, for now, but it wouldn't take much for him to spot me if he headed over.

  I had planned to take off into the trees, get far enough away, and then climb one. Wait him out. It was actually still my best plan which was sad because I was fairly certain that my shoulder had been dislocated when I landed on it earlier. Climbing a tree would be somewhat…uncomfortable.

  First, I had to make it deeper in the woods.

  Unless...

  I could backtrack around to his car. I shook my head. His keys might not be in it though, and that would be a big problem. He wouldn't be expecting the move, but there was still a good chance that I would be caught.