Part 2 (2/2)

”I think you probably know that already. And if I don't call this in and tell him the job has been done, he's only going to send someone else after you.”

I could see I'd gotten her thinking by the way her gaze slipped away from mine. But she stormed up to me, and before I could tell what was happening, she'd grabbed my useless arm and dragged it together with the other, then wrapped my wrists in thick black duct tape.

”At least it goes with my outfit,” I quipped.

”Shut up,” she snapped back, and slapped a piece of the tape across my mouth.

She moved to my feet. I considered lifting my uninjured leg and attempting to kick her hard enough in the head to knock her unconscious, but she still held the gun, albeit not as firmly as before, wedged under her arm as she worked the tape, pulling a length of it free long enough to wrap around my legs. I clenched my teeth against the pain every time she moved me, agony shooting down both my leg and arm. I'd meant what I'd said to her about bleeding out, but she didn't seem to care too much about that at the moment. I couldn't say I blamed her.

With me secure, she went to a door in the wall-the cellar, I guessed.

She opened it and reached in to flick on the light. This was where I was going to end up. I took some solace in the fact she'd bound my arms and legs. It meant she didn't intend to kill me right away, so this bought me some time.

I wasn't a ma.s.sive guy, but I had fifty pounds on her, easily. But she grabbed hold of my feet and put her back into it, dragging me toward the open doorway. A set of wooden steps leading downward lay beyond. She'd never be able to carry me down there.

Turned out, she didn't plan to. When she'd hauled me through the doorway and to the top of the stairs, she used her foot and gave me a good shove.

I teetered, my whole body tensed for impact, though that was probably the worst thing I could do. I remembered reading about small children who survived big falls simply because they were so floppy, and so, despite the blinding pain caused by the knife wounds, I forced my body to go loose.

The young woman reached out with her foot and gave me one final shove.

I moved in a roll, my wrists and ankles taped together. I smacked the back of my head and then the front, hit my cut thigh and then my arm. Everything hurt, so I couldn't distinguish one injury from the other. I flipped over and over, thump, thump, thump, down each step.

Finally, I came to a rest at the bottom. I was lucky I hadn't broken my neck. f.u.c.k, this girl might just be crazier than I was.

Then I became aware of movement behind me. I didn't have time to process what had happened before something heavy but soft thudded down the stairs after me. The thing landed on top of me, a weighted ma.s.s pressing down. Then a second thing followed, also landing on top of me. The weight was so great, it threatened to crush the air from my lungs. Only my hands trapped beneath me allowed any breathing s.p.a.ce between myself and the floor.

She'd thrown the bodies of the two men down on top of me, so I now lay beneath the two hit men I had killed.

A trickle of unease spread through me.

Just what had I gotten myself into?

Chapter Seven.

V.

”Vee?”

My sister's voice came from behind her bedroom door, nerves causing it to quiver. The sound of me lugging the men's bodies and throwing them into the cellar must have woken her.

I paused, looking down into the cellar at the bundle of bodies at the bottom of the stairs, and then reached in and flicked off the light, plunging the one who was still alive into darkness. He wouldn't be going anywhere with his feet and hands bound, and the weight of two dead men on top of him. I'd shoved my new cache of guns onto one of the shelves in the nook beside the cellar door, and I hoped she wouldn't see them there. It was too late to hide them somewhere else now.

”It's okay, Nickie. Everything is fine,” I called back.

She'd grown up in the same household I had, and knew when something was going on that you shouldn't open the door to. Things were different here, but her seventeen years of training hadn't changed overnight, and so she remained hidden in her room.

Softly, I shut the cellar door, and then walked down the hallway toward her bedroom.

”Do we need to call the Marshals?” she called out.

I approached her door and knocked gently. I pushed it open and found her standing in the middle of the room, looking young and afraid, pulling down the oversized t-s.h.i.+rt she wore with one hand to cover her thighs.

”It's nothing. It's been taken care of.”

”Vee, please tell me.”

The att.i.tude she'd given me only a few hours ago had vanished, and my heart softened at the sight of her. I didn't like that. I couldn't afford to go soft, not now, not any time. I could keep myself alive, but it was her I worried about.

I didn't want her to end up like me.

”Seriously, Nickie, I've taken care of it. You can go back to bed.”

Her gaze drifted down and alighted on my clothes and hands. Her eyes widened. ”Where did the blood come from?”

I glanced down to see red streaked across the front of my tank top and on my fingers. In the dim light, with only moonlight coming through the windows, the amount of blood didn't look as bad as it was. I quickly wiped my hands off on the seat of my shorts.

”A bird got into the house,” I said. ”It was disoriented and flew into a window and broke its neck. I cleaned up the mess, but it was pretty gruesome. You wouldn't want to see it.”

Her nose wrinkled. ”A bird? In the middle of the night?”

I shrugged. ”Like I said, it was disoriented.”

”It must have been a big f.u.c.king bird.”

”It was a ma.s.sive crow. Just go back to bed. You've got school in a couple of hours.”

She didn't believe me about the crow, but she also knew not to ask too many questions. All too often, she didn't like the answer. With a sigh, she turned away from me and got back into bed, but remained sitting up, the bedcovers pulled up over her knees.

I backed out of the room and gently shut the door, but remained standing there, listening to see if she'd get back out of bed.

I figured I'd better do something about the hole in the window beside the back door before she did. If I put a plant pot up against it, she wouldn't notice, but then I remembered that greenery and I didn't exactly get along, and plant pots weren't something I had many of. I knew she wouldn't go down into the cellar. She hated the place-said it reminded her of too many horror movies. I couldn't say I blamed her. It certainly looked like a scene out of a horror movie now that it was full of dead bodies-and one not so dead body.

I needed her to go back to sleep so I could go down into the cellar and uncover the guy I still had alive. As much as I'd be happy if he was dead, I needed him to answer some questions, and I didn't think he'd be too good at doing so if he suffocated under the weight of the other two men.

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