Deadly Sting

17

Owen followed me out of the vault. I stopped in the exterior chamber long enough to do a quick pat-down of the three dead giants. Key cards, a couple of metal batons, pepper spray, walkie-talkies. Same old, same old. Owen picked up two of the men’s guns, while I handed him all the extra ammo I found stuffed in their pockets. He reloaded both weapons before tucking one against the small of his back and keeping the other one in his hand at the ready. He nodded at me, and together we crept up to the exterior door and peeked outside.

I didn’t see anyone in the hallway, but I heard something just as worrisome—the steady thud-thud-thud of footsteps, growing louder and louder as they pounded in this direction.

“Let’s go,” I whispered. “They’re headed this way.”

Owen nodded again and followed me into the hallway. I headed right, away from the sound of the footsteps, and we ran in that direction. What followed was a desperate series of zigzags as we tried to avoid the giants. Clementine’s men were everywhere we turned, walkie-talkies screeching as they yelled instructions at each other and searched for whoever or whatever had caused the explosion. Three times we started down a hallway only to pull up short and backtrack when we caught a glimpse of a couple of giants lurking at the far end, guns up and ready to fire at the slightest movement. Oh, yes. Everyone knew that I was here now.

There was no way we could break through the perimeter they’d set up without making a whole lot of noise and bringing them all down on top of us, so Owen and I ended up crouching behind a doorway in a room down the hall from the vault entrance. It was far too close to the vault and the main force of giants in the rotunda for my liking, but all the other exits from this part of the museum had been cut off. We’d just have to hunker down and see what happened.

We didn’t have long to wait. We’d just slid into the shadows when Clementine ran down the hallway, with Opal and Dixon following her. The three giants rushed through the open door that led into the vault area.

“Dammit!” Clementine’s scream erupted out of the chamber a minute later.

I grinned. Such a satisfying sound. Always nice when you could make your enemies bellow with anger. Across from me, Owen gave me a sly wink.

A moment later, Clementine stormed out of the vault entrance and back into the hallway. Opal and Dixon followed her, although the two younger giants were careful to keep out of arm’s reach of her. A good idea, on their part.

Clementine raised her walkie-talkie to her lips. “Somebody go out front and see if the cops are here. Right now.”

“It’s not the cops,” one giant answered her a few seconds later. “I’m out by the moving trucks, and there’s no one here. No police cars, no cops, nobody. All of the art is still inside the truck, and it doesn’t look like anything’s been stolen. Er . . . re-stolen.”

“Roger that. Stand by for further instructions.” Clementine clicked off her walkie-talkie and stuck it back onto her belt.

She paced back and forth for a few seconds before whirling around and facing Opal and Dixon again. Her features, which I’d thought so attractive before, were twisted and mottled with purple rage. Lips flat, nostrils flared, eyes narrowed to slits.

Opal and Dixon glanced at each other and took another step back. Dixon swallowed, and Opal wiped a bit of nervous sweat off her forehead.

“How the hell could this happen?” Clementine finally barked at them.

“Now, Mama, just calm down,” Opal said, holding her hands palms up in a placating gesture. “I’m sure we’ll get this all figured out. Whoever set off that bomb couldn’t have gotten far. It’s not the cops, so that’s a good thing. We’ll take care of whoever it is.”

Clementine cocked her head to one side, and she advanced on Opal, who immediately sucked in a breath and plastered herself against the wall. Dixon scooted out of the way. Opal glanced at her cousin for help, but he smirked at her. Opal sighed and turned her head back in her mama’s direction.

Clementine coldly eyed her daughter. After a moment, she drew back her fist. Opal shuddered, waiting for the blow—but it never came.

Instead, Clementine slammed her hand into the wall beside Opal’s head. The sharp, stinging crack reverberated down the hallway, seeming almost as loud as the bomb blast. But the giant didn’t stop with just one punch. Again and again, Clementine rammed her fist into the marble inches away from her daughter’s head. Opal stood there and watched her. Mouth open, nostrils flared, eyes wide. Her expression a far more terrified version of her mother’s murderous one.

Finally, Clementine stopped her assault on the wall and glared at her daughter once more.

“I don’t care about the damn bomb,” Clementine said, every word as sharp and clipped as the punches she’d just plowed into the wall. “What I do care about is the fact that someone used it to lure us away from Grayson and the vault. Something that is your fault, my darling girl, since you assured me that everyone was corralled inside the rotunda.”

“Yeah, Opal.” Dixon sneered, sidling up to Clementine’s side. “That was your job. Looks like you’re the screw-up tonight. How does it feel, cuz?”

Clementine immediately turned on her nephew, grabbed him by the throat, and lifted him off the ground. She slammed him back into the wall and kept him there.

I eyed Dixon’s feet, which were dangling six inches above the floor. Dixon was no lightweight, but Clementine was holding him up with one hand like he didn’t weigh any more than a wet kitten. My gaze flicked to the basketball-size dent she’d punched into the marble wall. Impressive, indeed.

“And you, you little weasel,” Clementine growled. “You can’t do anything without half-assing it or fucking it up completely. Where do you think our surprise guest got the bomb from? My guess is the bridge or one of the moving trucks. Which means that whoever it is has probably been following you around for who knows how long, watching you check the charges with your phone, and you were too stupid to even notice.”

Dixon’s mouth opened and closed, and opened and closed again, but the only sound that came out was a faint, pitiful squeak, the kind a rabbit might make before a wolf snapped its jaws around the rabbit’s throat. Clementine shook him once, then dropped her hand and stepped back. Dixon landed in a heap on the floor, a perfect red handprint ringing his throat like a rash.

“We’ll fix it, Mama,” Opal said, her voice a little higher and more desperate than before. “We’ll find whoever’s responsible for this and make them pay.”

“You’d better hope so,” Clementine growled. “You’d both damn well better hope so.”

Opal vigorously nodded, trembling as badly as a bobblehead doll someone had set to bouncing.

More footsteps sounded, saving Opal and Dixon from any more of Clementine’s wrath—at least for the moment. The giant smoothed out her features and turned to face the two men who were running down the hallway toward her.

“Anything?” she asked when they finally stopped in front of her.

They both shook their heads. Like Opal and Dixon, the giants took obvious care to stay out of reach of her long arms. Smart move, given the murderous rage that still glinted in her hazel eyes.

Clementine raised her walkie-talkie to her lips. “All teams, report in.”

“Team one, here.”

“Team two, here.”

And on and on it went, with the giants reporting back to Clementine—all except the ones I’d killed.

When Clementine realized that she couldn’t raise her people in the security center or the two who’d been down by the bridge, she let out another loud curse. She lowered her walkie-talkie and stabbed her finger at the men standing in front of her.

“You two, come with me,” she growled before glaring at Opal and Dixon. “You two, stay here and start organizing a search. I want to know who was in the vault, how many of them there are, everything they took, and where they and Grayson are now. So move! Now!”

Opal and Dixon scurried back into the vault area to do her bidding. Clementine marched off down the hallway with the other two giants, heading away from Owen and me. I waited until I was sure she wasn’t coming back, then looked at Owen.

“Come on,” I whispered. “Let’s get while the getting’s good.”

The giants had started their search from the vault and the rotunda, spreading out toward the exits. They didn’t bother checking behind them, so Owen and I were able to trail along in their wake, weapons in hand, eyes open in case any of them doubled back on their search pattern.

“We need to get outside,” I told Owen. “Bria and Xavier should be here soon. Jo-Jo too. She can heal Phillip after we take out the guards in the rotunda.”

“If he’s even still alive,” Owen said, his forehead creasing with worry.

I shrugged. Another twenty minutes had passed since I’d first gone into the vault after Owen, but there was nothing I could do about the time that just kept tick-tick-ticking away. First, I had to get Owen to safety. Then I’d worry about rescuing Phillip and the others.

Finn would realize that I was planning something, though. Knowing that I was still alive, he would have figured that I was up to my usual tricks as soon as I set off that bomb. He’d help Eva, Roslyn, and Phillip until we could free them. Finn might be selfish, flighty, and infuriating and have an inflated sense of his own self-worth, but if there was one thing I could always count on, it was for him to be there when the chips were down—and they were certainly down tonight.

Finally, a pair of guards we’d been following reached a set of exit doors and checked them to make sure they were locked. Owen and I slipped into one of the rooms that branched off from the hallway and looked out the doorway at the giants, keeping an eye on them.

“West exit secure,” one of the guards said into his radio. “We haven’t seen anyone. Haven’t found any more bombs either.”

After a moment, Clementine’s voice crackled back. “Well, retrace your steps and keep searching. They have to be in the museum somewhere. Go back through and look again. Check every room—I want them found. Now. Got it?”

“Understood,” the giant said, and clipped the device back onto his belt. He jerked his head at the other man. “Come on. You heard her. She wants us to keep searching.”

Damn and double damn. I’d hoped that Clementine would order the giants to start sweeping the grounds. That way, Owen and I would have been able to follow them outside, kill them, and slip into the gardens before anyone was the wiser. Instead, the two men turned and headed back in our direction, which meant there was nowhere for us to go.

“Gin?” Owen whispered, raising his gun. “What do you want to do?”

We couldn’t backtrack deeper into the museum without risking running into more giants, and I didn’t want to try to take out the two men in front of us—not now, when they were on high alert, guns drawn and ready to shoot at the first hint of trouble. Oh, we could kill the giants, but I doubted we could do it quickly or quietly enough to make it outside before the others heard the commotion and came running. If Clementine and her men surrounded us, we were done—simple as that.

My eyes flicked around the room we were in. The lights were turned down in here, casting everything in soft shadows. The giants hadn’t looted this area yet, so paintings still covered the walls, and several statues squatted out in the middle of the open floor. But none of them was big enough for us to hide behind, not even for the few seconds it would take to spring a surprise attack. I’d thought we might have to stand our ground by the doorway and risk going at the giants head-on after all, when I spotted a larger statue in the very back of the room.

“Over there.” I grabbed Owen’s arm and tugged him in that direction.

The statue was a life-size scene, some twenty feet wide, and featured a boy in a thatched hat and overalls sitting down and holding a pole as though he were fishing in the pond of white rock in front of him. Next to him, a girl wearing a gingham dress sat on a rope swing, her feet pulled back and her bare toes digging into the ground as if she were about to launch herself up into the air. A maple tree arched over the two of them, its branches stretching up and down, almost like it was reaching out to hug the boy and the girl, before the limbs ran together and formed the back of the piece. Well, it definitely wasn’t abstract art; Bria would approve.

I sprinted to the right. The statue was set flush with the wall, so we couldn’t hide behind it. I’d just turned back to Owen to tell him to get ready to fight after all, when I noticed a shadow on the statue that looked a little deeper and darker than the others. I stepped up onto the carved stone and peered around the girl on her swing. Sure enough, there was a slight gap between the tree trunk and the rock wall that formed the back of the statue. Not exactly the best or most creative hiding place, but it would have to do.

“Up here!” I hissed at Owen. “Hurry!”

He climbed up onto the statue, and we managed to squeeze in behind the tree. The space was small, barely big enough for one person, much less the two of us wedged in behind it. Owen had his back to the tree, while mine was pressed against the rock wall. I wasn’t completely hidden by the trunk like Owen was, and I just had to hope the giants wouldn’t notice half of my head, arm, and shoulder sticking out from behind the tree.

I shifted, trying to squirm even farther into the shadows, but the rocks snagged on my dress, and I couldn’t move without ripping the garment down the back and making even more noise.

“Here,” Owen whispered. “Let me.”

He drew me away from the rock wall and into his arms, then shifted to his left, dragging me behind the tree and sculpting his body to mine so we could better blend into the shadows together. My concern about the giants spotting us quickly melted away as I realized just what an intimate position Owen and I were in.

Our bodies pressed together, chests to hips to thighs, and all the hard and soft spots in between. His arms around me, my leg between both of his, our faces level, given the bit of rock I had climbed up on. Our breaths mixed and mingled in a hot rush of air, our lips a heartbreaking inch apart. His eyes stayed steady on mine, and we stood there in the darkness, staring at each other. Heat flashed and shimmered in Owen’s violet gaze, the same heat that was scorching through my veins. His scent washed over me, that rich, metallic aroma, and I breathed in, drawing it deep into my lungs.

Whatever our problems were, the attraction was still there, and he seemed to feel it just as much as I did. It gave me hope that we could work through the rest of our problems—if we managed to live through the next three minutes.

Owen had a gun in his hand, and I had a bloody knife in mine, but we moved even closer together in the darkness, careful with our respective weapons. Owen’s lips brushed my cheek before sliding into my hair. I pressed my cheek against his, then slowly turned my head, burying my face in his neck—

Something clicked, and light flooded the room, shattering the moment.

“Come on,” one of the giants said. “Let’s sweep this area and go on to the next room.”

They didn’t say anything else, and for several long seconds, the only sounds were Owen’s raspy breath in my ear and the staccato slap of the giants’ shoes on the floor. The steady tap-tap-taps echoed all around the room, so I couldn’t tell where the giants were. By the door, in the middle of the room, in front of the statue, guns up and ready to plug us full of bullets.

Tap-tap-tap.

Tap-tap-tap.

Tap-tap-tap.

Owen’s muscles clenched, and his body swelled with tension with every passing second. I slowly, carefully, quietly raised my hand to his and squeezed his fingers. Owen exhaled, and I felt some of the worry leave him.

“Come on,” one of the giants finally said. “They’re not in here. Let’s go.”

More tap-tap-taps sounded. Ten seconds later, the footsteps faded away, and the room was quiet once more.

Owen and I stayed where we were. Bodies flush, lips close together, eyes locked on each other.

I would have liked nothing more than to have stayed with Owen in the shadows, but after thirty more seconds had passed and I was reasonably sure the giants weren’t coming back, I made myself step out of his arms and slide away from him.

Because this wasn’t the time for such things. What was important right now was making sure that we lived to have a later—and so did our friends.

“Come on,” I whispered. “We should be able to make it outside now.”

Owen nodded.

I let myself remember the heat of his body against mine for a moment longer before I turned, hopped off the statue, and headed for the door.

I’d just started to peer out the opening when one of the giants stepped back into the room.