The Taken

Chapter Twenty-Six

How long had it been since she had been taken?

Kit turned her head from side to side, like that might help her see. Only hours. Not days. Not yet. But it was full dark now. She couldn’t see the sky, not inside what sounded like an empty warehouse, or from behind the folds of the sleek, thick blindfold, but she could sense the night lying atop the city like an opaque veil. Yet unlike her midnight drives along Vegas’s bowl-like rim, there was nothing comforting in this darkness. This was both an abyss and a dead end. It felt as if she didn’t get out of here soon, she’d be trapped in blackness forever.

Be positive, she told herself, lifting her chin and swallowing hard. It helped that they hadn’t hurt her. After she’d stopped shaking, after she’d muted the panic that threatened to crawl up her belly and through her throat in an inhuman scream, she’d heard Schmidt tell his partner that there wasn’t to be one mark on her. So maybe Chambers just wanted to scare her out of pursuing this story. To force her to back way off, and warn her of what would happen if she didn’t.

Yet when they were left alone, Schmidt’s anonymous partner had run rough hands along her limbs, too intimate and too long, claiming with a smile in his voice that he was just making sure she was in good health. She knew then that this was the same man who’d accompanied Schmidt to her home and attacked her the first time, and she shivered with the memory, though she knew that it could have been worse.

It might be worse yet.

As if she’d voiced these worries aloud, the door to her prison opened, and he was suddenly there. She knew his boot steps already, the same way a trapped mouse might know the slithering sound of a snake’s belly. She sensed his movement like she sensed the night. The man approached, footsteps deliberate and heavy, and stopped too close, his hot breath and cool attention squarely on her. Kit felt that, too. But if she could just get him talking, it might buy her time. And if there was a person alive that Kit couldn’t get to talk to her… well, she hadn’t met him yet.

However, just in case this one had more on his mind than talking… “I have to pee.”

“I don’t care.”

Despite the ice in his voice, Kit rose from the chair she’d been ordered to sit in and said, “Seriously, I really have to go. I don’t know how much longer I can hold it.”

“Fine.”

An immediate shove, like he’d been planning to do it anyway, and she crashed into a wall, hunching there until she was sure that was all he was going to do. Silence met her attempts to right herself and she fought the urge to scream. Instead, she patted at the wall, looking for a door, yet rammed into a table, and elicited a curse from behind.

“No bruises, you idiot.” Another shove and her blindfold was lifted. She blinked, though the light was dim, and peered up into a hard, stubbled, and familiar face. “Hitchens.”

No wonder she hadn’t been able to get the police to help. No wonder even Dennis had seemed deaf and mute to her pleas for prompt assistance and investigation. Was he in on it? Had he been party to Nic’s death? “Where’s Dennis?”

Hitchens laughed. “Dennis is too soft to be of any use to us.”

“But… he’s your partner,” she said feebly. She was having trouble ordering her thoughts amid all the latent panic and adrenaline and fear.

“Chambers is my partner,” Hitchens shot back with such vehemence she immediately knew he only wished it to be so. He also knew she knew it. His round jaw clenched. “I thought you had to piss.”

Swallowing hard, she looked around. A trailer, double-wide, uninspired. Typical. The bathroom was behind her. She’d run into a fold-out table.

“Oh, this is for you, too.” Hitchens pulled his other hand from behind his back and threw a wad of black material at her. Kit looked down at the strips of fabric in her hands, wondering what she was supposed to do with them. Wipe?

“Put that on when you’re done. Do it quickly and quietly or I’ll put it on you. And you won’t like that.”

Kit couldn’t help it. Her chin began to wobble.

“Don’t worry, I wouldn’t enjoy it. Your type isn’t even close to appealing to me.”

“My type?” she parroted.

“Yeah, you know…” The depths of his eyes lit, a bare bulb of meanness shining right through to spotlight her. Kit expected the vulgar and the familiar-sluts, whores, bitches-so Hitchens surprised her entirely when he said, “Weirdoes.”

Slumping, Kit looked down at the “clothing” in her hands. She didn’t have to think now because there was nothing to figure out. She knew exactly what was happening here, and could pretty well guess what would happen next. In case there was any doubt, Hitchens held out a pair of black stilettos, too. Taking them, Kit bit her lip. She’d always told herself, and believed, that knowing was key because knowledge could keep you safe from harm and all the things you didn’t know. Not the easy answer, like her dad had said, but the truth.

The truth was that she might not ever step foot outside of this trailer again.

Tears welling, she looked back at Hitchens. “You killed Paul, didn’t you?”

“He was an asshole.”

Her fingers tightened against the thin silk. “And Nicole?”

“Nah, that was my bowling night.” Tucking his hands into his jeans pockets, he rocked back on his heels, and smiled cruelly through his lie.

Slumping, Kit swayed. “That’s awful.”

“Only if it happens to you,” he replied coldly, because they both knew it would never happen to him. “Now shut up and take your piss. And make it fast, weirdo. You’re up next.”

Kit entered the small bathroom, dull glaze moving over the dingy linoleum and dirty sink. No lock on the door, of course. No other exit but the…

Window.

It was tiny, glazed, but also half-open. Problem was, Kit could practically hear Hitchens breathing on the door’s other side. She looked around, gaze dropping to the sink’s press-and-hold faucet. Then she looked at the cheap shoes in her hand.

Hell if these were going on her feet, she thought, and pressed the heel against the faucet, pushing down, and wedging the toe against the wall, forcing a steady stream. If she were quiet, this just might work.

She thanked God for the winter chill, which had forced her into cigarette pants instead of a pencil skirt. The argyle sweater would also keep her warm once outside, provided she could get out of the tiny, rusted window.

“Hurry up in there!” Hitchens yelled, as she climbed onto the toilet.

“My tummy hurts,” she said, raising her voice to hide the window’s squeak. She only got halfway. “And I’m being careful not to put a run in the hose.”

There. But only her arms and torso were through the window when Hitchens’s voice rang out again. “I didn’t give you any hose.”

Kit pushed, the sharp steel scraping her hips as the door rocketed open. She squealed, pushed harder, and was falling before she could right herself. Hitchens’s face appeared above her, brows drawn down hard over his eyes. “Fuck!” He disappeared.

Kit fought to sit up, and against the stabbing in her chest. No time to relearn to breathe, she thought, wobbling to her feet. There was barely even enough time to run.

Running had left Grif breathless, nerves had him shaky, and if he didn’t already know where the Marquis had stood, he’d have bypassed it altogether. It was enclosed by a temporary construction wall hemmed in by a chain-linked fence so that no one on the outside could see in.

Apparently, no one could get in, either.

“I told you to wait for me.” Courtney appeared so soundlessly he jumped.

“Which way?” Grif said, not sparing her a glance. He felt like a lion pacing a cage, caught on the outside of the long, linked fence.

Courtney pointed the opposite way. “You passed the entrance. It’s the section that’s boarded, with a rendering of the new casino. It swings open to allow passage from the side street.”

Of course. Chambers and his band of merry child-rapists wouldn’t want to attract the attention of some annoyingly curious tourist. Yet he was still unprepared for the sight of a fleet of mostly foreign luxury cars once he’d passed to the other side. It looked, he thought, like the parking garage at the Ritz.

“Wow,” muttered Courtney. “Vegas is filled with rich sickos.”

The world was filled with them, Grif thought, wishing Nicole Rockwell were here to document it with her camera. “They could drive away in Pintos and it’d still be sick.”

“Yeah, but this is just salt in the wound.”

It was. You had to be birthed with a sense of entitlement to think you could get away with this. How many of these men were considered upstanding? They paid their taxes, went to church, built their companies… and raped someone else’s child in their off-time. And they did get away with it. “Come on.”

“I can’t, Grif.” She pushed some of the hair from her face when he turned, and sighed. “You know I can’t.”

Grif swallowed against the lump that rose in his throat. “She’s in there, isn’t she?”

Her answer was silence, a returned blank stare, and he knew that Katherine Craig-the woman who grounded him and moved him and was more chatty and energetic and deliberately blissful than anyone he’d ever met-was already surrounded by death-telling plasma.

Ignoring Courtney’s heavy stare on his back, he broke into a jog. It wasn’t going to be Kit, he thought, slipping into the building’s shadows. Even if it had to be him.

From the outside, it looked as if jumbo construction trailers had been welded together to create a giant, enclosed octagon. It wasn’t something that would go unnoticed-why would someone create a makeshift space in what was already a makeshift space?-yet the construction crews were long gone, and the abandoned hotel project was as dark and forbidding as an underground cave.

And of course, there was nothing left of the Marquis, where Grif had died. He didn’t even try to picture the old resort. His was an old death, and had nothing to do with tonight. Besides, there was plasma purling in the sky, and the soft, effervescent waves were quickly narrowing into threads above the makeshift dwelling, and slowly sinking inside. He had to hurry.

Grif spotted, and ignored, the prominent and single steel door. No point in announcing his presence to the muscle undoubtedly stationed there. Toeing the shadows, Grif spotted windows on the conjoined trailers, all dark but for a small one that gaped wide. Too small and high for him, he thought, and looked instead for some sort of construction defect. A simple corner that hadn’t been sealed tight, or a place of escape that only someone like Chambers would know about. He’d already proven he had backup plans for his backup plans.

Yet the walls were welded tight, not even a proper peephole to establish the layout inside, so Grif turned his back to the clustered trailers, and spotted the crane. It loomed near the rusting scaffolding of the abandoned hotel, and he might have considered it neglected, too, were it not for the shiny black Mercedes parked, nose-out, right behind it.

“Damned foreign cars,” Grif muttered, but he was already connecting the dots-car to crane to ladder to trailers. Crouching low, he rushed the vehicle.

But there was no driver inside, only keys, which he naturally pocketed. At the very least, someone was going to have a hard time getting out of here tonight.

Leaving the car unlocked, Grif turned… and nearly threw a punch at the figure rushing him.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked, yanking her behind the giant crane.

Bridget Moore jerked away, and almost toppled backward. “You called me, remember? You wanted my help finding your girl.”

He’d left two messages on her voice mail before heading to the graveyard. “If you knew about this place, why didn’t you tell me before?”

“I didn’t know. I called… my mother.”

“Your long-estranged mother told you that Chambers was selling off Charlotte’s virginity tonight?” Grif didn’t believe it. Kit had claimed Mrs. Chambers was in such denial she was damn near comatose.

“No,” Bridget-not her mother’s daughter-shot back. “But she said this is where he comes for his boys’ night out. I’m the one who figured he was doing more than playing poker.”

Grif jerked his head. “Get out of here, Moore. This is no time for revenge fantasies. Kit is in there.”

Bridget grabbed his jacket as he tried to climb up into the crane, tugging him back down. “And so is a little girl who’s scared out of her mind. I was.”

“Don’t try it. I don’t trip over guilt.” He began climbing again.

“You can’t be two places at once,” she called out, her whisper hushed but harsh. Grif paused before he could stop himself. Bridget hurried on. “You save the girl, and you might lose Kit. Or vice versa. Bet you won’t be able to sidestep your guilt if one of them dies because of you.”

Jaw clenched against a curse, he dropped back down. “And what if something happens to you?”

Her hard expression unexpectedly softened, and for a moment the girl she used to be peered from beneath the tough facade. “That’s sweet, Shaw.” Her eyes glittered in the dark. “But nobody’s taking anything from me ever again.”

Which Grif would be doing if he tried to stop her. Sighing, he tilted his head up. The plasma was thickening, and now swirled like fetid clouds above the trailer. “Come on.”

Bridget followed close as they moved from machine to ladder, up and then over. Then they reversed, slipping down onto the trailer, and he was pleased when Bridget landed with no more sound than a cat burglar. She pointed to the entry hatch just in front of their toes.

Testing, Grif found it swung open silently, though he was still careful to lift it degree by degree. His power from Anne lingered, because even though no light filtered in or out, a steel catwalk popped below him like tiles in a Scrabble game. He entered, paused to be sure he hadn’t been seen, then helped Bridget inside, only taking a breath again when she’d closed the hatch behind her. Crouching and silent, they looked around.

There was only one other figure up on the catwalk, and he was hunched opposite them, turned away, thick cables crowding the space in between. Fiddling with equipment, and intermittently putting his hand to his ear, he was clearly engrossed in whatever was being said over a wireless headset.

“Cameraman.” Bridget pointed, and Grif saw she was right. The man had a shoulder cam, another propped on a tripod, while a third could be seen on the adjacent pathways. Yet it was the headset that bothered him most. One low word into that baby and everyone would know they were there.

Grif turned his attention to the room below, spotlit in pastel hues to appear oddly serene, like twilight emerging on a cool summer’s eve.

But this was no day at the beach. Dozens of men flared around the makeshift room in spokes and cushioned chairs, each with a side table holding refreshments and a simple electronic paddle. The floor was carpeted in black, the walls draped in white sheers.

But the room’s center was the real focal point. There, a platform stage sat draped in red silk, a four-poster bed centered atop, dripping with crystals and gold tassels. So there were lights, there were cameras… and there was the promise of action.

Plasma undulated over the sheer, silken walls.

“There he is.”

Following Bridget’s hard stare, Grif found Chambers at the back of the room. His chair was identical to the others, but he’d elevated himself, like he was a statue or god. His shirt appeared blindingly white in the pastel spotlights, though that was because everyone else was in black. It made him look like nothing could touch him, and that alone made Grif want to punch him square.

Chambers leaned back in the plush chair, a gleam sparking in a gaze worn by spoiled four-year-olds and homicidal killers alike. He lifted a microphone, and smiled. “Before we commence the final bidding, I’d like to take a moment to welcome our first-timers. That’s each of you seated in the front row. I think you’ll agree, it’s an exclusive club that you now find yourselves in, so don’t be surprised to find your social network outside of this room greatly expanded. We, men of taste, men of the same taste,” he clarified, “help each other. One final word of advice… make sure your electronic paddles are at the ready. Bidding tends to get… frenzied.”

He laughed, and Bridget growled beside Grif, but the sound was drowned out by a loud buzzing. The cameraman whirled in their direction and for a moment Grif thought they were spotted. Bridget did, too; her tense limbs began to shake, but Grif put a hand on her arm, and could tell the moment she saw it. The camera wasn’t pointed at them but between them, at a space in the rafters occupied only by a giant ventilation grille.

“Not a grille,” he whispered harshly, his mouth gone dry.

“A cage,” Bridget finished, and the cameraman punched a control panel at his side. Every gaze below lifted, fastening upon the black metal frame, though the interior was velvet-lined from top to bottom, its contents entirely obscured. It lowered slowly, no doubt to build anticipation, until it was suspended above the bed’s center, and hovered there like a question. The plasma began to crawl across the floor… though that’s not why Grif jumped. Something moved inside the cage. “Is that…?”

“A woman,” Bridget said tightly as the cameraman moved again, and the black velvet curtain fell away.

But Charlotte couldn’t truly be called a woman, Grif thought, swallowing hard. Not by a long shot. Just as what she wore certainly couldn’t be called clothing. But the silken restraints were meant to approximate both, snaking along her limbs to wrap up and around her torso, ending in a knot at her neck. One tiny nipple peeked from between the bindings, a pink petal flare against all the black and white, while one thigh lay exposed, revealing the full of her smooth bottom. Grif wanted desperately to take off his jacket and cover the child up.

But worse than the bindings, worse than the overt objectification, was the look in her eyes. As the cage slowly rotated, giving every man in the room a full and measured look, her stare was as blank as a doll’s… and, of course, that’s exactly what she was to them. A plaything to be toyed with, used, and discarded when they were done.

Charlotte’s non-gaze remained locked above the heads of the gathered men, her body motionless even as her cage rocked. Crossing his feet at the ankles, Chambers lifted the microphone again. “Let the bidding begin.”

Electronic paddles lit up all around the room.

“Jesus, Bridget…”

But she was gone. Grif had been so focused on Charlotte, he hadn’t seen Bridget closing in on the cameraman and the control panel at his side.

Grif spotted the clouds forming even before she lunged. With a maddened cry, she didn’t just bring the cage to a halt, she reversed its course. Jerking it back up and flashing a blade Grif didn’t even know she carried, she gutted the man who had lowered it.

A gust of air rushed Grif, and from the corner of his eye, he spotted wings in the rafters. “Shit.”

A Centurion. Glancing back at Chambers’s confounded face, hearing the disgruntled murmurs from the men as Charlotte’s cage continued to rise, he knew that more were coming.

Chambers was now yelling from behind his palm, causing the headset in the dead man’s ear to go crazy with commands. Get it fixed. Do it now. But the cameraman was prone and twitching, and Bridget had eased back into the shadows. Grif didn’t dare move, but pretty soon there’d be nowhere to hide.

Then Chambers surprised him. Instead of continuing to rant, he dropped from his small dais and crossed the expansive room until he was centered next to the bed. Though he cast a quick, irritated glance directly up, he replaced the frown with a wide smile, and leaned against one spearing bedpost. “We seem to be having slight technical difficulties, but at least your appetites are whetted. That’s good. I was going to save this next surprise for after the bidding, a little something to make this night extra-memorable, but I see no reason to wait now. We have a very… special show tonight.”

The microphone tilted in Chambers’s hand, like an old crooner entertaining a rapt, admiring audience. And those gathered were rapt. “Now, you’ll have to excuse our next prize for any unseemly behavior. She’s never been this route before, but I have full confidence that she’ll take to it quite easily.”

Grif found himself leaning over the rail without even knowing how he got there.

“You should brace yourself for some rough play. She will resist, and she will also be restrained, and hopefully she will cry out. Let me assure you that no matter what it looks like, she is a volunteer. She wants this. She needs it. And do you know why?”

Chambers ceased pacing, and scanned the faces there like they were gathered in a boardroom. “Because that, my brothers, is her raison d’être. Her role is to act as victim to your conqueror. She is like a lion in the Coliseum, and being put down is her purpose.”

Then he nodded to the corner where the white panels parted to reveal five men, shirtless and hooded, very much resembling the gladiators that Chambers had likened them to. Entering the room, they stood equidistance apart, hands folded in front of them.

“Each of you has been preselected for this sport. You’ve all shown yourselves as trustworthy in the past, so this is my gift to you. Feel free to jockey for position. A little friendly competition always puts grit in your blood, and grants you the respect of your brothers who’ve chosen to watch. Perform well for them, but remember, the five of you are ultimately a team.” He gestured again toward the door. “Now, shall we bring out the prize?”

And the door, Grif thought, was proof that more rooms lurked behind this one. Bridget was already working on freeing Charlotte, and she knew the way out. Meanwhile, the men below would be occupied while he searched for Kit. Yet the plasma plummeted to the floor as the door swung wide, and though he already had one hand on the rungs leading out, Grif had to glance down.

Schmidt. First seen by Grif on a gas station’s security monitor, last seen fleeing Tony’s, there was now a bandage on his face where Anne’s bullet had grazed his cheek.

Detective Hitchens entered next, and Grif huffed, surprised but not. He’d sensed darkness in the man at the stables, and would lay odds that he was the one who’d killed Paul.

Yet pulled along after them, wearing little more than mascara smeared beneath tear-filled eyes, was the woman that Grif had placed in danger again and again.

And now again.

Pow, Kit… right to the moon!

And she might as well have been on the moon. Another flurried rush of wings sounded in the rafters, and Grif knew Courtney was in. Sarge was right. No matter how hard Grif had tried, nothing had changed at all.

Grif’s heart took up an ear-splitting thump, and his insides grew icy, same as when he’d landed on the Surface. Where were the decent men on this godforsaken mudflat? Where were the police, the Guardians…

He looked back at Kit and cursed.

Where was God?