Click, click, click—
The Command was pulling the trigger over and over again, the loose folds and sleeves of the robe swinging out as from under the hood, rasping breath beat like a drum.
Jack just stared upward, unblinking, unflinching . . . unbowed, though he was flat on his back and incapable of moving. Surely he was bleeding out and that explained why his immobile body felt nothing of all his wounds and he was unaware of his suffocation.
“I hate you,” the Command growled. “I fucking hate you.”
The Command reached up and ripped the hood off.
Red hair tumbled loose, hanging into his face, into his eyes, the female’s calculating features and flashing, aggressive stare the source of his suffering these many years.
He hated when she took the hood off. It was easier for him to think of her as sexless as long as it stayed on. But now, seeing that hair, seeing that face, he was reminded that she was the opposite sex, and that she demanded to mate with him whenever she fucking wanted.
He hated that she would be the last thing he saw. But reveled in what would happen as soon as she realized that she had broken her toy, and it was never to be functional again.
“I want to kill you,” the Command bit out, long fangs flashing.
And that was when Jack realized . . . for all the bullets that had been discharged, she had not hit him. She’d shot around him, into the floor.
There was no scent of his blood in the air.
Meanwhile, the Command continued to breathe heavily—until she seemed to calm herself. Straightening, she looked at the gun in her hands, and then those eyes returned to his own, suspicion narrowing them.
“Where did you get this?” The Command put the weapon in his face, so close that every breath he took was full of gunpowder residue. “Where did you fucking get this?”
He couldn’t have answered even if he’d wanted to. Which he did not. He enjoyed her loss of control and what it did to her. He wanted her to suffer. After all these years, he wanted her to have a taste of what he had endured.
No control. At another’s mercy.
“You’re going to answer me,” she spat.
Then she put her hood back into place and whistled through the mesh. When the guards opened the door, she pointed to the bed.
“Chain him up.”
Nyx closed her eyes against the Fade’s blinding light, and prepared herself for some kind of physical reaction to being on the Other Side. She also got ready for the appearance of the door, for the decision to open it or not—
What the hell was that rumbling? That vibration?
There was a grunt, and she felt her body get yanked to the side—just as the harsh glare of the Fade’s painful illumination flared and was abruptly extinguished, a tremendous wind blowing across her face and irritating the raw wound on her head. Confused and in pain, she forced her eyes open—which was weird because she’d thought they were already open.
And then things got even more confusing.
Because she was kind of thinking . . . that she was suddenly in a tunnel. As in a road tunnel, one where vehicles came and went. And there was a truck going by her. A semitrailer truck that was the color of the gray and black walls of the cave.
Shit, she must be losing her mind. Where had the paved roadway come from? And as for the truck idea, one of them certainly seemed to be plowing past her, like she was on the side of a city street and the thing was delivering a pallet-load of something to somebody’s business on a rush job.
Red brake lights flared now, reflecting off the slick walls of the cave, and there was a screeching of tires in her ears and the sharp burn of rubber in her nose. Then the back of the truck fishtailed, the rear going cockeyed to the tunnel and swinging toward her in slow motion.
Adrenaline coursed through her body. If she didn’t move, she was going to be crushed—
A force from up above shoved her down and forward as the bed came at her, and as she fell into a crouch and twisted, she realized she was under the back of the truck, in between the front wheels and the rear ones, right in the middle. Doing that math, Nyx let herself go down flat on the asphalt and covered her head, rolling in the direction the vehicle’s momentum was taking all that weight so she wasn’t mowed over by those back wheels.
The halt took a hundred thousand yards and twelve years, and she scrambled to keep up to avoid being roadkill, boots digging in, limbs flailing, body flipping around beneath the truck’s tunnel-long bed as the brakes continued to squeal and the stench of rubber got thicker, and she knew that if she hadn’t seen the Fade before, she was going to now—