Frozen Desires (Asylums for Magical Threats 2)

She rubbed her face in an effort to wake up and erase the last vestiges of panic from her dream. Millie didn’t remember going to sleep, and with a quick glance around the room, she acknowledged that she was some place unknown. After years of working private security, waking up in strange places—while not exactly common—wasn’t too much of a surprise. If she could just calm the pounding in her head, she could start figuring out what she needed to do next.

Her symptoms of headache, slight nausea, and dehydration all pointed to a hangover. But she was one of those unfortunate people who remembered everything when she was drunk, and right now, she had no bloody idea how she’d got here, meaning the only explanation for her current state was that she’d been drugged.

Drugged. The word triggered a memory, and the face of Kiarra Melini’s brother danced in front of her eyes, showing him right before he’d emptied the syringe of rowanberry juice into her arm.

Despite incredible odds, the man had told her the truth and hadn’t killed her with an overdose after all. She wondered where Kiarra’s posh younger brother had learned that little trick.

Millie rubbed her face again, and tried to clear her mind. She’d worry about the play of events later, after she’d escaped and found a way to contact her brother Jaxton and let him know that she was okay. She only hoped that he hadn’t do

ne something daft, like storm into an AMT compound and demand answers. From what she’d seen, Kiarra Melini might’ve been able to drill some sense into Jaxton’s thick head and stop him.

Unsure of how much time she had remaining until someone came to check on her, Millie lowered her hands from her face and looked around the unfamiliar room that smelled faintly of dust and brine. There was a bed, a small table, and a chair. The wall was bare except for a square window no more than a foot across, covered by a dark blue curtain.

Gritting her teeth against the pain in her head, she threw the blankets off and walked to the window. Just in case there was a guard posted outside, she moved the curtain just a fraction to peek out.

To her right, there were jagged mountains in the distance, framed by a bright blue sky, but as she looked up, she saw that her room was only a few feet from a rock face that went up past her line of sight. To the left, she spotted low-lying vegetation and a few scattered trees. Everything on the ground was a bright shade of green.

She let go of the curtain and plopped back down onto the bed. Through the process of elimination, Millie knew she was no longer in Scotland, or anywhere in the UK for that matter—the mountains and vegetation were all wrong. The shape of the mountains, the vegetation, the faint smell of the sea, and the coolness in the air despite it being summer meant she was probably somewhere in Scandinavia, either near the coast or on a small island.

But how? The last thing she remembered was being interrogated and strapped to a table. She raised a hand to her face, but the tenderness and swelling from her earlier beating was nearly gone, which meant she’d been unconscious for at least a few days.

Remembering Mr. Fist-Bastard, her first interrogator, brought back other memories, specifically of Kiarra’s nameless brother.

He was the one who’d drugged her with diluted rowanberry juice, or so he’d claimed. He’d tried to tell her via small bits of masking tape on the syringe to pretend the stuff was real since the amount, in full strength, would’ve caused an overdose and her death. His words had hinted at her freedom, but while she was no longer in the research facility, this was not quite her idea of freedom.

She’d broken out of impossible situations before, and she could do it again. All she needed to do was find out who or what was guarding her, before formulating the next steps in her plan—namely finding a weapon and some money. A fake or stolen EU driver’s license would also make crossing the UK border easier.

Looking down at her clothes, she added less conspicuous clothing to her list of items to find. The sweatpants and oversized thermal shirt she wore were more suited to a Sunday staying in than to a woman rambling the countryside. The rambler cover story would allow her to dress practically and be able to hide weapons in the various pockets of her trousers, or under a loose top.

She heard a door open somewhere not far from her room, and Millie searched for something to use as a weapon, but nothing was handy. If she smashed the chair, she could use a chair leg to knock someone unconscious, but the noise would give her away.

Besides, she didn’t know how many people were on the other side of her door. Instead, she lay back on the bed. She’d show that she was awake, but would play up her grogginess and hopefully make her guard underestimate her strength.

Steps sounded against a hardwood floor, but stopped right before someone unlocked her door. Snuggling deeper into the blankets, Millie tried her best to look helpless because if this didn’t work, she could be in serious trouble. Kiarra’s brother may have gotten her out of the research facility only to put her into the hands of another interrogator. The bollocks of it all was that she simply didn’t know, and she hated not having enough information. Hopefully, she’d rectify that soon enough.

The door opened and a tall man with dark red hair and a two-day old beard came into the room. She couldn’t see any weapons, but she saw the muscles in his arms and legs as he moved and knew that he might not need any.

He stopped about a foot from her bed, never taking his pale blue-eyed gaze from hers. Millie said nothing as a truly sick person wouldn’t be all that chatty, and waited. When the man did speak, it was with Scandinavian-accented English. “You’re awake. Good, that means I can feed you.” He pointed behind him, toward the door. “There’s a shower across the hall. Use it if you like, while I get you something to eat. Do you think you can do that?”

She resisted a frown. This man was playing the role of nursemaid, not that of a guard. Whatever the reason for it, a shower couldn’t hurt. “Yes.”

The red-haired man nodded and walked away, but he stopped at the door and said, “Oh, and if you try to escape, be aware that I shoot to kill.” He disappeared down the hall, leaving the door open behind him.

Well, hell, that made things interesting.

Keeping up her ruse of being an invalid, she sat up slowly before trudging across the hall to the shower. After locking the bathroom door and making sure there wasn’t any surveillance equipment in the room, she shucked her clothes, turned on the shower, and stepped under the hot spray of water.

Millie closed her eyes, the warmth helping to clear the cotton from her mind, and she tried to think of how she could escape. It was unlikely that the red-haired man was working alone. She needed to find out how many accomplices he had guarding the perimeter, as well as their watch patterns, so she could look for weaknesses and pounce on them later.

After her shower, she would focus on taking better inventory of her nursemaid. Small things, like if he was right or left-handed, could be useful.

But most of all, she wanted to find out why she was here and if Kiarra’s brother had anything to do with it.

Cam kept her head angled so the stupid floppy hat she was wearing shielded her face from view while allowing her to keep an eye on her surroundings. The tour group she’d joined had been traipsing around Chichen Itza for the last hour, but they were finally approaching the section of the Mayan ruins she wanted to see—the observatory.

The observatory building sat atop a high but not quite square stone platform with another large rectangular stone platform underneath it. Stairs led up the two stone platforms to the tiered wedding cake-shaped structure that looked like someone had cut diagonally across the top layers with a jagged knife and taken away the left half. Inside the building there was supposed to be a spiral staircase that had given the observatory its name in Spanish of El Caracol, The Snail.

The collection of sprawling Mayan ruins—known collectively as Chichen Itza—was a UNESCO World Heritage Site and impressive in its own right. But Cam wasn’t here for sightseeing.