Page 40 of Wicked Things
Well, shit. This place is huge, and fifteen minutes isn’t a great deal of time. Definitely not enough time to scour the structure from end-to-end, looking for an incendiary device. Michael’s clearly conflicted. He looks down at the broken body lying in front of him, and his shoulders sag even further. He rushes across to Zeth then, placing a hand on his shoulder. Zeth doesn’t appear to register the contact. He’s swept away by his fury, lost in a sea of it, drowning in it as the seconds pass. Lowell’s frantic, but the fight is leaving her, her feet now dangling limply below her as she tries to pry Zeth’s fingers from around her neck.
“Zeth,” Michael says. “Zeth, let her go. We’ll deal with this another way.”
Zeth can’t, or won’t hear him, though. He pushes forward into Lowell, leaning all of his body weight against her. Her eyes roll back into her head, her face a deep crimson.
“Zeth!” Michael tries to pull him away, but the guy is a fucking mountain, huge and unmovable. Reaching back, Michael draws his fist back to his ear, and then he punches Zeth as hard as he can in the face. I can feel the rattle of the impact from where I’m standing—it has to come close to knocking Zeth out. The man reels sideways, stumbling, releasing Lowell as he tries to right himself. Lowell drops to the floor, coughing and spluttering, sinking to her knees before crawling away, putting as much space between her and Zeth as possible.
Zeth whips around, snarling at Michael like a cornered animal. There’s madness in his eyes, which are so dark they are almost fully black from pupil to iris. “Get the fuck out of my way, Michael.”
“I can’t do that.”
“It wasn’t a request.”
“If I let you kill her, Sloane dies. Is that what you want?”
Zeth growls, his hands clenching and unclenching into fists at his sides. “She’s lying,” he grinds out. “She’s fucking lying to save her own skin.”
Michael’s voice is soft when he says, “Is it worth the risk? Are you willing to call her bluff and find out?”
A seed of doubt must bloom in Zeth’s mind. He falters, the murderous look in his eyes fading just a little. “She’s planning on killing her anyway,” he snarls.
“But we can’t stop her if we’re all dead, too,” Michael reasons.
Lowell is hacking on the floor, making ragged wheezing sounds as she tries to recover herself. “You’re not going to stop it. You can’t. Not unless you want to be responsible for the deaths of your friends.”
Zeth bares his teeth. I’ve never seen him look so frustrated before. I’d heard his name before I started training at the gym. Everyone in Seattle who works below the line of the law has heard it. I know enough of from my own personal experience of him, along with his reputation, to piece together how badly he wants to tear this bitch’s head off. Both of their heads.
But he takes a step back.
“Very wise,” Lowell says. Her face is still red, and there are burst capillaries in her eyes, but she’s almost able to talk without coughing now. “Go and stand by your sister’s body,” she spits. “Go and take a long, hard fucking look at what I did to her.”
With leaden feet, Zeth complies. He drags himself over to the gurney, looking down at the pieces of the dead woman that lay there before him. The hatred that pours off him is stifling. Lowell gets to her feet, staggering sideways, then goes to stand behind him. She places a hand on his shoulder and smiles, her face utterly bloodless.
“That’s for stealing my dog.”
NINETEEN
ZETH
“Let’s go and find the lovely Sloane, shall we?” Alaska says. “Here. I’ll bring…what was your sister’s name again, Zeth? Laney? Lauren? I didn’t even know you had a sister until Denise showed up with this mess,” she says, pulling a disgusted face as looks down at the gurney.
“Her name was Lacey,” Lowell says. “And she was a whore. She fucked people on the street for money before she came to Seattle to leach off her brother. I bet you didn’t know that, did you, handsome?”
I’m not going to give her the satisfaction of seeing that she’s affected me. Inside, my temper is raging, though. Lacey wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination. She was broken and flawed. I never found out all the terrible things that happened to her before she found her way to me, but I’ve always known it was bad. She may well have had to sell herself in order to put food in her belly. If that’s the case, then I sure as shit don’t hold it against her. We all do what we need to survive. But for Lowell to call her a whore?
She’s just dug her grave five fucking feet deeper.
I’m already planning what comes next as Alaska takes hold of the gurney and pushes it out of the room, disappearing down the hallway, back the way we came. Lowell rubs a hand at her neck. “After you,” she snipes. I try to make eye contact with Michael, but Lowell lashes out with her gun, the weapon connecting with my temple. Not hard enough to really hurt, but hard enough to piss me off. “Don’t look at him. Look at me. Look at Alaska.”
I snarl, low and threatening. I’ll have my moment with her. I’m gonna have itrealfucking soon. I walk between the two of women, trying to not look at what’s lying on the gurney as we move beneath the stadium. Michael and Mason bring up the rear. Everywhere I look, one hall way branches off into another, into another, into another. I’m sure Lowell picked this place because she thought it would turn me around. That even if I did escape, I wouldn’t be able to find my way out, or find Sloane for that matter, before she foundme. This bitch is always underestimating me, though.Always. I know exactly where we’ve been and how the fuck to get out of here. I’m just biding my time. Waiting.
Eventually, Alaska stops in front of another heavy steel door. She raps her knuckles against the steel and hovers there, waiting. Her brow crinkles when no one answers.
“Clay? Ben? Goddamn it, answer the door, you assholes. We’re waiting out here.”
No reply.
She knocks again.
