Page 18 of Dangerous Silence
A bullet pierced through the trees. The man fell forward, falling on top of me.
Axe stowed his gun. My pulse raced. He had shot two men. And I had almost died. Had he saved me, or was I about to die too? He pulled me into his thick arms, putting me into a headlock, his other hand pushing on the back of my skull until my vision darkened.
I pushed against his arm. “Let me go!” I shouted.
He dragged me through the woods. I kept fighting, so he maneuvered me against a tree trunk and punched me in the chest, knocking the wind from my lungs. I gasped for air, unable to find it, falling forward, and he caught me, throwing me back into that headlock, dragging me once again.
“You can’t get away with this,” I said.
But what had he gotten away with? I had almost died. He had saved me from one of the men, hadn’t he?
But he had still killed another man before that. What the hell was he doing?
He opened a door in front of us. A click of a switch. Then light flooded around us, and he pulled me inside. Concrete covered every inch of the room, like a warehouse or a parking garage, and the lights above flickered, a gentle hum filling the room. Metal cabinets with locks. A toilet and a sink. A chain saw hung from the wall. Knives stuck to a magnetic rack. And restraints. Two cages. And so many metal objects that I had no idea what they were for.
Every vein in my body throbbed.
“Who are you?” I asked. Axe let go of me and I dropped to my hands and knees. He bent down to open up a wooden box, about the size of a large dog crate. He fumbled with the lock, then the wooden slats on the sides fell open, revealing a cage with thick bars. There was no way I was going in that. I had to do something. I grabbed the first thing I saw on the table—a baseball bat—and swung it into his back in a loudthwack!
He stood up slowly. Then he turned and looked down at me.
“Get in the box,” he said.
Hitting him with the bat hadn’t fazed him. My fingers quivered, but I stilled them.
“No,” I said.
“Get in the box,” he repeated, his tone firm.
“I’m not getting in your box.”
“Don’t tempt me, Demi,” he said.
Those words held in my chest, knocking back and forth until I felt them all over my body.Don’t tempt me. Because fighting back would only tempt him to kill me. Just like he killed those other men.
But there had to be a way out of this.
“You don’t have to do this,” I said.
He grabbed me by the hair and swung me around like a doll until I was on all fours. I held the sides of the cage, resisting as hard as I could, but he pushed me inside easily.
“This isn’t you,” I said.
I turned around, hunched in the cage, practically in the fetal position, and faced him. I tried to think of anything I knew about Axe. He didn’t owe me anything, and yet he had helped me plan my father’s funeral, and had agreed to marry me because it put Dad at peace. He could have let me die just now, but he hadn’t. He had saved me.
“There’s good inside of you,” I said, almost like a threat. “You’re not the monster you think you are.”
He crouched on his knees, tilting his head. A hint of amusement flickered in his eyes, then vanished.
“You don’t know anything,” he said.
He folded the wooden slats, covering the bars of the cage, locking them into place. Darkness swallowed me, leaving behind a small hole of light.
CHAPTER 5
Axe
A wave of heat crawled over my skin. Demi was in a cage now, but that didn’t make me feel any better. A third Midnight Miles soldier was out there, and I needed to take care of him before I did anything else.
