Page 91 of The SEAL's Duchess
Shit. She dropped the screwdriver with a clatter and pressed her hand to her mouth, probing with her tongue. A gash, maybe an inch.
“Here. Give me your hand.” Jack’s breath brushed her ear as she pressed the screwdriver back into Ivy’s palm and wrapped her grip around Ivy’s. Together they wiggled the blade back into the gap. “On three. One, two?—”
They worked together. Ivy’s shoulders shrieked and her cut hand throbbed. The door buckled as the gap widened.
“Come on, you fucker,” Jack grunted.
Ivy lifted a foot to the frame for leverage.
Gritted her teeth.
Pulled.
Something gave way with a crack like gunfire.
Ivy fell backward, Jack landing beside her.
For a heartbeat, they lay there, stunned, the silence enormous.
Then Jack started to laugh—a breathless, pained sound that bordered on hysteria. “Thirty years in this industry and I’m still opening doors the fucking hard way.”
Ivy turned to face her. “I know the feeling.”
Then she was laughing too, helpless wheezing giggles that hurt her bruised ribs and made tears stream down her face—hot and real and proof she was still breathing. For thirty seconds orso, she laughed in the darkness with a woman she barely knew, both of them alive when they should be dead.
“We have to move, Jack.” She wiped her face with her sleeve and clambered to her hands and knees. “Come on.”
They staggered out of the container into the same area where the man had attacked them. Emergency lighting threw everything into sickly yellow relief—the tilted floor, water pooling in corners, Jack’s blood still dark on the metal a few feet away.
“Shit.” Jack’s face was gray with pain, blood matting her hair on one side.
“Can you walk?”
“Can I sit here and die instead?” But Jack took a step, one arm wrapped around her ribs. “That was rhetorical. Let’s go.”
Ivy caught her before she careened into the wall. “Lean on me.”
They lurched forward together, Ivy taking most of Jack’s weight. On her wrist, the watch face was a spider web of cracks, but the hands still moved. Seven thirty. She’d been unconscious for—how long? It hurt to think. Long enough for the sun to set, for the weather to turn, for whatever was happening to the rig to progress to the point where the floor felt like the deck of a ship in a storm.
They reached the stairwell, too narrow for them to progress side by side. Ivy went first, Jack following with audible effort. Every few steps, Ivy waited and let Jack catch her breath. She left bloody handprints on the rails, the metal so cold it made her skin sting.
Where is everyone?
The question beat against her skull with every step. An emergency evacuation would be chaos—alarms, announcements, crew scrambling to muster points. But the rig was silent except for its dying moans.
No voices. No footsteps. No helicopter rotors overhead.
Water seeped through a crack in the welding above them, a steady drip that became a stream that their boots splashed through.
The Vega juddered. A sharp veer that threw them both sideways. Ivy hit the wall and her knees caught the sharp edge of the step.
Hell—
Jack went down hard with a cry of pain. “I’m okay,” she panted, clinging to the rail, face pasty. “Keep moving.”
Ivy got an arm around her waist and hauled, ignoring the shearing pain in her shoulders.
Thirty steps. Fifty. Ivy’s hands cramped, her legs were fire. She marked their progress in bloody handprints—red on yellow. A trail anyone could follow—if anyone was left.
