Back at the dead guy’s side, she went around to his shoulders, grabbed him at the armpits, and dug in with her good leg. His boots banged into the floor one by one as she got him completely off the makeshift bed, and those Timberland heels scraped their way over to the door. Fortunately, the guard had arms long enough to be a center for the Knicks, so she was able stop a good four feet away from her target.

His elbow even bent in the correct direction.

The thumb went right where she needed it, and the light at the base of the reader went from red to blinking orange.

The instant she got out of here, she was going to jump into that damn car and hit the gas—

Red.

The reader went back to red. So his print didn’t work.

Dropping his hand, she sagged in her skin and hung her head. As a wave of pass-out threatened, she took some deep breaths.

The other guard was now locked in the cell all the way in the basement—and she’d barely been able to get this one across the damn floor. How the hell was she going to hump the man she’d killed up here?

Other man she’d killed, that was.

And shit … she’d locked him in downstairs. If that cell was print-locked, too? She was liable to starve to death first.

Unless Benloise got here soon.

Leaning up against the wall, and bracing her hands on her good knee, she tried to think, think, think …

Looked like God had taken her prayers literally: She’d gotten out of the trunk after her first “Help me, Father.” The second “Dear Lord, please let me get free” had only sprung her from the jail, but not the house.

As she offered up a third prayer, she got real specific.

Oh, Lord, I promise to get out of the life if you let me see my grandmother’s face once again. Wait, wait, that could happen if she were on the verge of death and somehow vovó came here or to a hospital. Dear God, if I can just look into her eyes and know that I am home safe with her … I swear I will take her somewhere far away and never again put myself in harm’s way.

“Amen,” she said as she struggled to straighten.

Reaching deep, she found the strength to weave her way back to the stairwell and—

Sola stopped. Pivoted back to face the counter where she’d found the car keys and the clip. Locked eyes on a solution that was at once utterly repugnant, and evidence, arguably, that God was listening.

It appeared as if things were looking up.

In a sick way.

“There it is,” Assail said, pointing through the windshield. “The turnoff.”

He had waited a lifetime for the nearly hidden, evergreen-choked lane that finally saw fit to make an appearance about fifty feet ahead.

As Ehric’s phone had prescribed, they had followed the Northway all the way through the Adirondack Park, past a place called Lake Placid as well as some mountain that, considering what they had in the back, was rather fitting.

Gore Mountain.

And hadn’t he seen something about a ski resort called Killington? His kind of recreation, indeed.

It had been such a long trip. Hours and hours, each mile under the tires of the Range Rover like an endless succession of hurdles to be surmounted.

“Thank fuck,” Ehric muttered as he wrenched the wheel and they bumped onto a miserable stretch of earth.

The ascent that followed was best suited to goats, and fortunately the Rover’s superior traction turned whatever version of Goodyear they were riding upon into quite passable hooves. It was, however, another endless delay, to the point where Assail became convinced that they had chosen the wrong way: although Benloise himself was with them, one wouldn’t have put it past the man to have some sort of edict in place whereby if he didn’t contact the captors within certain parameters, whoever was in custody would be eliminated.

Assail propped his elbow on the door and leaned his face into his open palm. The fact that his Marisol was a female made him ill. Males could be hard enough on members of their own sex—thinking about all the things that could be done to a woman was a nightmare he prayed had not been made manifest.

“Faster,” he gritted.

“And run the risk of losing a shock absorber? We must needs get down off this pile of rock.”

Just when Assail was ready to roar, the end of the trip presented itself abruptly and without fanfare: A single-story concrete structure with all the charm of a kennel came into view, and before they even closed in, he popped his latch and began to jump out—

At that very moment, the door to the place swung wide.

And for the rest of his life, he would never forget what came out of there.

Marisol was naked from the waist down, a parka that he recognized flagging wildly behind her as she lurched into the night. Spotlit and blinded by the headlights, she glowed red, blood streaking down her legs and up her ghostly torso, her face grim as death as she pointed a gun straight in front of her.

“Marisol!” he screamed. “Don’t shoot! It is Assail!”

He put his hands up in the air, but it wasn’t as though she could see him. “It is Assail!”

She stumbled to a stop, but like a good girl she kept that gun up as she blinked myopically. “Assail …?”

Her voice cracked with a despair that changed him forever: As with the vision of her, he would hear that tone frame the two syllables of his name for years yet to come.

In his nightmares.

“Marisol, darling Marisol … I have come for you.”

He wanted to tell Ehric to kill those lights, but he didn’t know who else had been in there with her and whether anyone would be chasing after her.

“Marisol, come unto me.”

The way her hand shook as she brought it to her head made him want to go to her. But she seemed unsure of what was reality and what might have been a phantom of her imagination. And with that gun, she was as dangerous as she was vulnerable.

“Marisol, I promised your grandmother that I would save you. Come unto me, darling one. Come unto my voice.”

He held his arms out into the darkness.

“Assail…” As she took a step forward, he realized she was limping. Badly. But then, of course some of that blood had to be hers.

“She is going to need medical care,” he said aloud. Damn it, how could he get her treated?

If she died on the way back …

How much of that blood was hers?

As she took another step and one more, and still nobody emerged in her wake, he had some hope that not all of what covered her was her own.

“Come unto me.” As he heard his own voice break, he could feel Ehric shooting him a shocked look from the SUV. “My darling…”

Marisol moved that shaking hand over to shield her eyes, and for some reason, that brought the fact that she was naked into full focus.

His throat stung so badly he could not swallow.

Fuck this.

Assail shoved his gun into his belt and rushed forward to meet her more than halfway.

“Assail … is it really you?” she whispered as he came close.

“Yes. Please don’t shoot—come unto me, darling one.”

As she let out a sob, he grabbed her and hauled her up against his chest, the muzzle of that gun of hers going right into his sternum. If she pulled that trigger, she would kill him outright.

She did not.

With a sob, she gave herself over to his strength, and he held her up from the ground as she crumpled. She weighed nearly nothing against him, and for some reason, that terrified him even more.

Accordingly, he allowed only a moment of communion—and then he needed to get her safe.

Swinging her up into his arms, he turned and ran for the bulletproof Rover, ran into those headlights as if they were a heavenly safety zone.

Ehric and his brother anticipated what he wanted to perfection. They jumped out of the Rover and left open the backseat doors—whilst they removed Benloise from the rear and kept that man away from sight.