He was holding her against his body, and she couldn’t turn to see his face. Instead she looked upward, through the narrow slit of light into the cold gray Paris sky. A few stray snowflakes drifted down into the room, landing on the black cashmere coat that had become almost a second skin. Drifting and melting and gone. And Chloe slept.
15
Chloe wasn’t quite sure what had woken her up. She was alone in the bed, and cold, but it wasn’t the dense, suffocating blackness. A small flashlight lay on the mattress beside her, the light a tiny beacon in the dark.
She sat up, slowly. Her entire body ached, her stomach was twisted in knots and her head hurt. Her best friend had been murdered because of her, and she was on the run for her life, with only an enigmatic killer to turn to.
But she was alive. Painfully, undeniably alive, despite the guilt and the fear that were tearing at her. The only question was, what would she do next? And where was Bastien?
There was always the possibility that he’d finally abandoned her. Taken her to this deserted house, dragged her up to a tiny room and locked her in there to slowly die of starvation.
But there was a window in the roof, and she could climb out. And he had no reason to drag her all the way here if he wanted her dead.
If it was a question of simply hiding her body, then he wouldn’t have abandoned her to starve or scream or fall to her death on the pavement below when she tried to escape. He would have killed her, quickly, painlessly. He’d promised her that much, and she found the notion comforting. It was a sick, twisted reaction, but she was beyond conventional thought and emotions. Everything had been stripped down to the bare minimum—survival. After seeing Sylvia’s poor body she could no longer deny it. Her only means of survival was Bastien, and she wasn’t going to fight him anymore. In fact, she was actually going to be glad when he reappeared in the tiny, closed-off room. Downright delirious. Though she had no intention of telling him.
She scooted over to the corner of the bed, wrapping his coat more closely around her, pulling the threadbare blanket over her as well. She was hungry, a notion that horrified her. When her nephew had died in a car accident she hadn’t been able to eat for days—the very sight of food had made her nauseous. But now, even after seeing Sylvia’s brutalized body, she was famished. Part of the survival instinct, she supposed. It didn’t make her feel any less crass, but there it was. She wanted to survive, and she needed her strength to do it. And to be strong, she needed to eat. It was that simple.
Where the hell was he? At least he’d left her the light. She would have been screaming and climbing the walls if she’d awoken alone to total darkness.
He was right, she wasn’t the sort to be crippled by complexes. She’d actually thought she’d gotten over it years ago. She had no problem with familiar places, elevators or dark basements.
It had been her fault in the first place. She’d been eight years old, tagging after her older brothers, always trying to do what the older kids did, refusing to realize her own limitations. The mines were off-limits, even to the older boys, but no self-respecting teenager would pay attention to danger warnings. They would, however, stop at bringing their younger sister on such a risky adventure, so her only choice was to sneak after them. One wrong turn too many, and she’d lost them in the warren of passageways deep below the ground.
They hadn’t known she’d followed them, and no one realized she was missing for hours. Her flashlight had given out, and she’d been trapped in the darkness, in the middle of Miller’s Mountain, while time lost its meaning and monsters crawled at her from every corner. By the time the search party found her she’d been in the dark for nineteen hours, and she didn’t speak for two weeks after the ordeal.
Her father used to joke that after that she never stopped talking. She had a sensible family who carted her straight off to the best therapists, and by the time she was twelve she no longer had to sleep with a light on. By the time she was fifteen she could go down into the basement again, and by the time she left for college she thought she’d put it all behind her. Until last night.
It was probably just the accumulation of horrors that had suddenly made her weak and vulnerable again. She accepted that fact, grudgingly, just as she accepted she needed Bastien’s help. And she might even tell him so, if he ever got his skinny ass back here.
Except he wasn’t precisely skinny. She’d had a good look at his body in his apartment yesterday, whether she’d wanted to or not, and he was long and lean and smoothly muscled.
And she wasn’t going to start thinking about that, even though she should have welcomed the distraction. In the end she was more comfortable thinking about being trapped in a small room with monsters trying to kill her than she was thinking about Bastien Toussaint’s, or whoever he was, naked body.
She didn’t even hear him approach. She didn’t know whether the room was soundproofed or he was simply very silent, but she was sitting cross-legged on the bed, staring fixedly at the tiny beam from the flashlight and trying not to think about him when the door slid open and he was standing there.
“Are you all right?” he asked as the door slid shut behind him.
She took a deep breath, trying to sound unconcerned. “I’m fine. I don’t have any idea what time it is, but shouldn’t we be starting toward the airport?”
He said nothing, moving into the room. She saw the spark, and a moment later he’d lit candles that she hadn’t realized were there. “You’re not going to be flying out tonight.”
The knot in her stomach tightened. “Why not?”
“It’s shut down. Most of Paris is, for that matter. The snow has brought everything to a standstill. That’s why it’s safe enough to light some candles. The snow…” He paused.
“That’s all right. It’s covered the roof window, hasn’t it? I’m calmer now. Especially with some light.”
He nodded. He’d managed to acquire a jacket somewhere, and she suspected he’d changed his clothes, though they were still all the same unremitting black. Which reminded her…
“I don’t suppose there’s a bathroom in this place?” she asked. “Otherwise I’m going to have to sample the snow firsthand.”
“There is one. It’s rudimentary, but it works.”
She’d scrambled off the bed before he’d even finished his sentence. “Where?” Now that she knew relief was at hand it had become a great deal more urgent.
“It’s on the floor below, directly beneath this. We’ll have to go without light—we can’t risk anyone seeing the torch.”
She swallowed. She was better now, she reminded herself. Calmer. “Okay.”