Chapter Nine
She didn’t dare move. Breathe even, fearing one false move would give her exact location away. Not that it was hard to guess, but she didn’t have to put a flashing arrow over her head either.
With the barrel of her Glock leveled at her bedroom door, she took a tentative step back and then another. Not that anyone had much space to search, but right now anything in her favor was a plus. The feel of thousands of ants on her skin returned.
“Ser…Seraphina? Run. Get away.”
Rhia’s heart stopped, and she dropped her arms.
She flinched, faltered. “Maya?” No more than a whisper left her lips.
“Oh, didn’t your bitch friend tell you, Maya? Tsk tsk. Friends shouldn’t lie.”
For once she wished she was a badass in order to sate the blood lust that coursed through her veins at that moment. Hell, she’d take being half as badass as Lara Croft, but she didn’t exactly look good in leather and her hair would never be slick or sexy. Her own curly mop hung around her shoulders still dripping wet, making the floor under her feet slippery.
The footsteps fell quiet. She could duck, roll and dive for the back door. But how far would she get before a bullet caught up with her?
And now Maya. FUCK!
“Fuck off, bitch. Like you know what a friend is, Indigo.”
Rhia popped the clip out and checked the rounds before sliding it home again.
“Ah, she’s alive. For a minute there I thought you might have caught a bullet,” Indigo cooed as a white waving light filled the small hallway.
Bullets blasted her bedroom door. Chips of wood mixed with cement dust to fill her mouth and knock the air from her lungs. She dropped her gun and searched her body for wounds, her teeth clenched.
“You murderous bitch. What the fuck do you want?” Rhia yelled. She dove for her door, using what remained of the hanging wood as a shield when another round of Indigo’s rage came hurling her way. She didn’t have a license to kill, but that wouldn’t stop her from trying. Spying her gun a few feet away, she stretched out and knocked it her way with the tip of her shoe.
Rhia wrapped her fingers around the heavy metal and felt a sense of comfort.
“While we’re hanging out, how about telling me what you’re really doing at Haven and why you have Maya? While you’re at it, how did you mask your true murderous intentions from Sevastyan and the others?” Rhia exacted her question with a bravado she didn’t feel. Not even an ounce. But it helped mask the sound of her opening the old, creaky window in her room. Metal ground against metal and she froze, the window only half-open.
“All in due time,” Indigo answered and Rhia could hear the shrug in her voice. “No one would be the wiser of my extra-curricular activities even now if Bjorn’s dick hadn’t started doing the thinking for him. Ruined such a good setup. Maya here seems to be the little temptress he couldn’t refuse breaking.”
Rhia swallowed hard. Why the hell did she have to ask?
“So you killed him. For what?”
“Money and power of course.”
The crazy bitch laughed.
“Don’t tell me you had feelings for poor Bjorn. He was nothing but a distraction. An impatient brute. Don’t get me wrong, he was useful. His dick took hours to sate. Lots of women followed him out of the club on a whispered promise of a good time.” Dainty clicks ticked on the hard floor as Indigo cooed sickly, but this time Rhia paid attention to what mattered. The bitch’s location.
A bullet pinged against the iron railing outside the window and Rhia flinched as the sparks shot out.
The heat of that one left her skin with goosebumps. Too fucking close.
She drew in a deep breath and swiped at a trickle of sweat rolling down the side of her temple.
Another click of a heel and scattering of bullet shells clanked against the wood baseboard. Three more steps and she would be past the kitchen. Another three would place her in front of Rhia’s door and directly in the line of sight. She had one chance to get this right.
With her eyes closed, Rhia drew up a mental layout of her apartment. Upon Adryan’s insistence on having an exit strategy, she’d spent her first night inside these walls mapping out every tile, wall, window, and dip in the floor. More than that, she had every step counted.
Rhia toed and heeled it a little farther until she bumped into the back wall of her room and peered over her shoulder to the street below. Rain slicked over every inch of pavement and metal and the streetlamp didn’t shed a single ray of hope she could make it down the death trap of a fire escape without getting killed. Another burst of bullets zipped down the hall, and she dove behind her bed, not sure if it was her screams or Maya’s that hammered against her eardrums. It didn’t really matter when locator bullets wisped through the loose tendrils of hair by her head to bury in the back wall.
My God, this was all getting a little too surreal. She’d end up killing herself and doing Indigo a favor if she didn’t get control over this situation and like right now.