Straight ahead. Move.
He gritted his teeth around the flashlight, wriggled his upper body out even further, and reached for the first rung.
It snapped off the wall. In his wild flailing for purchase, the flashlight slid from his mouth. He clutched the far side of the wall with his shaking, rigid fingers, legs splayed in the overflow tube, the hand with the throbbing shoulder groping desperately for another rung. A part of his brain that was cool and detached counted the many, many seconds that passed. The iron rung, plop. The flashlight, plop.
So. There was water in the cistern. Who knew how much or from what source. Perhaps it would be drowning for him, rather than a broken neck. No matter. He had no preference.
He reached, clasped the next rung. He would have to pull his entire upper body out of the overflow hole to test this one. There would be no way to keep from falling if this one gave out. He had no reason to think it would be any stronger than the one beneath it.
He had even less reason to turn around and go back.
He realized, bemused, that he was muttering something under his breath. An old prayer he had learned from his grandmother in his early childhood in Romania, before his mother had gotten bored with the man Val had known as his father, and their tiny rural village, and run off with her fancy city boyfriend to Budapest. Taking her luckless little boy with her.
The prayer was in a dialect he barely remembered. Something he’d recited at bedtime, verses to ward off monsters, beasts, vampires.
He gave the rung his weight. It bowed, ever so slightly—and held.
He pulled himself up. Dangled from it with his entire weight, clenched his teeth. Waited stoically to fall and die.
It didn’t happen. Not yet. Not his moment. Maybe later.
He dragged himself upward and began to climb.
Chapter
27
“You’ve removed every last bit of jewelry from her body, András?”
The cool, dragging voice sliced through the hideous dreams and the ever-present consciousness of pain, echoing strangely in her throbbing skull, volume cutting in and out. She ran the words back, trying to dredge some meaning out of them. It sank in slowly.
Hungarian. Not her best language, but she managed in it.
“Of course, Boss. I’m tying her hand and foot. Nothing to worry about. Besides, I inspected every centimeter of her body. Repeatedly. Nothing on it but what God gave her.”
“Do not underestimate this woman.” She tried not to shudder at the sound of that voice, like the cool, dry scales of a venomous snake sliding over her skin. “She is extremely dangerous.”
“I know.” András’s voice was long-suffering. “My balls are still sore. But I promise she won’t give us any trouble. Not when I do this.”
A rope jerked tight around her wrists, the right one of which was swollen and hot, and the blur of pain suddenly became horribly specific. She kept her eyes shut, feigning unconsciousness while she tried to remember how her arm had come to be broken.
Then it slammed into her mind, full force. András. Novak. Rachel.
Her eyes popped open just in time to see András take in the slack of a rope he’d tossed over a huge, menacing iron hook that was set high into the wall.
He looked down, smiled to find her eyes open, and yanked.
She shrieked. The rope wrenched her up until she dangled by her wrists, the tips of her toes barely touching the ground. Agony. Her ankles were tied, making it impossible to widen her stance, keep her balance, and take weight off her broken arm. She keened between gritted teeth, jerking until she managed to grip the rope with her left hand. Her vision was going dark. The maw of unconsciousness yawned, and she was tempted to tip herself into it.
But no way could it be that easy. They would have a way to revive her. András was a professional, after all, and besides—Rachel.
Where the fuck was Rachel? She had to know.
The two men swam into view. Her eyes streamed. She blinked, sniffed, tasted blood. Her face was swollen from a blow she did not remember receiving. Her heart forced blood through inflamed tissue, slamming painfully with each throb.
There was that prick András, dressed in executioner’s black, holding the rope, his cobra face expressionless, his eyes strangely dead and empty. And Daddy Novak’s hideous, grinning face.
His son Kurt, four years dead, was rotting in his coffin, and his corpse probably looked much like the skeletal man who stood before her now. The zombie king. His pale, bright eyes were identical to those of his dead son. The same strange, poisonous green color.
She glanced around the lavish baroque salon. The windows looked out on a vast, terraced garden, and beyond it, the winding curves of a river, fading into the twilight. Candelabra were lit on several tables, and the opulent gilded molding and trim gleamed in the flickering candlelight. Subtle track lights installed in the vaulted ceilings lit up the frescoes. Chubby, smiling cupids flanked gruesome depictions of martyred saints. There was one being pierced with a multitude of arrows, one being flayed alive, another holding her chopped-off breasts on a plate as if serving them up. One unlucky saint held both of her gouged-out eyes in her hands, mouth wide and screaming, eye sockets bleeding. The eyes in her clutching hands looked bloodshot, shocked and terrified. As if they still could see.
Tam looked away before she had to take in the images on the other panels. Novak followed the direction of her gaze and chuckled.
“Pretty, aren’t they?” he asked, switching to heavily accented English. “I’m so fond of my frescoes. Seventeenth century. The artist was anonymous but very gifted, in my opinion.”
Very fucked up in hers, Tam thought. She noticed two huge flat-screen TVs, set on tables to either side of her. Their blank fifty-inch screens were dark and empty. They were incongruous in the dim room, otherwise full of priceless baroque era art and furniture. Then the air moved on her shivering body, and a huge, gold-framed standing mirror right in front of her brought her attention to another unpleasant fact.
She was naked.
She was not surprised. She had learned young how vulnerable nakedness made a person feel, how easily controlled. It was a quick and dirty instant weapon for sadists and bullies, and she’d met too many of those in her lifetime. But she was tough as an old boot. Nakedness was not a problem. No, that fucking broken arm was the problem.
Novak clapped his clawlike hands together. “I was beginning to wonder if you would ever wake up. I’ve been so impatient to meet you, Tamara Steele. What a pleasure.”
He paused. Did he expect her to say that the pleasure was all hers? But even if she was disposed to play word games with him, she was shaking too hard to breathe enough to speak. All she could manage were shallow, squeaking drags for air.
Novak studied her thoughtfully, eyes hooded. “Let her down, András,” he said. “Onto her feet.”
András scowled and gave the rope an agonizing jerk. “But she—”
“She
