Chapter 152 Blackout

Chapter 152 Blackout
The bar smelled of stale beer, mildew, and sweat. When they heard the heavy sound of the door locking, the room shifted, stools and chairs scraping against the floor, as bodies rose like wolves emerging from the tree line.

Six men. Then eight. Then more, materializing from a back room, from behind the bar, from corners where the jaundiced light couldn't reach.

Sierra's hand found Sylvia's wrist and squeezed.

The circle tightened. Unhurried.

The first man to step close was thick-necked and barrel-chested, his leather jacket stretched taut across shoulders that belonged on a dock worker. His eyes crawled over Sierra with a slowness that made her skin revolt. He said something in Russian to the man beside him, a wiry figure with a shaved head and a gold tooth that caught the dim light when he grinned. Whatever was said drew low, guttural laughter from three others.

"Pretty," Gold Tooth said, the single English word distorted by an accent so heavy it sounded like the word had been dragged across gravel. He tilted his head toward Sylvia. "Very pretty."

"Excuse us," Sierra said, her voice harder than her hammering pulse should have allowed. "I believe we've gotten bad directions and we need to go now."

She took a step backward and collided with a chest. A hand gripped her shoulder, not hard, but with the casual certainty of a man who knew she had nowhere to go.

"Nyet." The voice came from behind her left ear, warm breath carrying the sour tang of vodka. "You come in. Now you stay."

Sylvia's breathing had gone shallow and rapid. Sierra could feel it through the grip she still had on her friend's wrist. But when Sierra glanced sideways, Sylvia's jaw was set, her dark eyes blazing with something far closer to fury than fear.

"Take your hand off her," Sylvia said to the man behind Sierra, her voice low and steady as a drawn blade.

More laughter. A tall man with a beard and a diagonal scar bisecting his left eyebrow stepped forward, arms open in a mockery of welcome. "You look for someone, yes? Cowboy?" He drew out the word, cow-boy, like it amused him. "Maybe we can help. Maybe not." He shrugged. His expression shifted, the amusement draining away like water through cracked earth. "Depends on what you're willing to give in exchange."

Three of them stepped forward simultaneously.

Sierra didn't think. She drove her elbow backward into the ribs of the man behind her, felt the satisfying compression of flesh, heard his grunt. She spun, throwing her forearm across his throat the way she'd been taught in the self-defense class she'd taken. The man staggered. For one fraction of a second, there was space.

Beside her, Sylvia moved with a ferocity that belied her frame. She grabbed a bottle from the nearest table and swung it into the temple of Gold Tooth as he lunged. The bottle didn't shatter, it was thick, heavy glass, and the sound it made against his skull was dense and wet. He dropped to one knee.

But there were too many.

A fist caught Sierra in the stomach. She doubled over, the air punched from her lungs in a single violent exhalation. Hands seized her arms, two men, one on each side, their grips iron-tight, wrenching her upright. She kicked, connected with a shin, kicked again and hit nothing. Someone grabbed a fistful of her hair and yanked her head back.

Sylvia was screaming, not in terror but in rage, a sound that was almost animal, thrashing against the three men it now took to hold her. One of them had blood streaming from his nose. Sylvia's boot caught another in the knee, and he swore viciously in Russian, backhanding her across the mouth.

"Sylvia!" Sierra's voice tore from her throat.

Then the cloth came.

Sierra smelled it before she felt it, sweet, cloying, chemical. It was a scent she recognized from her abduction at the ranch. A damp rag pressed hard against her nose and mouth, a thick hand clamping the back of her skull to prevent her from turning away. She held her breath. Twisted. Fought. The edges of the room softened. She heard Sylvia's muffled screaming go quiet, a silence more terrifying than anything that had come before.

Sierra's lungs betrayed her. She inhaled.

The world dissolved.

Cold.

That was the first thing. Cold radiating upward through concrete into Sierra's hip, her shoulder, the side of her face. She was lying on a floor. Damp. Gritty beneath her fingertips.

She opened her eyes to darkness so complete it pressed against her like a physical weight. For three horrifying seconds, she couldn't remember where she was. Then memory crashed back in… the bar, the circle of men, the rag, Sylvia's silenced scream. She jerked upright so fast her vision swam with grey static.

"Syl?" Her voice came out cracked, barely a whisper.

Nothing.

Sierra reached out blindly, her hands sweeping across the cold floor. Concrete walls, she could feel them close, could sense the low ceiling from the way sound died without echo. The space was small. A basement. A cell. She couldn't tell.

Then she heard it.

Faint. Distant. Muffled by what might have been walls or floors or both. But unmistakable.

Ryder's voice.

Sierra's heart seized. She couldn't make out words, just the cadence, the low timbre she had known for a lifetime. It was him. Somewhere inside this place beyond the walls surrounding her, Ryder was alive.

"Syl?" Sierra's hand found fabric, denim, warm skin beneath it. She shook Sylvia's arm. "Syl, wake up. Wake up."

A groan. Then a sharp intake of breath as Sylvia surfaced the same way Sierra had, fast, panicked, disoriented.

"It's me, Si, your okay," Sierra said.

"Oh god, my head and that taste," Sylvia murmured. "Those bastards."

"Can you sit up?"

"We're… I don't know where we are. Some kind of room. Concrete all around, like a basement or something."

Fabric rustled. Sylvia's shoulder pressed against Sierra's in the dark, and they sat there for a moment, breathing, orienting themselves in the absolute blackness.

"I heard Ryder," Sierra whispered.

Sylvia went still. "You're sure?"

"I'm sure."

Silence stretched between them, heavy, loaded.

"I'm not going to say it," Sylvia said quietly.

"I know."

"I could."

"I know you could. We should have gone to the police then found a nice, well-lit bar somewhere in a civilized part of town, ordered drinks like normal human beings, and we let the police do their job."

"You were listening."

Sierra could hear her smile in the dark, but said nothing.

Sylvia exhaled heavily. "So what do we…"

A sound from the far corner. Sylvia cut off her question and both of them froze.

The scrape of a boot sole against concrete. Slow. Deliberate. Someone had been sitting there the entire time, listening to them fumble in the dark, listening to every word.

A metallic click, a lighter flicking open, and a small, trembling flame bloomed in the blackness. It illuminated a face in fragments: a jaw like a cinderblock, a nose that had been broken and reset badly, and a scar that ran from the corner of one eye down to the hinge of the jaw, puckered and pale against olive skin. The flame touched the tip of a cigarette, and the man inhaled, the cherry flaring orange, painting his eyes in demonic light.

He exhaled smoke into the space between them.

In thick Russian English, he spoke. "You shouldn't have asked questions."