But that was so, so far from all he’d done.
“Regrets? No.” I kept going on the lock, applying minute pressure on the cuffs, whispering an escape artist’s prayer for it to yield. “I’d make it again.”
“What?” She blinked once.
“Luckily,” I said with a smile—showmanship—as the lock clicked open and my chains fell away. “I don’thaveto make it at all.”
“Oh, fuck,” she said. “Obadiah!”
At her desperate screech for backup, the reluctant goon sprang forward, his overgrown frame a cannonball hurtling toward me, bent on rage to collect the payment he’d been promised and denied over and over again.
His timing: perfect.
Because Resi, in her outrage at being outsmarted byme, of all people, had lost hers. In a frenzy, she grabbed the remainingacid in the vial. I lunged for it, managing to veer it off course by barely a centimeter.
Which was enough. The vial hit its target dead-on, shattering in Obadiah’s face. He shrieked like a demon, clawing at the flesh of his eyes as it bubbled and melted, the acrid stench of smoldering skin seizing my nostrils as he collapsed in a writhing pile of contorted limbs and incinerated tissue.
The world around me seemed to stop dead as Obadiah’s screams echoed and his body convulsed on the floor, hands blindly grasping at nothing.
In the chaos, I dove toward Resi’s metal shelf full of fun, pure adrenaline buoying me now, greeted with a series of unlabeled vials and beakers. Ones a chemist would know. Oneshewould know, not that he was in any shape to tell me.Breathe. Think. Don’t cry.
What neutralizes acid?
Tsk.Slow learner.A base, of course. But where?
My gaze settled on an unlabeled container of white powder. I snatched it up, fumbled with the lid, wailed in frustration as it resisted in only the way an inanimate object could. But at last, it popped open, and I stuck in a finger and tasted it. No mere powder was going to kill meorhim more dead than we were being killed now.
But before I could open it, a pair of small, cold fingers closed onto the box, trying to wrench it away. I clenched my teeth and growled, pulling it back. But robbed of her hired muscle, Resi was smaller than me and weaponless. I grunted and kicked her away, in the process letting what I was reasonably sure was baking soda loose all over the room in an enormous frosty cloud, eliciting a blissful fizzing sound as it at last overpowered and neutralized the acid melting him piece by piece.
He slumped in his collar, his once-shimmering eyes dulled and glassy with pain, barely able to focus. The chains rattledweakly as he gasped, gulping air as best as he could around the muzzle.
I kneeled, my fingers curling around the cool metal cuff around his withered inner arm, the jagged numbers seared into his skin in gruesome greenish-yellow cavities. The lock, though, blessedly yielded to the key. With a sharp twist, it snapped open. The collar came undone just as fast, clattering to the ground with finality.
Immediately, he wilted against me, eyes glazed but astonished, his still-muzzled breath warm against my neck. I slipped an arm around his waist, propping him up with what little strength I had left. And finally, I undid the muzzle’s buckle, unpeeled the straps, and flung it away.
“Lou,” he said before it was all the way off, and for a second—but only a second—I dared to fret about what he would say first.
I really needn’t have.
“I love you.”
“What?”
Despite imminent danger, despite certain death, I froze, trembling in sheer amazement. At hearing the words, at hearing themnow, at the fact that he was actuallyclingingto me and maybe even smiling, and delivering a series of half-blind, chaotic, bloody kisses to my lips, my forehead, my nose, my eyelids. And at the fact that I was probably putting both our lives in further danger by pausing to kiss himback, because of course I was.
“Am I not getting through to you, slow learner? I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you. And?—”
But in the degraded gold of his irises, for a split second, reflected back, I saw Resi catapulting toward us from behind, wielding the knife I’d theatrically tossed away. On instinct, I whirled, snaked out with my arm, and scooped up a discarded piece of ore. Even weakened, my aim was good enough toconnect with Resi’s temple with a satisfyingthwack. She physically jerked and crumpled, the knife clattering out of her grip. She hauled herself up almost immediately, of course, but before she could counterattack, a series of frantic, shrill noises cut through the chaos.
Rape whistle.
“It’s Max,” I breathed.
“Right on time, I see,” he muttered sarcastically against my lips, filling me with bizarre delight. But then his body went taut, head turning, eyes searching, mind calculating.
I knew that look.
“Wait. Where’s Noam?”
