D. Reynolds - Aden

What she needed to focus on now was getting out of here and taking all of these women with her.

“ Por favor ,” Sid said, speaking to the oldest of the women, who was still several years younger than Sid herself. Sid’s Spanish was good. Her mother’s cook, who had been Sid’s nanny when she was younger, was Puerto Rican and had used nothing but Spanish when speaking to Sid.

“How long have I been here?” she asked, continuing in Spanish. “How long was I asleep?”

“Many hours,” the woman replied. “They brought you here last night, and you slept all through the day.”

“But only one,” Sid clarified. “One day.”

The woman nodded. “They will come soon,” she warned. “But at least they will bring food and water.”

Sid nodded. That made sense. They wouldn’t spend any more than necessary keeping the women healthy, but they did need them alive. You couldn’t sell a dead slave.

“How many men, when they bring the food?” Sid asked.

“Two.” The woman shrugged. “Sometimes only one.”

“How long have you been here?” Sid asked curiously. With Aden wiping out the other house, she would have expected Pinto to move the women in and out as quickly as possible.

“Six days, I think,” the woman said. “They chained us together after one night, and they told us we are leaving, but then . . .” She shrugged again. “They went away and didn’t come back. I thought they would leave us to die. But then he came, and now we wait again.”

“You mean the vampire.”

One of the younger women, a girl really, chimed in, nodding. “The pretty one,” she said, “with the cruel eyes.”

Carl Pinto had meant to move these women with the others, Sid realized, the ones Aden had freed with his raid on the house Sid had discovered. But Pinto had been forced to change his plans. And now he sat here in this house with his few captives, probably afraid to move them for fear of getting caught, but not willing to lose the profit by freeing them either. Maybe he thought whoever won the challenge would let him return to his slave running. It was definitely profitable, if one didn’t mind where the profit came from.

Sid, on the other hand, was convinced that Aden would be the ultimate victor. And that meant Carl Pinto’s days were numbered.

Unfortunately, she couldn’t wait that long. She stood and continued stretching, running through various escape scenarios in her head as she did so. On the one hand, she felt confident that Aden would look for her. He wouldn’t believe that she’d left him. She hadn’t been thinking straight before. There had to have been some evidence of her capture. Earl Hamilton and his entire security team had been on duty only one floor below. She frowned, wondering what had happened to Hamilton and his men. Were they all dead? God, she hoped not.

She shook away the thought. There was nothing she could do about it, and she didn’t need the negative energy draining her resolve. She needed to focus on one thing and one thing only, and that was getting the fuck out of here. So, points in her favor . . . first, Aden would be looking for her, and second, she still had her gun. She’d learned from Dresner, that traitorous bitch, that you didn’t need an actual stake to kill a vamp. That was the traditional method, but the key was not the stake itself, but the damage it caused. Do enough damage to a vamp’s heart, no matter how you did it, and you could kill him. If she could somehow get close enough to Carl Pinto to shoot the gun point blank at his heart, that should do the trick.

Or rather, the trick would be getting the gun close enough and then pulling the trigger. She’d never killed anyone before, never even shot a gun at anything living, much less a person. But Pinto had not only killed Janey, he’d enslaved uncounted numbers of women, sending them to a horrible fate and sometimes death. Could she kill him, if it came down to it? She thought she could.

But what she knew was that she couldn’t sit around and wait for Aden to show up. This wasn’t a fairy tale, and she was no princess. She couldn’t count on her hero riding in on a white horse, or in this case rolling up in a black SUV. Even if he showed up, he might be too late.

The heavy tread of booted feet pounded down the hallway and stopped outside the bedroom door. Some of the women cried out, hugging each other and eyeing the door as if expecting a monster to enter, which wasn’t far from the truth. Sid didn’t join the terrified huddle—she wasn’t sure they’d have accepted her if she tried—but she played it safe, dropping into the corner and tucking her knees up against her chest, not wanting to take the slightest chance that her gun would be discovered.

There was a scrape of metal, and then what sounded like a heavy padlock falling against the doorjamb, before the door swung open. Sid had expected it to be the guards bringing food and water, but instead it was Pinto himself who stood there, his eyes gleaming red fire as he stared at her in the dim light.

“Get up, bitch,” he growled.

Sid didn’t move, just stared at him defiantly. She wasn’t going to make this easy for him.

Pinto gave her a cruel smile, and, moving faster than her human eyes could follow, he zipped across the room and grabbed the youngest of the women, the same one who’d called him pretty. She cried out, hanging from his hard grip and whimpering softly.

“Get up,” he repeated to Sid. “Or I’ll drink her dry and leave the husk.”

Sid tried to put all the hatred she felt into her stare as she stood, keeping her back against the wall. “Leave her alone,” she demanded. “You want me. I’m here.”

“How touching,” Pinto sneered. But he opened his fingers, releasing the teenager. She dropped to the floor with a clatter of chains, then crawled over to rejoin the knot of terrified captives.

“Come then, Sidonie Reid. Let’s find out why a cold bastard like Aden would find you so irresistible.”

Sidonie walked slowly, steeling herself to make a break for it when she hit the doorway. But she never got there. A deafening noise suddenly rocked the house, a loud crack of wood followed by a hard slam of something heavy and flat crashing to the floor. Like the heavy front door. Her heart soared as she realized Aden must have found her, that rescue was at hand, not just for her but for the other women. She opened her mouth to scream, to let Aden know where she was, but before she could so much as draw a breath, Pinto was on her. One of his hands gripped her waist, pinning her to his side, the other covered her mouth as he dragged her away from the living room to the opposite end of the hallway which opened to the kitchen.

It sounded like war had broken out behind them, with the steady sound of gunfire and men shouting coming from the living room. Sid knew a moment of fear for Aden before she was jerked back to her own danger as Pinto slammed her against the hallway wall hard enough to knock her breath away. He flattened himself against her, his hand over her mouth, and they hung there a long moment as Pinto seemed to listen intently to something in the kitchen. And then just as abruptly, they were moving again.

Sid fought as much as she could, but Pinto was a vampire. His strength far exceeded hers, and he didn’t mind hurting her. She strained to hear what was going on in the living room. With one exception, Pinto’s henchmen were human. If that was Aden out there, and her gut told her it was, Pinto’s human gangbangers didn’t stand a chance.

He wrenched her to a stop one more time, holding her just short of the doorless opening between the kitchen and living room. He froze, filthy fingers over her mouth, his arm around her ribs so tightly that she could barely breathe. She thought she knew why he was waiting. The door to the driveway was on the other side of the kitchen, and Pinto would have to pass right in front of the living room opening to get there. Even at vampire speeds, they would be in full view of the living room for a few precious seconds.