Sunny - Mona Lisa Eclipsing

I think all of us were waiting to see which way she would go on that, including Mona Sierra herself. Would she let me go or kill me?

Dawn was just beginning to creep over the horizon when they finally untied Dante from his pole. Two men unwound my bindings as well, though they kept our hands tied. No matter, as long as they were through for the night. Couldn’t torture us while they were sleeping, right? Which I presumed they would be, since they’d been up all night. Only, it seemed they could.

It didn’t occur to me what they were doing until I was standing over the pit. One of the men hefted me over his shoulder and walked a fair distance before setting me back on my feet. I had a moment to see the deep, crater-sized hole before I collapsed in a jellied mass on the ground, unable to stand, not even able to lift up my head. The multiple doses had accumulated within me. I was doped up to my gills at this point.

“Carry her down,” Mona Sierra ordered Dante.

It seemed an innocuous thing to ask of him, but Dante reacted as if she had just told him to stab me in the heart. The expression on his face grew frightening and his body seemed to swell larger, even though he didn’t move a single muscle. It wasn’t my drugged imagination either, because the six men surrounding him stepped back and drew their machetes.

“You will regret this,” Dante promised, icy rage flashing from his pale eyes.

“Not as much as you will,” Mona Sierra said smugly, “and that is all I care about. Maybe if you had given me a better show, I might have spared her, but you were such poor entertainment.”

“Lies,” I managed to slur out. “Bitch jus wansa torment you.”

Mona Sierra cast a venomous glance at me. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. He’ll never know. And that will indeed torment him as you and he boil under the sun. As he watches your skin blister and peel away.”

Oh, so that’s what she had planned. I blinked and kept my mouth shut. Sunlight didn’t bother me. Sunlight, in this case, was my dear, dear friend. It would give me time for the venom to wear off and let me recover my full strength, after which I’d break us out of this creepyville of horror.

“You can carry her down, or I will have her thrown down,” Mona Sierra said indifferently. “Your choice.”

Dante scooped me up and set me over his shoulder much more gently and carefully than the other man had. I hung over him like a limp rag as he descended the ladder, two men in front of him, another two behind. We went down twenty-eight rungs before hitting the bottom, and it was a tricky bit of work for Dante because his hands were tied together in front and he couldn’t hold me as he climbed down. I couldn’t even help. Another treacherous mind game Mona Sierra played with Dante—more guilt to heap upon him if I slipped off his shoulder and fell. But we made it down without mishap.

“Over there,” Raúl said, pointing.

Dante moved to the indicated spot and set me down on the cool cement floor. Dante’s eyes, the brief glimpse I had of them, were wild with anguish, turmoil, and rage. More emotion than he had shown throughout the entire night of tug-of-war Mona Sierra had played with his intestines.

“Step back away from her,” Raúl commanded.

I think Raúl and I were both surprised when Dante obeyed without putting up a fight. I watched as he let Raúl’s men untie his hands, only to retie them behind his back. They attached a long silver rope to his bound wrists and then secured the other end to a metal rung anchored into the concrete.

They did the same to me, and then the four of them climbed back up, pulled the ladder up and over the side, and drew an enormous silver netting, the ropes twice as thick as what they had used to capture us, over the top of the pit.

“Think of me as you burn,” Mona Sierra said in parting. But they didn’t leave just yet. Not until two darts, accurately thrown by hand, came sailing through the net to stab me in the thigh. Already I could tell that they had used full-strength venom. It would knock me out for hours. Hours during which Dante might die.

No , I wailed inside as consciousness dimmed. Noooo . . . Dante!

IWOKE UP to the smell of something burning. For a moment I thought I was back home, and something was burning on the stove. But my home didn’t have a concrete floor. And that didn’t smell like food cooking. This odor was noxious and distinctive and somehow familiar . . .

I cracked open a heavy eyelid and took note of several things. One, I wasn’t home. I was outside, with the hot sun straight overhead, filtering through a silver netting placed there, I remembered, by Mona Sierra’s primitive thugs. I was also sore and achy and had my hands tied behind my back. Then I forgot all about myself as I caught sight of the source of that noxious burning smell.

“Dante,” I croaked, my lips cracked and dry. The inside of my mouth was gummy, and my skin was pink and flushed. But that was nothing compared to Dante’s condition, I saw as he looked up. His face, his chest, were unburned where he had curled. The rest of him, however, was a red, oozing, blistering wreck. His back, arms, even the soles of his feet, were an angry, swollen mess of weeping boils and melting ooze. His flesh was burned, all but where the silver rope bound his wrists just below the bracelet bands he still wore. There the skin was a weeping, crusty black beneath the painful silver binding.

“Oh my God . . . Dante!”

“How are you feeling?” His voice was unbelievably calm and evenly metered.

“How am I feeling?” Horror choked my voice and hysteria hovered nearby, but I battled it down.

“Your respirations slowed. Thought you were going to stop breathing.” Only then did any emotion leak into his face—the sick worry he had felt for me.

“How long was I out?”

“Six hours, at a rough guess.”

Six hours while he had literally broiled.

“I’m sorry I didn’t wake up sooner.” I tried to roll over onto my knees, but my body didn’t seem to want to cooperate. It was as if an anchor was weighing down each of my limbs. The two darts were still stuck in my thigh, their feathered tails sticking up like tiny flags. “I’m awake, but my body still seems to be asleep. I think there’s a paralytic component to the venom.”

I was awake but useless to him. Fucking great. Wetting my cracked lips, I looked around. With the sun cast high overhead, the only sliver of shade was against the far wall. “Can you reach the shaded area?”

“Already tried. They tethered us out in the center. My rope doesn’t reach far enough.”

I tested my fingers and toes and found I was able to curl and wriggle them, move my arms and legs a feeble bit. “How much longer can you hold up?”

“Not much longer.” His voice held none of the enormous pain he must have been in, but there were still signs of it—I could hear his distressingly fast heartbeat, his almost panting breaths. “I passed the critical point already. It’ll go quickly downhill from here.”

“How fast?” I asked, licking my dry lips.

“Maybe another half an hour.”

“After so many doses, I’m getting to be a bit of an expert on this venom. I might be able to stand in half an hour”—if I was very, very lucky and determined—“but I’m not going to have my full strength back by then.”

Our eyes met, held across the short distance separating us.

“It doesn’t matter. It’s already too late for me. As least I know you’ll survive.”

“No, it’s not too late,” I said, rejecting his words as my mind revved back into gear. I couldn’t reach the darts, with my hands tied behind my back, but I could jiggle them loose by awkwardly rubbing my thighs together. Ouch! Not the most pain-free method but . . . yes! There they went, nicely dislodged, falling to the ground. I twisted myself around, fumbled them blindly into my hands, somehow managing not to stab myself, then inchwormed myself sideways toward Dante.