They walked into another room…or rather, one of her legs moved; the other just dragged behind her. The two women bore her entire weight. Was she having a stroke? What was happening?
Thinking was getting harder to do. Everything seemed distorted. They walked at least a mile into a huge, round room, stopping at a raised stone altar. There were little beings holding it up. Baby human monsters. With teeth. They twisted around to look at her. She tried to scream, but her mouth didn’t open. One of the women drew her cape from her. She expected a rush of chilly air, but couldn’t feel anything. Someone lifted her onto the platform, setting her down on her robe. The red velvet was the only color in the whole room. Maybe it was just brighter looking than anything else because of the stream of moonlight spilling over her.
The women who’d helped her come in here disappeared into the shadows. It was sick how they left. They didn’t walk out backward; they just got smaller and smaller then were gone. She couldn’t move well enough to look around the whole room, but she realized she wasn’t alone. There were alcoves spread about the space with statues in them. Some of the statues wore black robes, some white. As she watched, they stepped out of their cubbies and came closer. No, that wasn’t right. They didn’t move—they got bigger.
A man came to the side of the altar. She recognized him but couldn’t quite place who he was. Where did she know him from? As she studied his face, it morphed from handsome, Nordic features to those of a leering, horned satyr. He leaned over her and ripped her slip apart, baring her before all the statues. He ran his hand down her body, over a breast, her ribs, her pubic mound, then down one leg, which he lifted and resettled in the channel at the corner of the dais.
Moving to the other side of her, he repeated the process with the strokes and lifted her other leg into its place, leaving her open and helpless. She couldn’t fight, couldn’t scream, couldn’t do any of the things Angel had trained her to do.
Her only defense was to close her eyes. She couldn’t even feel the tears she knew she wept.
*
“She came this way,” Kelan growled as he paced the length of the wall. “She dropped those pearls for us so we could track her. She didn’t disappear into thin air.” He and Rocco began to pat the steel wall where the stairs dead-ended, trying to see where it opened. Kelan’s hand touched something that lit up. An access panel. “Rocco! I’ve got it!”
Kelan lifted the badge he’d taken from one of the mechanics above ground, and tapped it against the panel. The door slid to the side. The room inside was dark, lit only by a few candles. Two women stood guard. They each carried a tray with a single glass of red wine on it.
“Welcome,” they said in unison.
Kelan could hear a hum coming from the area behind the women, a circular area with Moorish arches in two rings. He couldn’t see into the room from where he stood, but these women were definitely meant to keep them out.
“Would you care to refresh yourselves before joining the others?” one of the women asked as they pushed their trays toward him and Rocco. Both he and Rocco swiped the trays off their hands, an action that opened them to the daggers the women thrust up toward their chins. Kelan caught the woman’s upward-thrusting hand in both of his, using her forward momentum against her as he turned the blade to her throat and sliced the side of her neck. Rocco stabbed the other woman, shoving her blade into her chest. They both dropped to the ground at about the same moment.
Kelan and Rocco stepped into the outer ring of the rotunda. What he saw chilled his insides. Fiona was laid out on a stone table, nude. Her eyes moved, but her body didn’t. A man was touching her…a man he knew. He was the fourth contender in the arena fight.
Kelan looked around the room, where caped men and women hummed and swayed. Their hoods were down, but in the dim light, Kelan couldn’t quite make out their faces. All of them stood except for one man, almost directly opposite him, who sat in a huge, golden, throne-like chair.
“Is that King?” Rocco asked in a whisper.
“Probably.”
“Jafaar’s here.”
Kelan looked at Rocco. Before he could speak, an alarm went off. The people in the room started to buzz around, uncertain where to go to get out. Kelan looked back at the women they’d dropped; one of them had crawled over to a rope pull and was still clinging to it even slumped back against the wall as she was.
“I’m going for Fiona,” Kelan told Rocco. “Wait a minute, then go in for Jafaar. Perhaps he’ll think the alarm sounded above the stairs, too. See if you can find another exit and get him out.” He met Rocco’s eyes briefly, knowing it went without saying that if his cover was blown, Rocco was going to have to take out Jafaar. His death could be absorbed into the mayhem that was shortly about to break loose, while Khalid’s cover could remain in place.
Kelan walked into the rapidly emptying rotunda. The blond guy was climbing up onto Fiona’s table. He was naked. His erection hung low between his legs. Kelan thought about a dozen different ways of ending him, but knew he had to get the guy away from Fiona first. He walked up to the guy and punched him in the ear, toppling him off the other side of the tall marble altar. Kelan grabbed the edge of the red fabric under Fiona and pulled it up over her. When he looked up, he could see King in the distance getting up off his throne.