TWENTY-SEVEN
I was deathly afraid of whatever Konstantin was going to do next. Even if there was some miraculous way Anderson could escape when encased in solid metal, I was sure it would take a while. Hell, it would probably take a while before he could possibly come back to life. I had no idea how long it would take that molten metal to cool, but I was sure its temperature would be lethal for quite some time.
Meanwhile, I was chained hand and foot and trapped with a man who thought rape and torture were fun. The only other living person who knew where I was was Cyrus, and he’d made it abundantly clear that he had no intention of saving me.
In short, it was looking spectacularly bad for the home team, and I was fighting the very reasonable urge to panic. I tried to wriggle my hands out of the cuffs, willing to take off as many layers of skin as necessary to escape them, but I didn’t think I was getting out of them without removing a few pesky bones from my hand.
Konstantin licked his lips, and I couldn’t tell if it was an unconscious gesture, or if he was trying to feed my panic. He smiled over his shoulder at the hole in the floor, the contents of which were still emitting a faint red glow.
“I’m sure that will hold him,” he said, turning back to me, “but a little more overkill can’t hurt.”
I tried to flinch away as he reached for me. All I managed to do was tip myself over. Konstantin grabbed me by the waist, then flung me over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. I wished I could struggle more effectively, but it’s hard to do much of anything when your hands are cuffed behind your back and your ankles are shackled.
“Patience, Nikki dear,” Konstantin said as he started up the narrow stairs. “I’ll give you plenty of things to get excited about later, but being carried up the stairs isn’t one of them. You might want to save your energy.”
Raw terror coursed through my veins with every beat of my heart. There was nothing I could do to get his hands off me. The sense of helplessness and dread was crushing, but I was never, ever going to give up fighting. I struggled and squirmed, not caring that getting free of Konstantin at this moment meant another painful tumble down the stairs, but I’m a small woman, and Konstantin was way too strong for me.
Konstantin paused when we reached the pool deck.
“I wonder how long it would take you to bend to my will if I dropped you in the pool for a while. It certainly helped put our dear, departed Emma in a more accommodating state of mind.”
I struggled even harder as Konstantin walked to the edge of the pool. I didn’t want to die ever again, and from everything I’d heard, drowning is a very unpleasant way to go. A life that alternated between drowning and being suspended in the airless dark of death wasn’t worth living. Maybe I should have been hoping he followed through with the threat, because at least while he was drowning me, he wouldn’t be raping me, but I wanted to live. Where there’s life, there’s hope, right?
Konstantin sighed in mock regret. “Such a shame the pool is too shallow. Of course, there is that lovely pond out back. As you might have noticed, I wouldn’t have any trouble melting all that inconvenient ice.”
Oh good, I wasn’t going to be drowning in the next five seconds. One could argue that things were looking up.
Konstantin continued on past the pool, carrying me up to the ground floor and then wending his way through the house to the back door. I remembered his previous comments about overkill and wondered what the hell he was up to. If he was planning some additional safeguard to reassure himself that Anderson was trapped, then why was he leaving the house?
I hadn’t realized my clothes were damp with sweat until we made it outside and a blast of wind plastered them tightly against my skin. I started shivering almost immediately. Konstantin wasn’t wearing a coat, but the cold didn’t seem to bother him. Maybe he could generate his own heat using his powers. Or maybe his excitement over whatever torture he had in mind was enough to keep him warm.
I had mostly stopped struggling. I was just too exhausted to keep it up, and while I was determined to fight to the bitter end, I had decided to conserve my energy for that mythical moment where fighting might actually do some good.
Slung over Konstantin’s shoulder as I was, I couldn’t see where we were going, but then I didn’t need to see. We were going to the pond, of course. Whether he truly meant to toss me in there or was just trying to push my fear to the max, I didn’t know.
I didn’t have a properly scaled map of the property in my head, but when Konstantin came to a stop, I knew we weren’t anywhere near far enough away from the house to have reached the pond yet. Konstantin let go of me and ducked his shoulder so I would roll helplessly off. I hit the snow with a cry of pain as my broken rib reminded me it hadn’t finished healing yet.
“You might want to watch this,” Konstantin said, reaching down and dragging me into a sitting position by the collar of my shirt.
I sat panting and shivering in the snow, my eyes squeezed half shut as I waited out the pain. Konstantin stood slightly in front of me and held out his hands like he had in the basement. Ignoring the biting cold, I let my fingers sift through whatever snow they could reach, hoping to find something I could use as a weapon. There was no way I could throw anything with my hands bound behind me, but I might be able to use my feet.
It was a long shot, no doubt about it. But a long shot was better than no shot, so I kept searching.
Once again, I felt a blast of heat, and something like an invisible fireball shot from Konstantin’s hands toward the house. I could track its progress as it evaporated the snow in its path. It expanded as it traveled, growing wider until when it hit the house it was almost wide enough to engulf it.
The moment Konstantin’s fireball hit the house, it went up in flames, the walls practically melting away. The fire spread instantly, racing around the walls and over the roof. Windows shattered, and the flames crawled in like living things, all blue and white with heat. I’d been shivering and cold a moment ago, but now I felt like I was sitting in an oven.
In a matter of seconds, the entire house was ablaze, the flames roaring with the fury of a forest fire. Konstantin basked in the glow of the fire for a moment, then frowned.
“Hmm,” he said. “Perhaps we’re still standing a little too close.”
It was almost unbearably hot, and I was more than happy to put some more distance between myself and the fire. I’d have liked it a lot better if Konstantin hadn’t moved me by grabbing hold of my braid and dragging me through the melting snow. Despite the pain, I kept trying to sift through the snow with my fingers in search of a weapon. Unfortunately, the snow was covering a lawn, and there aren’t a whole lot of useful throwing weapons lying about on your average lawn.
Konstantin had dragged me all of about five feet when there was a deafening, earthshaking boom. He let go of my hair and dropped to the ground as the flaming house collapsed, the walls falling in upon themselves. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Konstantin covering his head, and I wished I could do the same. There was another blast, even louder than the first, and a huge cloud of smoke and dirt and debris fountained into the air.
I had no way to protect myself as the debris came raining down. The best I could do was curl into the smallest ball possible and hope nothing too big and lethal landed on me. Flaming pieces of house dropped to the ground all around me. A couple of the missiles hit me, including one that nearly lit my pants leg on fire, but I rolled enough for the wet snow to snuff it out.
When the debris rain had lessened enough for me to risk it, I sat up and looked all around me.
The house was completely gone, nothing but a burned-out, debris-filled, smoldering crater where it had once sat. Konstantin had seemed to know the explosion was coming, and I figured that meant he had set up explosives so that the house would fall down directly over the basement where he’d stashed Anderson. Now I saw what he meant by overkill, though to tell you the truth, if being encased in metal didn’t keep Anderson contained, I doubted the weight of an entire mansion crumbling on top of him would, either. Still, it made for quite the spectacular show.
I hoped that a stray piece of debris had crushed Konstantin like the bug he was, but he’d actually gotten us pretty close to the edge of the debris field before the charges went off. There were bits and pieces lying on the still-melting snow around us, but most of the heavy stuff had come down closer to the house, and except for his seriously destroyed designer suit, Konstantin was unharmed. His eyes were practically glowing with pleasure as he eyed the destruction.
For the moment, his attention was not focused on me, and I knew I had to take advantage of his distraction in any way I could. The nice, grassy back lawn had been a poor candidate for providing a projectile weapon, but thanks to Konstantin’s overkill, there was now a lot of potentially handy debris lying about.
I searched the ground around me. I needed something heavy enough to do some damage, yet small and light enough that I could either lift it with my bound feet, or at least slip my feet under it so I could give it a kick. And it also needed to be close enough that I could get to it before Konstantin noticed I was getting ready to try something.
Moments ago, I’d been glad we were out of the worst of the debris field, but now I wished I had more larger chunks around me. Most of it was too small to do any significant damage. However, I did spot a broken piece of brick not too far away. A normal person wouldn’t have been able to do any damage with that piece of brick unless they could really wind up and throw it like a baseball, but I thought it possible that with my aim, I might be able to do it.
Keeping an eye on Konstantin, I wriggled and squirmed my way toward the brick, angling my body so my feet would get there first. Despite the fact that my socks were soaking wet from melted snow and my feet beneath them felt frostbitten in places and burned in others, I was glad I’d taken off my boots while in the house, because I was definitely more agile without them.
I managed to wriggle my toes under the piece of brick, then positioned myself so I could get the best momentum behind my kick/throw. Konstantin was still looking at the crater. The brick felt alarmingly light under my feet, and I knew it was all going to come down to perfect placement. I had to hit Konstantin in just the right spot to disable him, and in my experience, the eye is just about anyone’s most vulnerable spot. Lots of soft tissue to damage, some delicate bones that can shatter, and let’s face it, there’s a certain terror factor to feeling your eye squish.
I needed him facing me, and closer.
“Are you posing for a picture or something?” I jeered, and he finally managed to drag his attention away from the ex-house.
“I was observing a moment of silence for Anderson,” he replied with heavy sarcasm, and though he was looking at me, I could tell his attention was still divided. Which was good, because if he realized I had a weapon within my reach (sort of), he might decide to shoot me before coming any closer.
“But if you’re impatient to find out what I have planned for you, I’ll be happy to hurry things along.”
He was smiling his smug smile, jovial, arrogant, secure in his victory. Just the way I wanted him. He took a whopping two steps in my direction before he noticed the positioning of my feet. His eyes widened, and as he stepped backward, he reached for the gun still sticking out of his pants.
I wanted him closer, but it was now or never.
Putting every bit of strength I could muster into it, I scooped up the piece of brick, using the backs of my feet rather like a lacrosse stick, and kicked my bound legs as hard as I could toward Konstantin’s face.
I had taken Jamaal’s eye out once with a well-aimed toss of a stiletto-heeled shoe, but I wasn’t quite as lucky this time. The brick hit Konstantin’s eye, and he fell to the ground with a gratifying scream of pain, but though he clutched the socket, there was no sign of blood leaking through his fingers.
I hadn’t taken out his eye, but for a few precious moments, he was going to be in too much pain to retaliate. I couldn’t let him have time to recover.
I spotted another piece of brick, even smaller than the first, positioned between me and Konstantin. I wriggled toward it and kicked it at Konstantin’s head. He was protecting his wounded eye with his hand, but his other eye made a good target.
The second piece of brick didn’t hurt him as much. The hand that wasn’t clutching his wounded eye pulled his gun from his belt, and I had to duck as he fired a couple of blind shots in my direction. I suspected he’d get me with a lucky shot before I was able to pitch enough debris at him to incapacitate him, so I needed another plan.
I hunched in on myself, making myself as small a target as possible, then tried to contort myself enough to get my cuffed hands down below my butt. I’d tried this maneuver when I’d been duct taped in the trunk of the car and hadn’t been able to manage it, but I had a lot more freedom of movement out here in the open. I practically tore both arms out of their sockets to do it, but I managed to get first my butt, then my legs, through the circle of my arms so my hands were in front of me. Still cuffed together, but it was an improvement.
Konstantin fired off another shot, and it splashed up muddy snow way too close to my head for comfort. He tried to fire again, but he was out of ammo.
“Probably shouldn’t have wasted so many bullets on Anderson,” I taunted, because I couldn’t resist.
Konstantin dropped his hand from his eye, and though it was closed and swollen and obviously painful, he was going to be back to full capacity way sooner than I would like.
“I have more,” he growled at me, reaching into his pants pocket.
Of course he did.
Bracing myself with my hands, I pushed to my feet. I could move a little by shuffling, but by the time I got anywhere, Konstantin would be reloaded. He might not be able to aim as well as he’d like with one eye swollen shut, but I doubted he’d have any trouble hitting me with a full clip at his disposal. So instead of taking little shuffle-steps, I bunny-hopped.
I probably looked pretty ridiculous, but aesthetics were the last thing on my mind. I hopped toward another piece of debris, then bent to retrieve it and hurl it at Konstantin’s hands. I didn’t even know what I had thrown. It wasn’t big or heavy enough to do damage, but it did cause him to drop his clip in the snow. I thought that was an improvement, until he abandoned the gun and clip and surged to his feet.
Even if I hadn’t been bound hand and foot, Konstantin didn’t need a gun to hurt me. He was a big, strong guy, and I bet he had plenty of experience wrestling women into submission.
I hopped away from him as fast as I could, my eyes frantically scanning the grass and snow for the perfect weapon.
I saw it about six feet away, a big chunk of concrete that might have come from the foundation. I wasn’t going to be able to hop that distance before Konstantin tackled me, so I threw myself forward in a headfirst slide, my hands outstretched.
I might have put a little more oomph into that slide than was strictly necessary. I jammed my fingers against the concrete, breaking a few nails and possibly dislocating my middle finger. I swallowed the pain and wrapped my hands around the concrete, rolling into a sitting position so I could get some momentum on the throw.
At the last moment, Konstantin, who was almost on top of me, seemed to realize he had made a mistake. He tried to skid to a stop, holding his hands out in front of him. I think he was trying to summon another blast of heat, but it was too late.
I put my whole body into the awkward, two-handed, side-arm throw, and the chunk of concrete hit Konstantin right between the eyes.
He staggered and went down to his knees, blood streaming from his nose and from a large cut on his forehead. My throw had been too awkward, and he’d been too close for me to get enough momentum to knock him out. However, it had obviously made him woozy.
He flailed at me as I hopped over toward the chunk of concrete, but I think he was seeing double or triple, because he didn’t come close to hitting me. I raised the concrete over my head, and this time I had a nice downward angle for my throw.
The concrete caved in the back of Konstantin’s head, and he went down for the count.