For all her efforts, the best she could do was make a swishing sound against the floor—but there was no way the soft noise was going to travel far.
With a strangled groan, she twisted her neck as much as she could—until, in her peripheral vision, she could see the glowing square of the stairwell’s light bleeding around the doorframe. Down at the bottom, the man’s feet cut a pair of reassuring shadows into the illumination.
On the far side of the barrier, Detective de la Cruz, who she knew, who was widely respected throughout all divisions, knocked one last time . . .
That set of shoes stepped away, the line of light at the floor now unbroken, once again.
As his footfalls receded and then went down the rickety steps, Rio’s long shot turned into an impossibility.
Gritting against the twist of cotton in her mouth, she screamed in frustration—or tried to. She was weak, and as the pressure flushed her face, she felt like the back of her skull was going to blow out. Or maybe that was the hangover from the drugs.
When she had come around from whatever Mozart had injected into her, she had been totally disorientated and nauseous—and the first thing she had worried about was vomiting. With the gag, she was liable to choke to death. Then, as her stomach had stopped churning so much, and she’d found no new injuries, she’d tried to see what she could about the decrepit room she was in. The windows were covered with blackout drapes, but the lengths were loose so the daylight had seeped through and created somewhat of a glow.
Enough for her to see. Enough for the video camera that was mounted on a tripod in front of her to record her.
There had been nothing else of note, no one with her, and nobody and nothing she could visualize off in the other shadowy spaces.
She knew the layout, however. Knew the smells, too.
Mickie’s building. She was in Mickie’s trap house. And there were people upstairs, directly above her. All day long.
At least, she assumed it was all day. Time had been a fluid thing, and only the progression of light had been a concrete measure that hours were passing. Well, that and the sounds of voices, male and female, and so many footfalls up and down the stairwell. There had been a lot of people in the building, and she knew who they were and what they were doing.
They were the homicide team.
Mozart had staked her out right underneath the crime scene.
Sick fucking bastard.
And now that they had pulled out, she knew that someone would be coming for her. Mozart wasn’t going to leave her alive here forever. The day and the beginning of the night had just been the mental-torture foreplay before the real fun and games for her began.
He’d done this before to people. She’d heard the rumors, knew that he liked to watch.
Desperate, she arched her back and strained her shoulders, pulling against the rope around her neck. When her airway started to close, she shifted the effort to her legs, dragging them up until her throat once again refused to let any oxygen through.
She got nowhere. And under other circumstances, she would really have respected the attention to detail that had to go into a setup like this. If she’d had just a little more leeway, she could have gotten someone’s attention by banging her feet, her head, her arms.
They’d definitely done this before, maybe in this very room.
And very soon, all of those professionals above, who had worked so hard on Mickie . . . were going to have another scene to work when Mozart and whoever he’d hired were done with her. Not that he was going to do the messy work with his own hands.
Adrenaline surged at the thought of what was coming for her, but there was nothing to fight and nowhere to go, and—
Off in the front of the apartment, the sound of a door opening was soft. Her eyes shifted down her body.
What was that smell? Like . . . sweet and death at the same time.
The chuckle in the darkness was quiet. “I think we’re alone now.”
Footsteps came up to her and the figure stopped at her knees. “Isn’t that an old pop song? Tiffany, I believe the singer was. I’m old enough to have heard her on the radio.”
Rio’s eyes strained against the darkness and her body jerked as she tried to get a bead on the man. Other than his slight accent, she had nothing to go on.
“Would you like to see me?”
A light flared, the lantern the man held in his right hand coming alive with an LED illumination that was icy bright. Her murderer was dressed in black and had a tight black hood pulled down over his face, looking like some kind of wraith out of a nightmare.
Recoiling and blinking, Rio tried to think. Then worried about her breathing as her nose was stuffing up and there was nothing going in and out of her mouth because of the gag. As panic choked her, the man put the lantern down and stepped forward.
When he knelt down next to her, he was careful to stay out of the camera’s way, and she could feel his eyes on her as he looked her up and down.
With a steady hand, he pulled the mask off himself. “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Ainhoa.”
He had pale skin tone, pale, nearly white eyes, and white hair. His age was . . . unknowable. He was not young, but he wasn’t old, either, his lean face unlined and hawkish.
There was a sharp sound of metal on metal, a switchblade triggered.
The blade entered her visual field, shiny and clean, and the hand that held it was wearing a dark gray glove. In the back of her mind, she thought that the reflected light on the honed steel was the color of the man.
Icy cold.
“We’re going to have some fun now.”
The knife left her eye line—
As she felt the tip in between her breasts, she groaned and the man laughed again. “We’re going to have so much fun, Ainhoa. And I shall call you by your given name as we work through this process together. Although I’ve heard people call you by Rio, I prefer to be formal about things. No reason to be common in this.”