“It . . . was . . . her idea. Her . . . i . . . dea . . .”
The words came out as he banged, banged, banged the dumbass piece of shit into the concrete over and over again.
“Executioner . . . has . . . her.”
Lucan stopped with the bread dough routine. After a split second of total shock, he shoved his face forward, baring his fangs. “You better hope she lives. Or I’m going to kill you with my bare hands—”
“I tried to stop her, asshole!” With a shove, Apex broke free—but then tripped over his own feet, fell onto the steps, and slumped like he was out of gas. “Fuck.”
“I don’t believe you,” Lucan hissed.
“You want to argue with me or save her life? We need to get her out of the Executioner’s private quarters. I heard them talking from where I was—”
“Fuck you. No one can trust you—”
Apex shot up and got right back into Lucan’s grill. “She was trying to help Kane. For that alone, she deserves better than dying at the Executioner’s hands—or underneath him. So you can bet her fucking life you can trust me on this.”
Between one blink and the next, Lucan remembered Rio strung between two stakes on the floor of that apartment, that human cutting open her shirt with that knife.
“I owe her,” Apex announced.
There was a pause. And then Lucan lowered his head. Rubbed his aching temples.
“Since when did you grow a conscience?” he muttered as he went over to the doorway and checked through the glass again.
Apex cracked his knuckles. “Since I’ve been sitting at the bedside of that male of worth in the storage room. And then listening to that female of yours get manhandled by a goddamn guard.”
Lucan couldn’t even think about that last one. Or his head was going to fucking explode. “Like morals are something you catch like a cold.”
“Shut up, wolven. You can’t bust her out of there alone and you know it. You need me.”
As Lucan assessed the guards on duty at the wall, he shook his head . . . but couldn’t argue. “We have to go for a frontal assault. Take out the pair by the door, get into the private quarters—”
“The guards’ll call for reinforcements if we rush them, and the backups are only one floor down. We need a reason to get close.”
Lucan frowned. Then it came to him.
“I know what to do.” With a quick yank, he pulled open the door. “Make like you’re in on it all.”
“As if I’ve never done that before,” Apex muttered.
The two walked forward at a leisurely pace, Apex a couple of feet behind, as was his way. He never, ever made a pair with another, the I-am-an-island bullshit a cliché except for the tally of his kill count. Which was about to go up by at least one, maybe two guards—
They’d gone about halfway down the hallway of workrooms when gunshots rang out, the pops! muffled and distant. As the guards glanced toward the door to the Executioner’s private quarters—because, hey, those kinds of noises were not that unusual—Lucan ditched his plan to talk some bullshit about the deal and lunged into a run—
Apex yanked him back, and spoke under his breath. “You have to pretend you don’t care. You make like it matters, and the Executioner is going to have your balls really in a grip. You want in there to help her, you have to chill.”
It took every bit of self-control for Lucan not to explode into a sprint, but in the back of his mind, he knew it was unlikely she was merely wounded. The Executioner only shot to kill. He liked his torture wet and messy—and it wasn’t until he was done or bored that he’d cap someone.
Unless someone was a physical threat, of course, and Rio, as a human woman, would never be one of those.
“I’m going to kill that bastard with my bare hands,” Lucan growled.
“And my job is to make sure you have plenty of time to do that.”
One of the guards pointed off toward the stairwell’s entry. “Go back to your quarters. Right now.”
“Yeah, no.” Lucan came to a halt, putting his hands in his pockets and rocking back and forth on the toes of his boots. “I’m well aware of what the Executioner has in there. Right now, as you say.”
The guard leveled his gun right at Lucan’s face. “I know you have special privileges, but fuck you.”
Lucan leaned forward, puckered up, and kissed the muzzle of the weapon. “You’re so cute. But the Executioner needs to know that that human female with him? She’s his only way to Mozart. She’s the source down in Caldwell that he’s asked me to negotiate with. I brought her here to prove that we had the capacity to meet the supply she wants. We lose her, we lose all his business he planned for, paid for, is expecting, you know the drill.”
As light dawned on the guard’s Marblehead, that gun started to lower and Lucan shrugged. “If he’s just plugged her full of lead? He’s shit out of luck and he’s going to blame you for not telling him who she is. Better hope the holes are somewhere that doesn’t leak a lot—”
“Fuck,” the guard said as he went for the door and entered a code. “Sir, we have a problem—”
As the way was opened, both of the guards, and then Lucan and Apex, funneled into the Executioner’s private quarters. And what they saw was—
“Rio?” Lucan breathed.
In the center of the large open space, next to the army field desk that had been set up by the foot of a mattress . . . the human woman was standing over the dead body of the Executioner, the gun Lucan had given her in her hand.
She looked up—and did a double take, like seeing Lucan was the last thing she’d expected. Although as levels of shock-and-awe went, Lucan was feeling like he was totally winning in that department. Had she really just—
“He was going to kill me,” she announced. “It was justifiable homicide.”