I concentrated on the slight, warm pulse of my moonstone necklace against my chest and siphoned a small amount of power into my arms. I struggled harder against my bonds. The ropes burned my skin, but I didn’t have time to devote any power or self-control to healing the tender wounds.
The cording around my arms must have been lined with some kind of metal, because they barely loosened in response to my struggles. If only I could break free of that, the ropes binding me to the chair would be no problem at all. I rocked too hard, and the chair fell backward. It slammed into the ground, and I smacked my head on the concrete—which only made my splitting headache worse—and pinned my arms behind me with my own weight. I used my momentum to turn the chair, and myself, to the side. But now one of my shoulders was pinned; the weight of the chair and my body dug into it with aching force.
The whole situation seemed utterly hopeless, but I didn’t stop.
What felt like an hour passed, but for all I really knew, it could have been only a few minutes. The warehouse was still empty—at least from what I could hear. The noises out on the street grew quieter as the night got darker. I had no more feeling in my trapped arm, and I didn’t know how much longer I could go before I had no feeling left inside of me at all.
A few more minutes passed, and then I heard the break-room door creak open. I lolled my head in the direction of the noise, expecting to find Jude or Talbot checking on me, but I watched with shock as two people crept into the room. One man was dressed in a brown hooded robe—and the other was Daniel.
“Gracie,” he said, and rushed over to me as quietly as he could.
“Run!” I whispered. “It’s a trap. Get out of here!”
“I know. You were too easy to find. But we still have to try.” He pulled my chair upright and tugged at the ropes, but they didn’t budge.
The man in the hooded robe riffled through the drawers in the counter. He pulled out a serrated knife and approached us. He pushed the hood of his robe off his head and handed the knife to Daniel.
“Gabriel?” I looked at Daniel as he went to work cutting the ropes from the chair. “What the heck is he doing here?” Not that I was ungrateful for his assistance—just surprised, considering our history.
“Gabriel is the one who followed you here.”
“Your mother got concerned when she couldn’t find you at the festival,” Gabriel said as he worked on unwinding the cording that bound my ankles. “Then your sister said she saw you leave Main Street with a boy. I found your basket in the parking lot behind the hardware store and then followed the trail here. I called Daniel as soon as I could.”
“Luckily, I was already on my way home,” Daniel said. “I wasn’t too far from the city.” He cut through the last rope and pulled me out of the chair.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” I asked.
“No.” He brushed a curling strand of my hair off my face. “But I’ve found what I need.”
I got lost in his deep, dark eyes for a moment.
“We should go,” Gabriel said.
“Right.” Daniel pulled the cording from my wrists and then locked hands with me. “Stay as close to me as you can. We came in through an entrance in The Depot. There’s an underground corridor linking these two buildings together.”
“So this is the warehouse next to the club?”
Daniel nodded. “You ready? We’re going to make a run for it.”
I stretched out my arms and legs, happy for some relief. “They’re probably waiting for us.”
“We’ll just have to see.”
Gabriel went out of the break-room door first. Daniel and I followed, hand in hand. We stayed close to the wall, surveying the warehouse. All seemed quiet. The barracks were empty. I looked up at the balcony and the darkened windows of the upper office next to it. There was no sign of whomever had been up there before.
Daniel tightened his grip on my hand. “There’s another exit over there. It looks like it’s padlocked, but with the three of us working together, I bet we can break it loose. I don’t want to risk the corridor. It’s too boxed in.”
“Sounds good,” Gabriel said.