Never Die Alone (A Bentz/Montoya Novel Book 8) (3 page)

As Chloe cried out again, Zoe snapped back to awareness and yanked hard on the rope. She wound it tighter until her shoulder muscles screamed and the nylon cut into her fingers.

The beast responded by clawing at the rope. Sputtering and moaning, he staggered away from the wall, a little less steady this time.

She braced herself, pulled back so hard that her arm muscles ached.

His muscles bunched. With a muffled roar, he threw himself backward again. She banged against the wall and he pinned her, squeezing her against rough concrete. Every bone in her body rattled and her bare skin felt scraped raw.

She felt the rope slipping.
No, no, no!

Desperately she clung on. Tried to breathe.

“Zoe!” Chloe screamed from the shadows in the corner. “Help me!”

Zoe’s fingers were cramped and bleeding. She dragged in a breath, determined to hold on.

The monster’s back slackened. He stumbled slightly and then caught his balance as he gasped and sputtered. He was strong, but his knees were giving out.

Good!
Gritting her teeth, she wound the rope around her fingers and yanked even tighter. Both his hands were on the noose, scraping and pulling. He rocked to and fro, his legs wobbling.

Wobbling, he sank to his knees.

Still, she clung to the rope as his throat rattled, a hiss of air still escaping.
Damn it!
With all her strength, she wrenched the cord so hard she was certain the bones in her hands would break. She didn’t care. “Chloe!” she yelled. “Get yourself free.”

More wailing.

Sometimes her twin was such a wimp!

“Pull yourself together! The scissors. Cut yourself free! Come on, Chloe! Do it! Do it now!” She was barking orders as the big man teetered on his knees. “Die, you son of a bitch,” she growled into his ear as gravity dragged him to the ground. “Just frickin’ die!”

As he slumped to the floor, pinning her leg, she didn’t let go, wasn’t about to take any chances. Still holding tight to the cord, she searched the gloom and ignored the pain screaming up her thigh. Damn it all to hell, he was a heavy bastard.

With difficulty, she unwrapped the cord from one hand, then in the gloom, gripped both ends with the other. Slapping and sweeping the floor with her free arm, she frantically searched for a weapon.

When he moaned, she tugged the rope again, but her strength was nearly zapped. Chloe was still whimpering in a far corner. Shit! As usual, Zoe had to do everything. Scrabbling wildly with her free hand, she hit something sharp. Metal. The scissors!

She slid backward and kicked at the beast of a man with her free foot to roll him off her leg. Finally, she let go of the cord around his neck. Then she curled her bloody fingers through the eye ring of the scissors, turned, and with all her might, stabbed him in the throat. The blades went deep into the soft tissue, right into the welt created by the cord.

Chloe screamed.

Zoe wasn’t finished. With an effort she pulled at the eye rings of the scissors and forced the blades open, trying to slice whatever tissue she could. Then, she slammed the scissors shut again.

The beast roared over a sickening slurp of blood and muscle and tendon. Zoe hoped to high heaven that she’d severed something important—the carotid, his jugular, his spine. The ensuing sucking sound curdled her blood, but she couldn’t think about it. She only hoped the bastard bled out quickly, for both their sakes.

Zoe crawled across the floor toward the sound of her sister and found Chloe naked, bound, and trembling against a wall. Her eyes were wide, her breathing shallow and rapid.

“Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God,” Chloe babbled, quivering and pale. “You killed him.”

“I hope so.”

Chloe started crying.

“Pull yourself together!” Zoe ordered and started cutting her sister’s hands free with the scissors. Her fingers cramped and she, too, was shaking, but she forced the bloody blades open and closed, then sawed with them as Chloe stared in horror. “Come on, come on,” Zoe ordered herself, and shot a glance at the motionless blob that was their abductor. The cords were tough, and part of her longed to crumple into a pile like her sister, but adrenaline and fear spurred her on.

And Chloe was no help at all. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” she chanted, her eyes wild and teary. “Oh, no . . . no, no!” She began to pant, gasping for breath.

“Shit.” Zoe winced, working one prong of the scissors into the coils of a fat knot.

The cord over Chloe’s wrists weakened and finally gave. “Come on, help me with your ankles,” Zoe ordered, but Chloe was shivering and wild-eyed, panting and damned useless.

“Chloe!” Zoe gave her twin a sharp shake, then worked at the ropes around her twin’s ankles. “Come on. We have to get out of here. Now!”

“No. Oh, God. He . . . he!” She was staring petrified over Zoe’s shoulder, and for a split second Zoe thought the freak had awakened and was dragging himself up to pounce again. A quick look confirmed he was still unmoving. Hopefully dead.

Still, her twin was frozen in place. “I . . . I can’t . . . he . . .”

“Stop it!” Zoe ordered.

“I . . . I . . . I can’t.” Chloe sobbed, staring at the naked man prone on the floor, blood still pumping in a dark pool blooming around his body. “I—”

Slap!
Zoe swatted her twin on the cheek.

“Ow!”

“You can and you will,” Zoe insisted, finally untying the rope around Chloe’s ankles.

As Chloe started unwinding the cord from her neck and kicking her feet free, Zoe spied a ladder propped upward, extending through a hole in the ceiling.

Zoe pulled Chloe to her feet. “Come on, let’s go!” Even in the garish half-light she could see a red welt rising on her sister’s cheek. Zoe didn’t have time to care. Served the ninny right. Propelling her sister toward the ladder, she took one last look at the freak still bleeding out. “Get going!” she commanded. “Up!”

“Geez, you didn’t have to hit me.” Chloe was rubbing the red spot above her jaw.

“Yeah, I did. Now! Up, damn it. Climb!” What was wrong with her twin?

With maddening slowness, Chloe began the climb up the teetering ladder.
Come on, come on, come on!
Zoe mentally urged, right on her sister’s heels. Impatient, she pushed her upward on the unsteady rungs. As Chloe reached the top, the great unknown, Zoe heard a pained groan come from behind them, an ugly noise rising from the shadows.

Her heart sank.

The freak wasn’t dead.

C
HAPTER
3

“W
hat’s wrong?” Olivia’s voice was a balm, always had been. Soft and sensual, with a bit of a Southern drawl. Sexy as hell.

Bentz sat on the edge of their bed, felt the mattress beneath the thin quilt sag. He’d tried to enter the bedroom quietly so as not to disturb her, but of course that had been impossible. “A case.”

“Father John.” Not a question.

“Yeah.”

Sighing, she rolled over and hit the bedside lamp. In the soft illumination he saw the concern in her large eyes, the dusting of freckles over her nose. “Want to talk about it?” Yawning, she swept a few blond curls from her face.

“Nah.”

“You never do.”

He chuckled, leaned over, and brushed a kiss across her cheek. God, she was beautiful.

“You’ve had a beer?” No judgment. Just a question asked as she pulled herself onto her elbows and cocked her head to one side.

“Or two.”

“So the case is really bad.”

“I hate that bastard.”

“I know. We all do.” She was wearing an oversized T-shirt but was still incredibly feminine.

He chuckled at her pout, unbuttoned his dress shirt, peeled it off, and became serious again. “This guy, a fake priest of all things. I thought he was dead. I mean . . .” He pulled his T-shirt over his head and yanked off his pants. “What the hell? Couldn’t he have had the decency to die in that damned swamp?” Angrily, he balled the dirty shirt. “I mean, all of my cases are bad. You know that. Hell, I work homicide. But some of them, some of the killers, like this one, make it personal.”

“You’ll get him,” she said, smiling up at him in the shadowed room with its gauzy curtains, huge bed, and coved ceilings. “You always do.”

“I thought I already had,” he muttered, tossing his shirt into a darkened corner where a hamper stood near the closet. He missed, of course, the tee catching on the side of the hamper. Not that he cared. He thought of all the cases that he hadn’t closed, the killers who’d gotten away. There were several where he’d known who the criminal was but hadn’t been able to gather enough evidence to put the bastard away. And there were a few where a criminal was convicted, the case against him sufficient, but still Bentz had wondered if the right man had ended up behind bars. Those, thankfully, were not even a handful.

“Hey, can’t you forget about it for a few hours?” Olivia said. She’d let one long leg slide from beneath the quilt, and reached up to touch his cheek. With a gleam in her eyes and a lift of one already arched brow, she added, “I’m awake, and the baby’s asleep.”

He couldn’t help the grin that grew from one side of his jaw to the other. “Why, Mrs. Bentz,” he asked, “are you trying to seduce me?”

“Never,” she said, but dropped the hand from his face, slowly tracing his neck and chest to fall into his crotch. “Uh-oh.” Feigned innocence.

Jesus, he loved her.

She let a finger trail between his legs.

His erection, already at half-mast, stiffened.

“You’re wicked,” he said, and leaned over to kiss her.

“Only for you,” she said into his open mouth as he scraped back the blankets with one hand and stretched out beside her. Her arms surrounded his neck and she kissed him with a passion that had been with them since the first time they’d made love. Yes, they’d had their bumps in the road. Their relationship had been far from perfect. But the heat between them, that raw lust and deep yearning, had never faltered. And now, as her hands sculpted his muscles and his blood quickened in his veins, he closed his eyes, lost himself in her, and wished that the lovemaking would never end.

 

 

“Come on, hurry!” Zoe said, pushing her sister from that hellhole. The ladder had opened to the stone floor of a small one-room building that was more shed than living space, and she’d had to push her sister up and out. After they had made their way up the metal rungs, Zoe had taken the time to pull the ladder to the ground floor of the darkened shed. If the psycho in his rubber apron somehow had the grit and strength to wake up and try to follow them, he’d be trapped in his own lair.

Fitting, Zoe figured, as she knocked over a chair and tripped while ushering Chloe outside to the darkness of the night.

“What about him?” Chloe asked, her voice tremulous with fear.

“He’s dead.”

“You killed him?”

“Yes! Move it! ”

“Good. Twisted psycho-freak!”

The old door scraped as Zoe tugged it open. Then she led her sister into the dark night. The cabin was dilapidated, ready to topple onto the sparse, weedy clearing around it. A forest surrounding the small patch of ground seemed to block out any light. From here, there were no visible neighbors, no signs of civilization. If only she could hear the hum of traffic on a highway or the clack of a train on tracks or the deep moan of a foghorn on the river. But there was no sound beyond their tattered breathing, the steady patter of rain, and the sough of wind rushing through branches of nearby trees. Then a dog, as if disturbed from slumber, gave a sharp “woof.”

“Where are we?” Chloe whimpered, sounding as if she might start crying again.

“Don’t know. Come on!” Grabbing her sister’s hand, she started running along what seemed to be a path cutting through a dense thicket of trees. The night was warm and wet, rain falling softly, summer in Louisiana evident in the earthy smell and dense vegetation. From somewhere in the distance she thought she sensed the roll of a river, the smell of water.

There was no moonlight. Clouds blocked some of the stars and snuffed out most of the light.

“We . . . we need to call someone,” Chloe said as they sprinted.

“Good idea. Got your cell?”

“No, but—” The slumbering dog was now awake and barking wildly.

“Neither do I. Just keep moving.”

“But my feet . . .”

“Yeah, I know.” Zoe’s feet hurt, too. They were running barefoot through the woods, not a stitch on, probably getting bitten all over. Although the lane was now overgrown with tall grass, the gravel long driven into the ground, the twin tire tracks were still visible. Zoe stubbed her toe and bit back a curse. The weedy lane had to lead somewhere, she figured, to a county road or private drive or something. Their only course was to follow its winding path through the looming trees.

Every once in a while she glanced over her shoulder, worried that somehow the freak would escape from his own prison and break free, running them to the ground.
Impossible,
she told herself.
You killed him. You’re a murderess.

“Good.”

“What? What’s good?” Chloe asked in the darkness, her fingers still clutched in Zoe’s hand.

“Nothing.”

“Oh.” Disappointment. “Shit!” Chloe squealed and ducked as a creature of the night flew by. “Oh, God, was that a bat?”

“Don’t know. Don’t care.”

“An owl. That was it. Tell me it was an owl.”

Who cared? “Sure. An owl. Don’t worry about it. We’ve got to find someone to help us.”

“We’re naked!”

“I know. That’s the least of our problems right now.” Zoe kept pressing forward, hoping beyond hope that they would find safety and that the abomination who had captured them was dead. Why the hell had the freak kidnapped them? What was he doing at the workbench, cutting up the wire and ribbon? And why did he sing that stupid birthday song? Nothing made any sense. How did he even know it was their birthday? Who the fuck was he? “Come on,” she stepped up the pace, her mind racing faster than her bare feet. Obviously they’d been targeted because of their birthdays. He had known. How? Had he been following them? Stalking them?

Happy Birthday, dear twinsies . . .
Wasn’t that what he’d sung? As if the two of them being twins and sharing a birthday was significant. Holy shit, what was going on? “Hurry, Chloe,” she whispered urgently as the forest seemed to close in on them. It was her twenty-first birthday and, for the first time in her life, Zoe Denning personally felt the presence of evil in the world.

 

 

Pain screamed through his neck and throat.

An even deeper anguish came from the knowledge that the bitches had escaped.

For the first time ever, he’d lost both victims. He closed his eyes for a second and gathered himself. Willing the fire around his neck to subside, he reached up and felt the blood drying on his throat. He’d been lucky there. That cunt Zoe had tried to kill him with his own damned shears and rope. His lip curled in disgust at his weakness. But he wasn’t dead yet.

Wincing, he rolled over and climbed to his feet. His head was clearing at last. A quick survey and he saw the devastation in the basement, the cracked light, the scattered ribbon, the bloody scissors that had been meant to end his life.

He let out a hard growl as rage engulfed him. Didn’t they know he was doing them a favor? Taking their lives before they turned into adults? Saving them from the horrors of being separated, wrenched apart?

He’d been careless. Complacent.

And Zoe had gotten the drop on him.

Un-fucking-thinkable.

Blood had crusted down his neck, and he knew he was lucky to be alive, but the fury that consumed him didn’t allow him time to give himself a pat on the back. Not when the twins had gotten the better of him, left him for dead and found a way to break free. Fuck. Wait until Myra found out. Shit, he could already hear her taunting him, reminding him of what an idiot he was.

“Son of a bitch!” he roared, but his voice emerged as a whisper, a painful mew. He realized whatever that bitch Zoe had done to him with the rope around his neck and the scissors thrust into his throat was going to keep him from speaking very loudly, at least for a while. Not that it mattered, but it pissed him off.

Furious, his blood pumping, he pounded a heavy fist on his worktable.

She’d get hers.

He’d see to it.

He had to get them. Chase them down. Bring them back. Finish his work. He checked the clock. There was still time.

But a headache pounded behind his eyes and his throat felt as if all the demons in hell were gnawing at his flesh, chewing on him from the inside out. With difficulty, he staggered for the ladder and found it missing. “Goddamn it!” he hissed, then closed his mouth as pain exploded in his neck. With difficulty he peered upward and saw the foot of the ladder visible in the open door of the crawlspace.

How had he let down his guard, letting them escape?

Despite his wounds, he found the stool near his workbench and placed it under the opening in the ceiling. Standing on the stool, he reached up, took aim, and swung his belt over the protruding leg of the ladder. Eventually he was able to hook the buckle over the bottom rung. Slowly he pulled, but the belt slipped, fell back, the clasp nearly hitting him in the face.

“Shit!”

Again he swung the belt upward and hooked it. This time the connection was more secure. He tugged. The ladder moved. Gently, he pulled, forcing the ladder to the opening and levering it through. One final tug and gravity took care of the rest; the ladder slipped down to him. He secured the feet and a second later he was clambering up and checking the small cabin for signs of the twins. Nothing.

Outside the darkness was thick, no moon glow or starlight. A misting rain filled the air. He closed his eyes and strained to listen to the sounds of the night. Over the pounding of his own damned heartbeat he heard a hoot of an owl and the steady croak of a bullfrog and the rush of wind through the trees. But no frantic footsteps. No hushed voices. Nothing to indicate the twins were nearby.

Frustration burned through him with a savage heat, and even though he was stripped bare, wearing only the damned apron, he began to sweat. Had he lost them? The twin girls who could ID him? His teeth ground together as he searched the darkness. They couldn’t be far. He hadn’t passed out for that long, less than fifteen minutes, and they were both naked and on foot.

He didn’t think twice as he rounded the shed where his dog was going ape-shit, barking and howling loud enough to raise the dead. For a second, he thought about releasing Red, but he didn’t want to take the time and his van would be so much faster. He reached into a deep pocket of his apron and found his keys. There was only one way out of this place, and the lane was long.

 

 

“Hurry!” Zoe stage-whispered, still yanking on her twin’s hand. The rain was coming down harder now, fast and furious, so loud that she could barely make out the rush of the river. The sudden noise of a dog barking wildly in the distance alerted her senses. “Come on.” She couldn’t get away from that horrid cabin fast enough. Sure she’d left their captor bleeding out, probably dead already, but the all-consuming fear that they somehow wouldn’t escape kept her racing on the uneven track.

“Ow! Shit!” Chloe stumbled and let out a groan.

“What?”

“I think I cut my foot. Goddamned rock.”

Too bad. “
You’ll be all right.” Zoe kept pulling on her sister, forcing her to run.

“I . . . I don’t know.” Chloe’s whiny tone was back. “How did this happen?” she demanded, breathing hard. “Who was that psycho? What did he want from us?”

“Who knows? As you said he’s a psycho.” But whatever his sick plans were, they included their birthdays.

“Jesus, he was going to kill us, Zoe. I know it!”

“Just keep going,” Zoe said, tugging her sister along as a new noise cut through the night. A rumble of sorts. “Wait!” She skidded to a stop, wet grass and gravel sliding beneath her feet.

“What? But I thought—”

“Shhh!” Over Chloe’s complaints and her own breathing, Zoe thought she heard the sound of a motor, a car’s engine. Trying desperately to locate the direction, she closed her eyes, straining to listen. “You hear that?”