for about the hundred millionth time. He’d heard them, but he didn’t believe them, not for a minute. Hart was just trying to scare them all senseless.
Touché. He’d succeeded. Lancaster had gone catatonic since Hart had raced out of there. It was that Monk guy business, just like in Bangkok, when Randolph had gotten so buggy with the booze.
Cannibalized, as in eaten.
No fucking way. Tyler shook his head. No way. No one Tyler had ever known had been as brutish as the dynamic duo of King Banner and Rock Howe, and they’d never eaten anybody. If they had, he would have heard about it forty-eight times by now. Bragging about their badass exploits was those boys’ favorite pastime.
Or it had been, Tyler thought with a slow shake of his head. Dead. It was hard to believe … and if Walls moved any slower, they were all—
Wait. Tyler froze in his chair, absolutely froze solid, listening with every fiber of his being, listening for …
“Lancastaaaaa …” The cry came from somewhere above them, unlike anything he’d ever heard.
Twenty feet away, Lancaster whimpered and started to cry.
Cry? The bastard was crying?
An unholy terror of death and destruction was descending upon them, and all the old man could do was cry?
A vacant sound of rapidly running footsteps echoed on the ceiling, and, for a moment, Tyler wished with all his might that Quinn Younger had just blown his brains out. Aything would be better than what he was facing now.
Oh, so help him God. So help him, he did not want to be eaten alive.
An unbearable trembling took hold of his body, and all he could do was sit there, trapped, and shake.
“Lancassstaa …” The eerie voice grew nearer and nearer, the sound of it making Tyler’s blood curdle in his veins.
“W-walls,” he moaned. “Walls! Good God, man, get up!”
Oh, geezus, geezus, geezus.
Over in a darkened corner, Tyler heard the sound of someone moving a heavy metal grate in the ceiling.
No, no, no, no, no … this couldn’t be happening, not to Tyler Thomas Crutchfield.
“No,” he said out loud, then again, more vehemently. “No!”
He didn’t deserve this, to be butchered in a basement.
Not to be butch … butch … bu—His mind stuttered to a dead stop, his eyes growing so wide they hurt.
Whatever was coming was coming now. A huge hand reached through the hole in the ceiling and finished moving the grate aside. Then a man dropped through to the pool deck. Monk.
Ungodly big, ripped to the point of distortion, every muscle so hard, so delineated, he looked like a caricature, like a comic-book hero in the flesh.
Albino flesh. Long white hair, disheveled.
Bare-chested and bloody.
The blood was dried in streaks down his arm but still fresh and running down his face from a wound across his cheekbone.
Eyes so silvery pale they seemed to have no color at all met his across the basement, and all the energy went out of Tyler in one rushing wave of despair, every last ounce of it. The only thing holding him up was the duct tape.
Monk quickly dismissed the gutless weasel taped to the chair. That one was no warrior and none of Monk’s concern. Neither was the man wallowing and struggling half naked on the pool deck, Sam Walls, one of Lancaster’s idiot lackeys.
But the third man meant the world to him, the new world he’d awoken to in pain and confusion. Monk had detected his scent the minute he’d entered the building.
Lancaster himself—roped and chained and cuffed.
An emotion he couldn’t describe welled up and filled Monk’s chest, made him ache with longing and disgust, with love and despair.
Lancaster’s last moments of life had come to him.
Monk walked across the pool deck and slowly dropped to his knees in front of the old man, bringing them face-to-face.
Lancaster was such a mess, hanging so heavily from his chains. He had blood on his shirt and tears on his old, wrinkled cheeks and no hope in his tired, weary eyes.
“Scott,” Monk said, speaking the name that had once been his. He wasn’t Scott anymore. He was MNK-1, a beast of strength and cunning who would never have made the mistake Scott Church had of putting his life in this man’s hands.
“Y-y-yes.” The harsh, whispered word fell from Lancaster’s mouth.
Paper-pushers, Monk thought with disgust, the money-mongers—they had no real balls. He wanted a battle. He wanted his destroyer to go out in a blaze of rage and fury, fighting for his life. But there was no getting a