said finally, releasing the last of the knot. “Wiggle your fingers.”
Steele Street’s original bad girl kept herself in amazing shape, and, in seconds, she had movement back in her hands and arms.
Thank God, Jane thought, wiping at her face again.
She and Skeeter had gone hoarse calling out to the guys, hoping the team would find them—but the chances that their voices had risen above the sounds of the storm were slim to none.
They were on their own, and they needed to get the hell out of—oh, damn, oh, damn, oh, damn.
Skeeter had gone mannequin in front of her, and over the blonde’s shoulder, Jane saw why.
The “ghost” had returned, silent and stealthy, and was watching them with a preternatural intensity from where he stood in the shadows at the other end of Skeeter and Dylan’s loft. God only knew how long he’d been down there—and he was ever so much more horrible than she had imagined from her fleeting glimpse of him behind Mama Guadaloupe’s, his hair crazy white and raggedly long, his muscles bulging under his pale white skin, his neck thick, his hands huge and deadly.
He’d torn King Banner’s arm off, clean off—oh, geezus, oh, geezus.
And he was staring straight at them with a dead body lying at his feet, a broken, old man.
“Go, go, go,” Skeeter said, lifting herself up and reaching for a handhold above her.
Jane was more than ready to go, go, go, but the metal pipe Skeeter grabbed broke away, and their open-sided box of twisted metal shifted and yawed with a squealing screech of metal.
Oh, hell. Jane lunged for Skeet, grabbing her hard around the waist and pulling her back. The stairwell shuddered into a new resting spot at an angle that threatened to spill them out, and Jane held on to Skeeter even tighter.
Oh, damn, oh, damn. She braced her feet and gritted her teeth, and prayed.
Below them, the albino walked over to one of the fallen rafters.
Her arms straining, her heart racing, Jane watched in growing dread as he lifted the huge wooden beam up and braced it against the loft’s outside wall. When it was solidly in place, he lodged the top end of the rafter up into the exploded stairwell, crashing and slamming it into position. The stairwell bucked and tilted under the assault but ended up throwing them back against the rear wall of their perch, giving them a reprieve from falling to the floor below.
Jane relaxed her hold and tried to slow her breathing, tried to slow the pounding of her heart and prepare herself for the coming onslaught.
Because it was coming, and it was coming fast.
The albino beast’s intentions were clear, and made even clearer when he started climbing—so fast, so freaking fast.
“Are you ready to fight?” Skeeter asked, her voice breathless from the bone-rattling they’d just been given. They were out of time, out of choices.
“Yes, ma’am, I am,” Jane said, sliding her hand down her leg and taking hold of the sheath knife she kept in her boot.
Hawkins jerked his head up at the horrendous crashing and banging coming from above them. It wasn’t the storm raging outside. The sound was man-made.
He and Quinn and Kid had been working the building from the top down, clearing floors and marking and mining the elevator shaft, Plan A in the Steele Street Survival Handbook for any bastard-in-the-building scenario, a plan they’d come up with after the last time a bunch of bastards had breached their home turf. They hadn’t seen a damn thing, not hide nor hair of the bastard Monk, or Jane, or Skeeter. Zach and Dylan were coordinating the SDF attack from the comm console, and Hawkins had thought they were holding the eighth floor, that nothing would get by Zach or the boss either way, from the top down or from the bottom up.
“I thought we cleared the upper floors,” he said, his mood so far south he had nothing but cold, frigid, arctic anger running through him.
Those were his girls Monk had taken.
Kid had already broken into a run, heading toward the commotion.
“We don’t have enough men to cover the whole damn place, Christian, not inside and out,” Quinn said, lying flat on his stomach, stretched out over the shaft through the open elevator doors on the sixth floor. He was setting the last claymore—very, very carefully. “The way Monk climbed in here, he could have gotten by us by going up the outside.” He set the trip switch, signaled, and Hawkins