he turned towards the stairs.
* * *
Allison Chou raised her head weakly. Red waves of agony washed through her, and her arms felt broken, aching with the strain of supporting her weight. She was barely conscious, but something . . . something had reached into her hopelessness and despair. She felt it. It was coming closer, and it was focused with deadly purpose upon her . . . and filled with a terrible, burning anger.
Her brain was barely working. She didn't have the least idea what these people wanted from Jacques, but she'd already realized they were going to kill her in the end. It was the only way it could end, and after the last two hours, part of her hoped that end would come soon. But it was only a part of her, and the rest reached out to that flame of hatred. Its searing fury ought to have terrified her, a tiny fragment of her mind reflected, but she'd learned what true terror was. And, even more than that, she knew that furnace flame's purpose. She rolled her eyes to one side, seeing the back of the man who had hurt her so terribly, and as she felt that seething tide of hatred come steadily closer, she smiled.
* * *
Alfred went up the final flight of stairs with the pulse rifle at his shoulder, trained up the stairwell. He reached the top and stepped out into the third-floor hallway.
* * *
Allison licked her lips. It had to be now, she thought. She couldn't be wrong about what she was feeling, and there was a pulser on the desk beside the HD her torturer was watching. He had the audio turned down, but she recognized the sound of her own screams, and her mind flinched away from the memory of what had wrung them from her. But that pulser was too close to his hand.
“Please,” she managed to whisper. “Please, let me go.”
He heard her, and he looked up, his smile evil and hungry as he realized she was conscious once more.
“Sure, honey. We'll let you go,” he sneered, and she twisted weakly as he picked up the neural whip and stepped towards her once more. “We just can't let you go yet, though,” he told her, and she moaned as he pressed the button and the whip began to hum once more, but every step towards her was one step away from the pulser. “First you have to do a little something for us.” His eyes glittered. “Don't worry, I'm sure it will come to you.”
“Please, don't!” she moaned through a sudden choking surge of terror, but he only laughed and raised the dully gleaming baton of the whip.
* * *
A sudden, sharper stab of fear went through Alfred. It wasn't his; it was hers, but he tasted a spike of panic all his own as he realized she was doing something. He didn't know what, but he'd felt the flare of her determination. She was . . . she was deliberately goading her tormentor!
He was in two worlds at once. In one, he raced down a hallway on feet which were preposterously quiet for a man of his size; in another, his throat closed with another's terror; and in both of them, the monster was awake and hungry.
* * *
Giuseppe Ardmore paused for a long, lingering moment, savoring the fear in her eyes, tasting the whimpers she couldn't suppress however hard she tried, watching her try to shrink away from him, letting her hear the hum of the whip and remember what it had already done to her. The power burned through him, sweeter and more addictive than any drug, and he cocked his wrist.
The door crashed open behind him, and he spun in disbelief as a complete stranger, at least twelve centimeters taller than he was, came through it with a pulse rifle in his hands.
* * *
It hit Alfred Harrington with an instant totality and clarity that he knew even then would live in his nightmares forever. Allison Chou stood in the center of the large, sunny room, surrounded by exercise equipment, with her hands held above her head by a tightly knotted rope. Her wrists were raw and oozing from the rope's bite, she was three-quarters naked, hanging heavily from those wrists, and he recognized the red, ugly marks stippled across her skin. He would have recognized them even without the hard, painful muscle spasms wracking her long after the marks had been