the earbud and dropped it in my pocket. I winced as the action pulled on my stitches. I pushed the pain aside again. I could worry about myself when I had Willow in my arms.
After a couples minutes of walking, Domenico came to a stop in a wide doorjamb. It looked like blast doors had resided here at some point, but there was no sign of them anymore. Nothing was as it seemed, I guess.
We lined up against either wall. Guns were out and ready. Rafael even slapped a little one into my hands. “Don’t shoot her, yourself, or us.”
I rolled my eyes. These guys…man, break their trust once, never hear the end of it. I snorted mentally. They better get used to me being around. I was keeping Willow. Forever and always.
Massimo slid up to the front of the line, his steps made no noise whatsoever. Like the specter he probably was, he faded around the corner. We followed in silence.
Twenty feet past the doors, we met another fucking odd sight. We were up on a catwalk of sorts. And down below…a massive portable maze. Bright lights lit the entire thing from one end of the room to the other. And it was roughly the size of a football field.
Massimo stopped at the top of the stairs. When he turned back, he had a finger over his lips.
We all nodded.
Massimo pointed to his ear. Pointed to the maze.
I held my breath as I listened. How the man heard anything over the pounding of the blood in his ears, I didn’t know. But that was a mystery for another time.
A man’s voice I recognized from that night in the hospital sounded from somewhere deep in the maze. “If you’d just done what I’d told you, expanded your mind, you could have saved them.”
That fucking jackhole was angling to get dead. Right now, I didn’t even fucking care which one of us did the deed as long as he failed to breathe Willow’s air ever again.
Willow’s voice rose in taunting challenge. “Just like my actions saved the last girl, right? You stabbed her through the head with a piece of metal, you sick fuck. No. You can try to defer blame as much as you want, but I know exactly who you are, Ethan. Poor little boy who didn’t fit in with his family.”
My girl wasn’t down or out yet. She was poking the bear. Forcing him to acknowledge his own weaknesses. I knew the feeling. Good thing I wasn’t actually a psychopath.
Back and forth they bantered as we crept down the stairs at a snail’s pace. I wanted to bolt down them, crash through the walls that looked flimsy enough they wouldn’t stop a rat on downers. “Boo hoo. He was too young, too smart to have friends in his classes.”
We each branched off into the maze at different points. We didn’t have time to wait for him to find her in this shitshow. We needed to find her, kill him. Get her to safety.
“How did you end up this way?” Willow asked. I could hear the genuine curiosity in her voice. The true desire to understand.
The doctor’s laugh was past the boundaries of sanity. “I’ve always been this way. My experiments have kept me company since I was twelve years old. No one understood me. No one bothered to reach out. To try to befriend me. If someone had, I wouldn’t be like this. It’s society’s fault for everything that I’ve done. It made me do it.” The man’s breath sobbed out before he cut off the sound.
I understood that kind of isolation. That level of abandonment. But I hadn’t turned to the dark side because of it. At least not the go-kill-people dark side.
“Sure, of course. If only smart people were treated better.”
I tuned them out. I couldn’t afford to get wrapped up in the drama that was unfolding. I just needed to find her.
Unfortunately, his next words froze my heart where I stood. “I placed the electrode next to your femoral artery. If I press the button long enough, it could cauterize that nerve branch. How would you like that, Willow? Would that be a good enough experiment?”
As quickly as I was able, I started darting around corners. Sweeping each side of the hallway with my gun. I had to find her. Had to get that monstrosity out of her body.
He can’t have her. Ever again. She was mine and I was going to make sure he