Dark Champion (Flirting with Monsters #4) - Eva Chase Page 0,88

jerked against the restraints automatically—and the steel cuff around my left hand popped open.

I started at it for the space of a few heartbeats, barely believing it. How could Tempest’s people have been anything less than perfectly careful? But they were mortal, and as I’d imagine she’d have grumbled hundreds of times, mortals were infinitely fallible.

Lucky for me, shadowkind were far from perfect too.

I lifted my arm with a wince and fumbled with the cuff around my neck. It only took a matter of seconds for my groping fingers to snag on the latch and wrench it open. A moment later, I’d released the cuff around my other wrist and then my waist as well.

I shoved myself upright so fast my head spun, both with dizziness in the aftermath of whatever sedative my tormenters had injected me with and the lance of pain that shot up my spine. My breath caught just shy of a sob. I gritted my teeth and snatched at the cuffs around my ankles.

Snap’s voice was getting more distant but no happier. Had the others come to break me out and been trapped? Damn it. But maybe I could turn the tables on these Company assholes one more time.

I swung around and lowered my feet to the ground. As I eased my weight onto them, my legs wobbled and then held with the stiffening of my calf and thigh muscles. My gaze fell on the smaller table, but its spread of torture instruments had been cleared off.

Oh well. Slicing and dicing wasn’t my typical style anyway. It was barbequing time.

My hand was just coming to rest on the door handle when the fading whimper rose to a scream. I flinched, the hairs on my arms standing on end. The shriek carried on, quavering and hitching. It didn’t sound as if they were simply tormenting my devourer. It sounded like they were killing him.

My throat constricted. I yanked at the door handle, but it didn’t budge. Of course they’d have locked that.

I closed my eyes, groping for calm despite the rattle of my frantic pulse in my ears. I knew my way around a lock. If I just melted the right bits—if the sprinklers overhead didn’t trigger from the concentrated heat—

An even more piercing cry sent another shock of urgency through me. I pressed my hand over the lock area and let anger mingle with my panic. How dare they hurt my lover. They would pay—all of the assholes here would pay in every way I could make them.

Heat flared across my collarbone, sharp enough to sear, but my fiery voodoo surged toward my intended target as well. I thrust more in that direction, wanting to reduce every mechanism in there to goop.

The shrieking had faded into a sputtering gurgle. Would I even make it to him in time?

I gritted my teeth and hauled at the door. It flung open to reveal two drenched scientists standing right on the other side.

My stomach lurched, but I didn’t have time to move so much as an inch. One of the experimenters was already slashing a scalpel across my forearm; the other slammed a container over the cut. A container that caught the rush of smoke that streamed up from the wound in my adrenaline-spiked state.

Fury clanged through me alongside the jolt of understanding. My inner fire whipped out in a blaze—but before it had done more than sizzle across the moisture flecking my attackers’ faces, a fresh downpour burst from the sprinklers both in the room behind me and in the hall, this time icy cold.

My breath rasped at the sudden smack of frigid water. The scientists were already fleeing with their ill-gotten plunder, and the burly guards from before barged in to replace them. I only managed to land two blows before I found myself tangled up so tightly in one of those glittering nets that I could barely wiggle my pinkie. I couldn’t even congratulate myself for the blood trickling from the one nose it appeared I’d broken.

Snap’s voice had vanished. But it had never really been him, had it? Or at least not him now. As the guards rolled me out of the net back into my cage, the remaining pieces clicked together.

The Company had captured my devourer before. The bits I’d heard of him actually speaking, they must have recorded while they had him in their facility. The screams and shrieks might have been from then too or simply been sound effects they’d picked to