Fracture (Blood & Roses #3-4) - Callie Hart Page 0,41

do that—sense when I’m not alone, even in a house as big as this. It always leads to broken sleep. Yet somehow I know this isn’t that. It feels different. Awkward. Tense. Resigning myself to the fact that I’m not falling back to sleep, I fling back the covers from the bed and tiptoe silently from the room. I stagger to an immediate halt out in the hallway, stunned. Two men in black pants and T-shirts, mirroring my expression of surprise, hold between them the rising, struggling form of Lacey. The guy closest to the top of the stairs has a firm grip around her legs, which thrash against him uselessly. The other guy has his arms threaded underneath hers, lifting her but also expertly clamping his hand over her mouth at the same time. It doesn’t seem as though she’s screaming anyway so his efforts are probably unnecessary. Lacey’s eyes are gripped with a pure terror that grabs me by the throat and spurs me into action.

“What the hell are you doing?” I gasp. Pretty stupid question. It’s obvious what they’re doing; they’re kidnapping Lacey. The girl Zeth left in my care. The girl I said I would look after.

The guy wrestling to pin down Lacey’s flailing legs shakes his head menacingly at me. “Go back to bed, baby. Otherwise we’ll make sure to come back up here for you, too.”

“Put her down and get the fuck out of my house!” My voice quivers with a rage that surprises even me. The two men exhale in frustrated synchrony; they clearly don’t want to be dealing with me right now.

“You got a death wish, bitch?” the other one says. “You don’t wanna be interfering right now. Trust me.”

“Fuck it. She’s seen us now, anyway. We’re just gonna have to deal with her,” the other guy says, a malicious glint in his eye.

Lacey lashes out with one foot, managing to get it free, and for a moment the two men are distracted as they struggle to right the wildly kicking leg. I do the first thing I think of, backing up into my bedroom and slamming the door, snapping the lock closed behind me. Lacey’s eyes are pleading as the barrier slams shut between us, and I beg her not to think I’m abandoning her. I’m really not. I just can’t get to the only offensive weapon—the baseball bat I keep by the front door—without having to pass them, so I’m going for the next best thing. My medical bag. I find it where I always keep it, in my en suite carefully perched on top of the toilet cistern.

“Open the fucking door, bitch!” A thunder of loud hammering buffets the door to the bedroom. My hands are shaking like crazy.

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon! Quick!” I mutter the words under my breath as my hands try to move faster, fumbling with the zip and then struggling to upend the contents on the bathroom floor. Blister packs of drug samples, small glass vials, syringes, dressings, tongue depressors—the lot ends up pouring out onto the tiles. I grab the first vial I see and a syringe and then I’m running out of the door. Not the one back into my bedroom. The connecting door that leads into the third bedroom. I hold my breath a moment, listening.

“..back up for her. We need to get this one in the car first.”

“No way. She’ll get out!”

“So?” The guy with the deeper voice, the one who’d been holding Lacey’s legs, sounds like he’s getting pissed off. “Where the hell is she gonna go out here? She can’t call the cops. The phone line’s dead, too. Come on. We’ll let her stew a minute.”

Stew a minute? Hardly. Someone asked me a long time ago how I thought I would fare in a wartime situation. Would I be able to fight, or would I crumple under the pressure. The life and death of it all. Well, I suppose right now is a good indicator of how I’d react. I’m not crumpling. I’m reacting.

I give it a solid minute, battling to make myself wait as I listen to grunts and scuffling sounds moving through the house. And then I’m moving.

Thank fuck for trauma surgery.

That’s what races through my head as I stumble blindly down the now empty hallway and down the stairs. If it wasn’t for trauma surgery, I wouldn’t be practiced at snapping a syringe from its sterile plastic, plunging the needle into a vial and drawing the correct