She could do this. This was a cavern; it wasn’t a coffin. All she had to do was get her bearings.
Still kneeling on the rough floor, she reached out around her, feeling the stone slowly. Methodically. She had to take this a step at a time. She had to be patient.
She was whimpering. She heard her own panicked gasps as her hands found the footboard of the bed. Okay. She was at the bottom of the bed.
She knew this cavern. She had spent days pacing it off, getting to know her territory. All she had to do was make her way across the room to the counter. There was a light inside the dishwasher.
She looked around desperately, realizing that the digital light that had been on the dishwasher before was no longer there.
There was no power.
No power.
“Oh God, Tanner, please don’t do this to me.” She couldn’t scream now. Her voice was weak, and she hated the pleading sound of her voice.
She was not going to do this! Scheme clenched her fists as she bent over, pressing her clenched fingers into her stomach as she fought to hold back the bile boiling there.
She wasn’t going to be sick either.
She should have known she couldn’t trust him. She had been close though, so close to considering it. He had seemed so concerned, so furious for her sake that Chaz had tried to kill her.
And as she had suspected, it was all an act. Just an act. A trick to get the information her father wanted. He needed to know what was on that fax. He had worked decades for that information.
“I don’t know anything.” She keened before slapping her hands over her mouth to hold back the sobbing pleas. She had stopped begging years ago. She had learned to accept that her father was a rabid psychopath; no amount of pleas would change whatever he had planned for her. And no amount of pleas would change whatever Tanner had planned.
But she did know something. She knew too much. She knew David Lyons, Callan Lyons’s son, would be kidnapped. She knew that the first Leo still lived and where he could be found. She knew the rumors of the Breeds mating rather than just loving were true. She knew enough to ensure that her father faced Breed law rather than just federal law.
She couldn’t breathe. Her hands moved from her lips to her throat as she gasped for breath.
It was so dark. She rocked forward slowly, fighting to hold on to her composure as she felt the coffin surrounding her, smelled the scent of her own fear and urine around her.
It wasn’t real. Her hands swiped out around her desperately. There was no coffin. Just a cavern. And there was an exit somewhere.
And Tanner would be back. He would wait, wait until she was completely hysterical before he came back. He would try to soothe her. To make it better. Then while she was weak, broken, he would ask her questions. He would probe.
She didn’t try to stop the tears from falling. She was f**king terrified; hysteria wasn’t that far away—there was no way to fight that. She knew her weakness, and so did her father.
The dark. Complete darkness, restraint, though at least this time her hands and feet weren’t tied. She was mobile. Hysterical, but mobile.
“You bastard!” she screamed. “You son of a bitch. You think burying me alive is going to get you something I don’t have to give?”
She laughed. The sound was sharp, desperate and disintegrated into sobs.
She really, really hated the dark.
Tanner dropped from the opening in the tunnel’s ceiling before reaching up and pulling the stone cover carefully back into place.
The lights blinked on, activated by the motion sensors hidden in the stone, providing a faint glow to light the way through the tunnels.
The motion-activated lights allowed for greater freedom of movement as well as an early warning system if the tunnels were ever breached.
Small pinpoints of warning activation would now be lighting through every tunnel, cavern and cave that Callan had wired. The tiny red sensors would emit a pulse of sound, similar to a hum of electricity.
He flipped open the panel at the side of the wall; the fake stone hid a small digital keypad that he punched his password into automatically. The hum would evaporate and the cavern’s motion-activated lights would flip on as he made his way to the main cavern.
Scheme was obviously still sleeping. He had left the sensors active there when he left. If she had awakened and gotten out of the bed, the lights would flip on. Once she got into the bed, they would dim and within an hour extinguish, just as the lights and television had the night before.
He had just spent longer than he would have liked fielding several very heavy suggestions from Callan Lyons that he return to oversee any potentially harmful media that arose from the disappearance of one Scheme Victoria Tallant.