“Maya,” he rasped. “Look at me.”
“Yes, Marjorie,” Richter mocked, jamming the cruel little box and its torturous probes back against Gray’s chest. “Look at what you’re doing to him.”
The switch flicked. Gray’s body jerked. His muscles locked. Rage, panic—Maya couldn’t tell them apart anymore. Nothing felt real and everything hurt. Her heart pounded in her ears so viciously she felt her own scream before she heard it, the pain of it shredding her throat as she jerked against her chair. “Stop it, stop it.”
Gray’s lips pressed together, bloodless with the effort. Her voice was the only sound in the room, an echo of terror and grief that rattled her bones. When Richter pulled away this time, Gray sagged in the chair. The strain carved deep lines around his eyes. But when she met them—
Warm. Soft. The gentleness that he always saved just for her. “Trust me,” he murmured, that honey voice a sweet balm over shredded nerves. “Trust yourself.”
His eyes flicked down and to the side, just for a heartbeat. Toward where her arms disappeared behind the chair. He’d noticed, as the guards and Richter hadn’t. He knew about Dani’s gift. He’d seen the telltale movement.
Everyone else thought she was helpless, but Gray never had.
Gray was waiting for his moment. Maya had to give him one. She held Gray’s gaze, even as Richter applied his nasty little torture box a third time. She let the faith in his blue eyes form a wall against panic. She used his words as a shield, conjuring them from too-perfect memory, imagining him whispering them against her ear as she focused on the blade and her bindings.
Trust me. Trust yourself. Trust me. Trust yourself. Trust me. Trust—
A silent snap was followed by sudden give. She stiffened her muscles to keep from revealing that her wrists were no longer bound together. A tiny movement clipped the bracelet back together, and she exhaled and checked the guards. One was watching the torture with a blank expression, the other seemed kinda into it.
Neither were paying Maya the slightest bit of attention.
She waited until Gray was sprawled in his chair again, breathing hard. She inclined her head in a tiny nod. The left corner of his mouth twitched up in silent encouragement.
Maya flexed her fingers. The pins and needles were already fading. She shifted her weight forward and relaxed her mental grip on her senses. Every detail of the room locked into place, a replica she could repaint across the backs of her eyelids. A chess board waiting for her opening move.
So she took it.
Her metal chair was solidly constructed but light enough that she could heft it easily in one hand as soon as she’d gained her feet. She didn’t have super-speed or super-strength, but she had something more vital when it came to fighting overly trained soldiers—she was easily dismissed. A nonentity.
The guard on the left was the one who seemed to be enjoying Gray’s agony. He didn’t realize Maya had moved until the chair crashed into his stomach. She’d been aiming for his face—maybe she would have to start lifting weights again—but the stomach was good enough.
Time expanded. Maya got to enjoy every detail of the chair crashing into him. The thud, his sharp exhale. The shocked confusion twisting his face, swallowed by pain as he doubled over. The hilarious bafflement on the other guard’s face as his gaze darted around the room, looking for a threat he could comprehend.
Richter spun to face her, his smug pleasure evaporating. In that single second that stretched for a lifetime, she could see his thoughts scrambling to make sense of all the things he couldn’t have anticipated. Her resilience. Her inexplicable freedom. Her brazen defiance. Her Dani-given ability to turn literally anything into a weapon, including the chair he’d tied her to.
Underestimating her would be the last thing he did.
* * *
Gray was running out of time.
He didn’t need a medic to tell him this. He knew it, the same way he knew his own name and designation, his reflection in the mirror, the trigger weights on his favorite rifles.
The way he knew the scent of Maya’s hair.
All he could smell right now was blood. It dripped into his eyes, slid slickly over his skin. He was bleeding, but he couldn’t tell how or why. The pain was far away, buried under …
No, not buried. Frozen. He’d watched a pond freeze over once, tiny crystals forming and then reaching for one another until they locked together in a thin shell that obscured the water beneath.
That’s what this felt like. Something was under the ice. Waiting.
Waiting.
Then Maya sprang from her chair and launched it across the room, and Gray remembered what it was—purpose.
He had a mission, one that was as clear to him now, in his admittedly altered state, as it had been when he was lying naked in Maya’s bed. Shield. Protect.
Love.
Gray moved.
The chair clattered loudly to the floor, the sound covering the snap of Gray’s bindings as he surged up and toward Richter. With the element of surprise on his side, he managed to wrap one bloody arm around Richter’s neck. He jerked him into a chokehold so vicious that his muscles strained and burned.
But Richter wasn’t a fool. He still clutched that fucking silver box in his hand, and he jammed the prongs against Gray’s arm. The burning spread over Gray’s entire body, his muscles contracting as the current flowed through him—but it also kept his arm locked tight around Richter’s throat.
The man quickly realized his mistake. The electric pain ceased as he tossed aside the stun gun, and Gray went down in a heap of quivering muscle, dragging Richter down with him.
Richter’s face was turning red. Gray tried to count the seconds, but it seemed like it took an eternity for Richter to grope for the pistol in his shoulder holster. Gray caught his wrist in a punishing grip, grinding the bones together—
But the effort was costing him. Richter slammed his elbow into Gray’s side and managed to dislodge the chokehold. He broke free, gasping, and reached again for his gun.
The guards were still standing there, stunned into inaction. They barely reacted when Maya shot past them, screaming an incoherent denial. She kicked at Richter’s hand, and Gray heard some of the bones in the man’s hand shatter—
thin ice on a pond
Richter snatched at Maya’s boot, but she evaded him, dropped to her knees, and grabbed the gun from his shoulder rig. She lifted it and fired at the single naked bulb. It shattered, and darkness exploded through the room.
Glass rained down on him, and Gray laughed.
Richter had no fucking idea what he’d unleashed.
Gray grabbed at Richter, came up with a handful of shirt and leather gun holster, and used it to drag the man closer. Richter struck out at him, finding the wound on Gray’s upper arm and digging his thumbs into it.
It didn’t hurt. Gray felt it, a strange sort of pressure that made him tense in anticipation, but the waves of agony never came. He slammed Richter’s head against the floor to dislodge his grip, then did it again as his opponent raked his nails viciously across his face.
Gray ignored it all, grappling with Richter until he managed to get his forearm across his neck again. Richter rained blows on him, but Gray shrugged off every one in his single-minded pursuit of his goal.
If this was what Dani felt like all the time, no wonder she thought she was bulletproof.