“Your arms will fit though,” Dante said.
“But I don’t know how to pick locks,” she reminded him.
“You can learn. I’ll teach you.”
She wanted to argue with him, she could never learn how to pick a lock fast enough to get them out of here before James came back but arguing was only wasting time. “Okay, tell me what to do.”
“Do you have any pins in your hair?”
“No.”
“Underwire bra?”
“Yeah.”
“Take it off.”
Again, she could have argued, but what would be the point? She didn’t even turn around, just pulled her sweater off, unclipped her bra, and handed it to Dante. She should be embarrassed having him see her topless but their situation kind of put things in perspective. While Dante ripped the wire out of her bra, she put her sweater back on.
“Come here,” Dante said, coming to stand behind her. His arms on either side of her, he took hold of her hands. “You hold the wire like this, and you twist like this.”
He kept hold of her hands and demonstrated a few times before letting her try on her own. Her movements weren’t as smooth as Dante’s, but she tried to mimic what he had done and after a few goes of practicing in the air she thought she was ready to give it a try for real.
“You can do this,” Dante told her as she stepped up to the gate.
His faith in her helped her confidence and she wriggled one hand through the bars. It was tight, but she was able to get it through.
Now she had to get her bad arm through.
There was no way she could do it with the shirt wrapped around it so she took it off and couldn’t help but get a look at the jagged wound.
It momentarily threw her off, but Dante put a hand on her shoulder and his touch grounded her. Gritting her teeth—she knew this was going to hurt—she forced her swollen arm between the bars.
By the time she managed to wiggle it through, she was panting from pain and exhaustion. It might not seem like much, but she hadn’t eaten or had anything to drink in thirty-six hours, and this high-pressure situation was draining.
“You got this,” Dante told her.
Hoping he was right, she ignored the pain pulsing through her arm and put the two ends of the wire into the lock on the door. It took her several tries but eventually she felt a click.
“I did it,” she squealed excitedly.
“Told you.”
“Yeah, you did,” she said with a smile.
Now she had to get her arms back through the bars so they could open the door. Her good arm was easy, but her bad one had swollen further from the pressure of squeezing between the metal.
“I don’t think I can do it,” she whimpered. Her arm hurt so bad and now she had a headache forming from dehydration. She just wanted out of here. This place was making her claustrophobic, and she didn’t even suffer from the phobia.
“Yes, you can,” Dante said firmly. “Just relax.” He moved behind her again and took hold of her elbow. Sydney closed her eyes and leaned back against his chest, letting him take some of her weight as she focused on not passing out as he somehow managed to free her arm again.
Her relief at being free lasted only a moment, because they weren’t free. They still had to get out of this cave, and they both knew that James could return at any second.
Dante didn’t hesitate. He grabbed the hand on her good side and started to run, pulling her along with him. Willing her legs to function, Sydney ran alongside of him, not quite ready to believe that they might make it out of this alive.
Her pessimism proved to be well founded.
7:59 P.M.
* * *
Dante couldn’t believe that they’d done it.
He and Sydney had gotten out of the cage, and now all they had to do was get out of this cave. Once he knew that Sydney was safe, he would find and arrest James and make sure the man rotted in prison.
They worked well together, he and Sydney. If he’d been on his own, he never would have gotten out. There was no way his arms would fit between the bars. But Sydney was much smaller than him, and even though he knew she was in pain, she had sucked it up and done what she needed to do to get them out.
He was proud of her.
She was really something else—beautiful, quirky, sweet, caring, and tough. What a combination, no wonder he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
They were just ten feet from the entrance to the cave when a figure suddenly appeared.
It was James.
The man was naked, and with his long hair and beard blowing in the breeze, and the claws on his hands that glittered as they caught the moonlight, he did look like a beast.
Dante knew there would be no reasoning with this man. There would be no talking him down, no convincing him that the sensible thing to do would be to not resist arrest and let himself be taken down to the station.
Letting go of Sydney’s hand, he shoved her in the direction of the cave entrance. “Run, hide, get as far away from here as you can,” he hissed.
He didn’t stop to see if she listened, he just charged.
For once, he didn’t try to contain the darkness that lived inside him; he let it fly loose. James was right. They were both beasts, and they both hunted prey. They just went about it in a different way.
His body connected with James, and his fists slammed into the other man. With each hit, he released a piece of the anger that had built up inside him ever since he lost his family.
Blow after blow, he rained down on James.
The other man rained down his own bevy of blows, but Dante didn’t even feel them. He was past feeling pain. He was past feeling anything but peace from getting rid of the aggression he kept tightly under control every single day.
He didn’t know how long they fought, but slowly, inch by inch, James began to get the upper hand. He only had his fists, but James had the claws, and from the sharp sting on his arm, he knew that he’d been cut at least once.
“You think you can stop me from getting her?” James growled. “You think you can protect her? You think you can stop me? No one can stop me.”
James raised a hand, the claws were poised above his neck, and Dante thought at least having his neck slashed would be a quick and painless death.
Sydney was safe, and that was all that really mattered.
Just as James started to move his hand, he heard a crack, and James promptly dropped.
There stood Sydney, a rock in her hand staring at James’s limp body.
She was breathing hard. He could see her chest heaving, and in the thin moonlight, he could see her eyes were wild.
Before he could launch to his feet and stop her, she had dropped to her knees and was slamming the rock into James’s head over and over again. Dante wasn’t sure she really knew what she was doing, but it looked like he wasn’t the only one with pent up anger that needed an outlet.
Standing behind her, he grabbed her arm, stopping it before she could smash the rock into James again. With his other arm, he pulled her up and pinned her against his chest. She struggled. She was sobbing, her breathing was erratic, and she fought so hard to get free that he struggled to contain her.
Eventually she stopped fighting.
When he was sure that she wasn’t going to try to go back to breaking James’s skull, he reached over and pried the rock from her white-knuckled grip and dropped it on the ground. Then he turned her around and held her while she wept.