Vengeful

“How did you get into Stell’s office?” asked Dom, changing directions. She looked up, a shadow crossing her face. Dom pressed on. “There’s only one door, and I was facing it. But you showed up behind me.”

Rios’s eyes narrowed. “Hancock,” she said. “Go call Stell. Ask him what he wants us to do next.”

Dominic really did want to hear Rios’s explanation, but not as much as he needed to get out. He waited as Hancock swiped his keycard, waited as the line turned green and the door clicked open.

“Now, Agent Rusher,” she continued, “let’s disc—”

He didn’t give her a chance to finish. Dominic took a deep breath, like a swimmer before a dive, and jerked backward, the world parting around him as he slipped out of time, and into the shadows.

The room hung in perfect stillness, a painting in shades of gray—Rios, frozen, her face unreadable. Hancock, halfway through the door. Dominic, still handcuffed to the table.

He rose, pulling the stapled pages toward him, and got to work prying the bit of metal loose. He worked the sliver free, then straightened it out, and began fitting the slim bar between the teeth of the handcuff and the locking mechanism. It took several tries, the weight of the shadows like wet wool draped across his limbs, and a red welt rising on Dominic’s wrist from the constant applied pressure, but finally the lock came loose. He pried the handcuff open, repeated the same grueling process with the other side, and was free.

Dom fastened the cuffs back around Rios’s wrists, then ducked under Hancock’s frozen arm into the hall. The air dragged around him like an ocean tide as he approached the nearest control room. There was only one other soldier there, a female agent named Linfield, sitting in front of a console, and frozen mid-stretch. Dominic freed the cattle prod from her holster and brought it to the base of her neck before stepping back into the flow of time.

A flash of blue-white light, the crackle of current, and Linfield slumped forward. Dom pushed her chair aside and started searching, hands flying across the keyboard.

He didn’t have long. Every second Dom stood in the real world was a second exposed, a second he could be caught, captured, a second alarms were going up, and soldiers were invariably crashing toward him. And yet, despite it all, the world narrowed as he typed, his heart racing, but the pulse strong, steady. He’d always been good under pressure.

Dom didn’t have time to figure out which cell Victor was being kept in, so he chose the fastest option.

He opened them all.

He looked up, scanning the ceiling for cameras, and was interrupted by a familiar voice filling the cell.

“Mr. Vale,” said Stell. “We’ve come a long way, only to find ourselves back where we started. The difference, of course, is that this time, you won’t be getting out.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” said Victor, forcing his voice to hold its edge. “But I have to admit, this isn’t exactly sporting.”

“That’s because this isn’t a game. You’re a murderer, and an escaped convict, and this is a prison.”

“What happened to my trial?”

“You forfeited it.”

“And Eli?”

“He serves another purpose.”

“He’s playing you,” sneered Victor. “And by the time you figure out how, it will be too late.”

Stell didn’t rise to the bait, leaving Victor in silence. He was running out of patience, and out of time. He looked up at the cameras. He may be in a cage, but Victor had prepared for the possibility. He had left himself a key.

The question was—where was Dominic Rusher?

The soldiers had taken his laptop, and he had crushed his primary cell, but Mitch crouched—which turned out to hurt just as much as standing up—and felt under the lip of the sofa, dislodging the small black box and the burner smartphone that it was feeding into.

His butler.

In the old black-and-white movies he’d always loved, a good butler was neither seen nor heard, not until they were needed. And yet they were always there, tucked innocently into the background, and always seemed to know the comings and goings of the house.

The concept behind Mitch’s device was the same.

He booted the phone and watched as the data from the soldiers’ electronic tracking streamed in. Calls. Texts. Locations.

Three phones. And they were all in one place.

Got you.

All his life, people had underestimated Mitch. They took one look at his size, his bulk, his tattooed arms and shaved head, and made a snap judgment: slow, stupid, useless.

EON had underestimated him too.

Mitch looked around, found the playing card Sydney had left behind. He scribbled a quick instruction on the back, and rested the playing card on the dog’s motionless side.

“Sorry, boy,” he said again.

And then Mitch grabbed his coat, and his keys, and went to save Victor.