The Runaways

Chapter 12

Hailey

I’d dehydrated myself from crying. I didn’t think I could. Sobbing to the point where my tongue stuck to my teeth wasn’t something I was used to. Then again, neither were dead bodies.

I could still see his feet.

Red-speckled black oxfords over black socks.

Blood trails all over the concrete.

The air smelled like pennies—like sweaty palms chock-full of copper. The scent could make you sick if you breathed it in long enough, but a mouth full of old blood was worse than the smell.

Tasted a lot like pocket change. The cuts on my lips were deep enough to stick my tongue into and stung enough to make me dizzy. I let my chin hit my chest and shut my eyes until the spinning stopped.

I was really starting to look the part. Black-eyed and busted-lipped—portrait of a modern black dahlia. If I ended up freezing to death, they’d find me grinning too, flipping my kidnappers the bird with frostbitten middle fingers.

Picturing my front page New York Times debut was worth wasting the oxygen over. At least a sense of humor kept my mind off the cold.

The wires around my legs and arms were the first to freeze. Cillian had me strapped so tightly to the chair that every time I moved, the cables rubbed my skin raw. Bad day to wear shorts. The sheriff wasn’t much better off than I was.

All the blood on his pant legs had frozen the pleats in place. His skin must’ve been rock solid judging by the frost forming all the way up to his utility belt. His gun was gone. Liam was probably responsible. If he had that, he most likely had gotten a hold of Rusty’s—

Keys.

The full set peeped right out from under his empty holster. Enter Hailey Houdini. If there was one thing I was good at, it was falling. I rocked back and forth, rattling the metal against the hard floors until I did just that.

The chair hit the concrete and shattered the chilled silence while the frozen cables cracked around my arms and legs. I wriggled free. You never know when a little water weight will come in handy.

Moving was the hard part. My hands and feet stayed clumsy and numb as I tried to lift myself off the ground. I needed time. Time to defrost my fear and my fingers, time to work through the pain, time to convince myself to get close enough to a corpse to grab his keys.

I didn’t even have thirty-seconds. When a girl falls in a room, and four men are there to hear it, is she safe and sound?

        “Who let the kitten out of her cage?”

Liam’s voice cut straight through the cold and a dull, gnawing sensation crawled around the corners of my stomach. My body tensed, a subtle warning to brace myself for him—for them. I was alone. Liam wasn’t.

        “Where were you planning on going, love? There isn’t a door in this house that’ll open for you,” Cillian said with a painted smile on his lips.

He grabbed me by the hair, tore my scalp apart by the strands, and dragged me over to Liam. He looked different. Like the crow’s feet around his eyes had quadrupled since the last time I’d seen him. His left arm hung in a makeshift sling. Good to see Rusty leveled the playing field.

        “What’s the password on that fancy phone of yours?” Liam asked.

I stayed silent and swallowed the coming consequences.  Liam couldn’t do much with a dead arm, Cillian’s strong point was intimidation, Marcus seemed harmless, and Caleb couldn’t even look at me. As long as I had something they needed they couldn’t touch me.