The trick now was to make sure no one else discovered it.
He wasn’t surprised when Neal took the service elevator to the basement. He was a little more surprised to find Trevor Black already waiting for them.
“Put her over there.” Trevor gestured for Blake to drop Sunny on the bed. Blake carefully rolled her to her side so she could more easily reach her gun if she had to. But it worried him that she wasn’t moving at least a little.
Trevor was watching him with all the warmth of the lizard he was. “How would you like to be in movies? We blank out your face so customers can picture themselves in the lead role. It’s all part of the fantasy. Neal’s already been in a few. Haven’t you, Neal?”
Rage unfurled inside him and he fisted his hands at his side. Jesus, what cold bastards. Blake would rather go up against a demon any day. Better the monster you knew. And understood.
These men were conniving pricks, and things had gone too far, farther than he’d ever expected. He needed to get her out of there, now.
As he formulated a plan, the only one he could come up with under the circumstance, and the one and only he thought would allow him to get her to safety he said, “Maybe next time.” Blake shot a shriveling glance at Neal, who already looked like he had a woody the size of his arm. Cold, sick bastards. “If your friend here had let me finish what I’d started to say to him, rather than just go ahead and slip her a drug, I could have told him that she’s probably a cop.”
Trevor’s eyes flicked to Sunny, still motionless on the bed. “Kill her.”
Fuck no.
Neal slipped a gun from his waistband, not even bothering to question the command. Not only were they cold-blooded, they were stupid.
Jesus, he really hadn’t thought his plan would backfire like this. He assumed they were at least smart enough to figure out what he meant. Apparently assumptions were dangerous. His mind raced a million miles an hour and it was then that he realized he was going to have to walk them through this, step by step. This was going to work, he assured himself. It was a good plan. And it had to work.
“Wait. Where there’s one cop, there’s always at least one more, and we don’t know who it is. I have a better plan.” Sunny still hadn’t moved. Right now that was a good thing. “So far she’s got nothing on us. We put her back in her own bed. We tell her someone slipped something in her drink. We apologize like shit, tell her we’re doing an internal investigation into it, give her a false lead, and just like that, she’s off on a wild goose chase.”
“That’s assuming she’s really a cop,” Neal said.
Blake laughed but there wasn’t any humor in it. “You think I can’t tell when I’ve been screwed by a cop?”
Michelle kept her eyes closed and her breathing steady, wishing like hell she could kick his half-demon ass. Not just because he’d told them she was a cop, although that was big part of it. It was because he was trying to get her out of that room, and there was no way she could leave. Not now. She’d never get another chance to get back in. She tried to clear her head enough to think, but it was hard. She’d like to drift off into sleep and let Blake take care of the whole frigging mess. But if she let them take her from this room, she’d never get a search warrant. She’d been drugged and that meant her testimony wasn’t worth squat.
As Blake negotiated for her life, however, she came up with a plan she thought just might work. If she discharged her weapon in here, she’d have proof that she’d been in the room and it would officially become a crime scene. There would then be grounds to search it. She could swear in court that she’d fired her weapon because she’d thought her life was in danger, and the fact she’d been drugged would work in her favor. Women weren’t slipped date rape drugs for the good of their health.
Of course if she discharged her weapon one of them would most likely return fire, but that was a chance she was willing to take. She’d just have to trust Blake to watch her back, like he’d promised. The man was part demon. He might as well put that to good use.
Michelle reached for her gun, rolled from the bed and fired—all in one fluid movement.
Except “fluid” was a relative term to someone who’d been drugged and she didn’t exactly master the element of surprise. The first return shot caught her high in the chest and felt more like a solid punch. The second shot she didn’t feel at all.
Blake didn’t have much time to react when Sunny pulled her weapon. Neal, his gun already drawn, managed to get off one shot at her before Blake’s fist caught him in the side of the head and dropped him like the sack of shit he was.
As Neal fell, his finger tightened on the trigger again, but the second shot went wild and hit the wall behind Blake.
The roaring in Blake’s ears and the sudden terror on Trevor’s face told him his eyes had flashed to demon yellow.
“Jesus,” Trevor breathed. “Your eyes. They look like—”
Blake didn’t give a damn what his eyes looked like. Sunny was bleeding all over the floor.
He picked Trevor up by the throat and slammed his head against the wall, not caring if he killed him and rather hoping he had. He tossed the limp body aside and rushed to Sunny.
He clamped his hand over her chest, trying to stop the bleeding, only to realize that most of it was coming from beneath her. He carefully lifted
