Page 100 of Tainted Blood
Lunging forward, he grabs my wrist and drags me away from the door. Flinging it open, he hurls me out onto the main gaming floor.
It’s empty. Disconcertingly so. Every single patron has disappeared, leaving cards and chips strewn across the tables and their chairs overturned. All that’s left is a pile of dead sicarios in the center of the room.
The ghost town became a ghost casino.
This can’t be happening to me.
“You might want to start running now,” he advises, propping himself up against the doorframe, his gun hanging loosely by his side, a wicked caricature of the man I used to believe would die to protect me. “I don’t have a pack of dogs, but I have silver bullets and dark, dark urges that are going to tear your body to shreds.”
Nausea burns the back of my throat. His deception is a jammed screwdriver into the mechanism that makes all my muscles work.
I’m trembling with shock.
Shivering with revulsion.
“Run!” he roars, losing his patience. “Or Lola Carrera and the bastard baby growing inside her will pay for your disobedience!” At this, he hits a button on his iPhone, and Lola’s screams and pleas explode like a dirty bomb into the casino. He clicks the recording off after a couple of seconds, but it’s enough to have me staggering to my feet.
“Where do you want me to run to?” I rasp, a million thoughts colliding inside my head to form a single image of the loaded gun that Santi keeps in his nightstand.
“The whole casino is your maze, tonight, Thalia.” A sinister smile stretches across his face. “Forty-two floors to chase you through all night long. There’s no way in, and no way out. Every escape route is locked and bolted.”
“W-what do you want from me?”
But I already know. He’s already intimated, and the truth turns my stomach to bile.
“Zaccaria offered me the world, Thalia. “Not money, not power, but you.” His hungry gaze slips to my breasts again. “This obsession,” he says, his voice thickening. “It drives a man to commit madness. The day you turned sixteen, I felt the roots burrow deep. For four years, I’ve waited for my chance, and now it’s time…. You have sixty seconds before the lights go out.”
“W-what,” I stutter, as he turns the tables so violently, I’m dizzy from the spin.
“You were stolen from the darkness. Now, it’s time to return you to where you belong.”
Backing away fast, my hip collides with a roulette table, and my high heels skid in a pool of crimson. When I encounter the sweeping marble steps leading up to the lobby, I hear another gun going off in my head.
Kicking off my shoes, I turn and run.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Thalia
He kills the lights just as the stairwell door is closing behind me, plunging everything into the kind of darkness where the demon under your childhood bed dwells.
Tonight, my demon is coming out to play, and I have forty-two flights of stairs to climb to have any chance of surviving him.
There’s a low whine, and then a fierce buzzing sound as Legado’s generators kick in, but the ethereal red glow overhead only lasts for a few seconds, before that’s shut off as well.
I have no phone.
No flashlight.
Nothing.
Panic comes crashing over me like a wave, catching me in a riptide and dragging me under—scraping my mind against memories I’ve fought so hard to forget.
Santi’s dead.
Edier’s dead.
My grief hits me like a second wave, and this time there’s no resurfacing from it.
