Page 114 of Torment Me Knot
“You’re not.” Aubrey shifts, rising over me in the dark. “What was it this time?”
I don’t have the same nightmare, even though the theme never changes. Wallace is always at the center of them.
“The room. The…gurney. But more. There was a name time time. Names on tiles. When they moved me.” I was always drugged between sessions, but the dream allowed me to remember this.
“Names? Of what, sweetheart?” Kev asks.
He rises onto his elbow looking down at me. His clothing is rumpled, his hair is too. I smooth down a section and he tilts his cheek into my palm, eyes half shutting.
“Names on old tiles. The lettering was worn down, but I could still read them. I remember—” I close my eyes. Go back to the corridor. The heavy chemical drag in my veins.The wall, Espie. Look at the wall. Remember.“Colton. Merrith. Haverstock. Ashcroft.”
I shudder because those names only mean horrible things happening to me. Cold corridors. Colder rooms and unending fire inside me.
“I know Ashcroft. Axel took me there.” Aubrey shudders, a full-body thing he doesn't try to stop. “We went underground. I could never get the smell out of my nose after.” He presses his nose against my neck, breathing me in. “I'm so sorry you were there.”
I swallow hard, trying not to give into the pain running between us because of this nightmare.
“There were other omegas there too. I never saw them. I heard their screams echoing down the corridor.” I press my face into his shoulder. “There were so many of them, Aubrey. I couldn’t stop it. Couldn’t help them—”
His arms tighten around me. “Neither could I.”
“I know Ashcroft Station.” Kev is already out of the nest, on his feet, moving through the patio door into the house. He comes back with his tablet, drops back into the nest and pulls up a blueprint, the screen throwing pale light across us. “Levi's been mapping every decommissioned underground station between Silverpine and Canton City.” He traces the network. “Ashcroft is here.”
Lex leans in. “That network connects both cities.”
“Yes.” Kev taps the screen. “They’ve been raided. There’s nothing but three floors of deserted offices. No evidence of activity for years.”
Aubrey stares at figures at the edges of the map, his fingers moving through the sequence of numbers as he speaks. “Forty-three. Seven. Twelve. Negative seventy-nine. Twenty-two. Five.” A pause. Then again. “Forty-three. Seven. Twelve. Negative seventy-nine. Twenty-two. Five.”
“Those are latitude and longitude coordinates, Aubrey.” Kev sits up. “But that last number. Five. That's not part of any location.”
Five. Something about five.
The lurch as we descend. Sometimes I’m on my feet. Sometimes I’m slouched in a wheelchair. In my mind, I see a panel on the wall beside the door, half-obscured by a guard's shoulder, timing down as we drop. One, two, three, four, five.
“Numbers counting down,” I say. My gut would sink when I saw those numbers, but perhaps it wasn't all in my mind. Perhaps it was a physical sensation. “I thought it was a room but it wasn’t. It has to be a lift.”
Aubrey's head comes up. “A lift with a red floor?”
Red. The color of blood. I want to be sick when I nod. I curl my fist over my stomach, swallowing down the bile. “Yes.”
“Axel took me there. In a service lift with a red floor. I noticed it because… I…” He wraps his fingers around his neck.
Lex kisses his temple, drawing Aubrey back from the brink. “Feel us here, Omega. You’re with us. Not back there. You’re never going back there again.”
Aubrey blinks and thankfully the light stays in his eyes. He exhales a shaky breath. “Axel took me there. They trafficked omegas, they…used the lower levels. Brought omegas in from all over the country. Swapped them at their meetings.”
Ezra goes still. “Meetings?”
“Other alphas came. Traffickers. The omegas they brought — they were checked out. All of them. Just — blank. Like there was nobody left behind the eyes. Wallace would walk through and look at them. Sometimes he'd take one. He'd say they weren't any good for anything more than what he was going to do to them,” Aubrey whispers.
“How did this go on without anyone discovering them?” Lex says.
“Because Axel went to great lengths to hide them.” Aubrey swallows hard. “There is a trapdoor hidden in a storeroom floor. No one would know it was there. That’s where we went down to get to level five.”
Kev stares at the blueprint. “The official record shows three subterranean floors. That's how he's stayed invisible. They haven’t gone down deep enough.” He ploughs his fingers through his hair, spiking it up all over again.
“How could he have built two more floors beneath the station?” Ezra asks.
