Page 70 of Girl, Entangled

Ella had failed them once and was now failing them again.

Ripley would recover, and probably find a new partner. Luca would do the same, and she hoped that her death would at least let him use the dead-ex-girlfriend angle for sympathy if he ever became desperate enough.

‘It’s been fun, Ella Dark.’

Fun.

This bitch had killed her loved ones and sewn their mouths shut, and to her it was a game played for the joy of watching Ella Dark lose.

The word lit something in her that the poison hadn’t touched and Ella decided, in the space between Doyle’s finger settling on the trigger and the round leaving the barrel, that she would not die sitting down.

If this was the end of it, she was going out swinging.

Ella came off the floor and lunged herself at the gun.

Both hands closed on Doyle’s wrist and Ella drove it up and away from her chest, and Doyle squeezed and the basement detonated with sound. Three rounds chewed into the rafters and brought dust and splinters down in a curtain. Ella had her by the scarred forearm and she twisted with everything she had left, felt the tendons roll under her grip, felt Doyle’s heel skid out from under her on the flagstones. For half a second the gun belonged to neither of them.

Then an arm came around her middle like a tightening of the world itself.

Varro lifted her off her feet without effort and without anger, and her grip on the wrist tore loose and her ribs folded in under his forearm until she gasped for breath. She kicked at nothing. She clawed at an arm she couldn’t get her fingers around. He held her off the ground and waited, patient, while Doyle got her footing back.

But Doyle ran.

She crossed to the rear wall, to a span of brick that Ella’s eyes had read three times as nothing, and she laid her palm flat against it and a low door swung inward on a black space behind. It was painted the color of the mortar, set flush in the wall, invisible until it wasn’t.

Doyle stepped into the dark of it and looked back once. She held up Ella’s Glock and inhaled its aroma one more time.

‘Good luck,’ she laughed, then vanished

The door closed behind her, and the wall was a wall again. A horde of footsteps from upstairs suggested that reinforcements had either bashed the door in or found the already-bashed rear door. But Ella’s real problem had its monstrous forearms wrapped around her torso.

Varro dropped her, then started on her. There was no skill in it. Varro had no guard, no stance, no idea of distance, none of the things she’d been taught to read in a man so she could get inside them. He simply reached out with a hand the size of her chest and took a fistful of her jacket and threw her, and she went off her feet and into the rack of plates and the whole thing came down on top of her with a noise like a car wreck.

When Ella rose to her feet, Varro was already there. He swung his arm and cracked her with a meaty fist that might have dislodged her jaw. It was not the actions of a trained fighter, but the actions of 280 pounds of man. Both were lethal.

‘FBI! Open up!’

A chorus of bangs sounded on the basement door, followed by deafening thud after thud. Whoever was up there was trying to ram through it, but it would take a lot of ramming to penetrate solid steel. There’d be no way they could dislodge the door from its hinges, so they’d have to knock the frame out of the wall, which could take ten minutes.

Varro came at Ella again, and this time he wrapped his hands around her neck. She was suddenly levitating off the ground, and all she could do was kick aimlessly at his midsection. Her hits connected but bounced off what felt like a brick wall. They had no effect at all, and Ella wasn’t sure that Varro could even feel pain at all.

‘Greaves… was… innocent,’ Ella spluttered.

Varro dropped her. Ella drew in as much oxygen as she could before his assault started again, then she crawled backward to put some distance between him and her.

Think.

More thuds came from the door, but the cavalry didn’t sound anywhere close to breaking it down.

She gestured to the door that Doyle escaped from. ‘Why don’t you make a run for it?’

He started on her again, and Ella clambered for another escape route. She jumped to her feet, backed away and found herself ten feet from the amateur torture device. She had to hand it to him. He was committed to seeing this through.

‘Innocent,’ Ella repeated.

Varro only briefly paused, because with every thud, he seemed to become more and more aware that his time was up. He was quickly realizing that he wasn’t getting out of here, regardless of whether Ella lived or died. She got the impression that the only purpose he had left was to kill her.

Ella tripped and then corrected herself. At her feet, she saw a stack of 20-pound weight plates.