What made my entry here a gazillion times worse were the sounds of life: an eerily keening voice, high-pitched. I didn’t think it was Sienna—I had never heard anything like it from her before. It was counterpointed with a man’s loud grunts, definitely of the powerful thrusting kind.
I was listening to a rape; there’s no way it could have been anything else.
The problem was that the sounds almost seemed to echo in the hallway, and there was a third voice—god, was that Sienna?—moaning as well, which seemed to be separate but somehow also in conjunction with the feminine sounds of Fielding’s current victim. It confused my comprehension somewhat, and my instinct to go to her first warred with my need to help the woman in obvious and immediate need.
My blood was pounding in my veins in rage and frustration, and adrenaline, too.
So I headed toward the first sounds I had identified, starting at an almost-run down that endless-seeming hallway from hell. It was disconcerting, the optical illusion with all the mirrors and sconces and doors, and with not knowing how far I needed to go.
I found that keeping my focus on the mirror facing me at the far end of the hallway was the best way to manage understanding the space visually. Then I relied on my ears alone to pinpoint the sounds. I slowed as they got closer, and it took me too many moments to finally zone in on one door in the middle of the hallway. Or, it appeared to be in the middle. Fuck, everything was in the middle.
Didn’t matter. I found the door, I was pretty sure.
I sent up a silent prayer that I was making the right choice, to help this woman before Sienna. Then I braced myself to power into the room.
I raised my gun to my shoulder, put my back to the wall by the door, and took a deep breath, ready to rain hell on Fielding, and hoping with all of my heart that the woman inside was not Sienna.
It flashed in my mind that it might have been Zoe. God, I hoped not. I wanted to find her, but not like this.
When I threw open the door, in a semicrouch with my gun in front of me with both hands, I found myself standing directly in front of another door made of bars of steel, and what I perceived to be a cage—the woman was strapped to a table inside the cage, so Fielding, too, was inside it. I stepped in far enough to give me a clear shot at him. I wasn’t worried that he’d have a gun ready to counter my own; he had obviously been otherwise occupied before my entrance.
I immediately targeted Fielding’s left side, which was facing me as he faced his victim, who was naked and trussed up on the table like a fucking turkey.
He was shirtless, and his pants were falling partway down his legs. And he was, indeed, raping her viciously.
“Get the fuck off of her, you motherfucker, now!” I heard myself roar.
Fielding’s head snapped in my direction at the intrusion to his sick scene, his eyes wide open in surprise and displeasure, and his body kind of slowly stopped pumping. He clearly had not anticipated a third-party entrance. My nostrils flared in satisfaction; I was at a distinct advantage here.
“I said, get off of her. Now!” I shifted the sights of my gun slightly to the right so I would hit the wall behind him and pulled the trigger. The bullet went past him and embedded in the wall. That got his attention, and he did as told.
Like a coward, he dove behind her and the table she was strapped to. Her keening had stopped upon my entrance, most likely out of shock, but her breath came back, and with it came sobs.
I didn’t want to look at her, but I was almost forced to, considering that he was using her body to mostly shield his own from the sights of my gun.
Fuck. It was Zoe. My jaw tightened, my eyes narrowed even more, and whatever patience I might have had snapped. “Get the fuck away from her. Stand up and move to the corner of the cage, right over here.” I indicated the way with a twitch of my head. “Put your hands up over your head and hold on to the bars, feet wide apart.”
He was not a stupid man. He had used the moments of hiding behind the table to return his pants to their proper position and do up his belt. He clearly trusted that I was not a homicidal maniac like he was, so he did as ordered, raising his hands in the air on his way to the indicated corner, where he turned his back to the bars and grabbed the ones above and behind his head.
It was likely that he thought this would give him some room in which to maneuver. We were roughly the same height, although I probably had him with about twenty-five more pounds of muscle, but our reaches would have been about the same.
I could see what he was thinking: hold on to the bars above and kick out at me, or some such thing. I was having none of it. This guy was sick, and I’d use whatever I had to take him down.