Chapter Thirty-Three

Juliette

Paris, France

Sunday, After Dark.

J uliette remembered .

She remembered!

She remembered that she was in the car with the men who were pointing a gun to her ribs. She was wearing a black pantsuit and a silky blouse. She looked to the side and George Matthews was there, too. She'd known him from their work together. She'd whispered to him, "We have to escape. The longer we're in captivity, the less likely it is that we'll get free." And George had said, "Be very still. Don't do anything that will call their attention to you. We'll be okay."

She shouldn't have listened to George. It would have been better if she'd been killed.

Juliette clutched at her pink nightgown and realized how absolutely ridiculous it was as a garment. What had she been thinking?

Tipping her head to see over to where Thorn stood with his back to the chimney, Juliette watched him crouching, his eyes scanning the area. Without standing, he jogged toward the edge of the roof.

Juliette grabbed at his bag and unzipped it. Bags of IV fluids rested at the bottom. She saw her converse and pulled them out.

She paused when there was a new movement along the edge of the building.

An arm wrapped the wall, and Thorn raced forward.

A man's black balaclava-covered head rose over the edge.

Thorn grabbed the man's wrist, yanked his hand out with a twist to expose the back of the man's arm, and Thorn stomped his elbow.

The man shrieked a high-pitch scream that froze other sounds in mid-air.

The sheer violence of the act was stunning.

Juliette dragged her nightgown up to see what had been pulling at her thigh. She found that she was wearing a catheter bag with a tube that ran up to her urethra. She wiped her fingers on some cloth in Thorn's bag, then reached up to pull out the catheter. She tossed it to the ground, then ripped off the tape holding the apparatus to her thigh. So there, my veterinarian's assistant training is coming in handy after all. But with that thought, Juliette knew it was a lie. That wasn't what she did for her work. She was something else. Doctor…the answer niggled at her, it was right there. But Juliette pushed those thoughts away. She needed to get herself safe.

She fished around and pulled out one of Thorn's turtlenecks, and there she saw the leggings she'd bought earlier.

Yanking off her nightgown, her eyes caught on a blur as someone ran from the left and someone else ran from the right. She froze in her place between the chimneys, as still as a statue.

Angry yelling voices swelled in her head.

It was the sound of fist to flesh that animated Juliette again.

Juliette was shaking so hard that she had trouble functioning. She plopped her naked bottom onto the roof and yanked on the leggings. She did her best to tie the shoes. Picking up the shirt, she lifted to her feet, balanced herself against the chimney, then moved back in the direction she'd come from. She was determined to get away. And if there was no other route to get away, she would go over the edge.

How many times over the last couple of years had she dreamed of doing just that?

Of running and jumping into a great nothing.

Of floating toward the ground, knowing that relief would meet her when her body found the sidewalk below.

As Juliette stumbled forward, she had the hem of the shirt between her hands, and she yanked it over her head, pulling her eyes free just as she came to the wall separating the roofs.

She didn't have the fluid body mechanics that Thorn had. Or the height and strength. Juliette leaned over the wall and, using her hands, wriggled one leg over then the other.

A siren sounded in the distance, and Juliette prayed it would get there and save her. And she also prayed that it would stay away because her head hurt enough as it was.

She stopped for a moment to catch both her breath and her balance on the other side of the wall.

The shirt hung around her neck, her naked breasts chilled by the night air. She pulled out the shirt and stuck her hands into the sleeves.

When she stood, Thorn's shirt came nearly to her knees, the arms dangling far below her finger tips. She looked back, and Juliette could see that the fight continued. It looked like a lot of people. Too many people to count. The only thing for Juliette to do was to keep going. She crouched back down and shoved the sleeves up past her elbows to free her hands.

This time, she'd put a little more brain power behind her moves.

Juliette tried to do the squat jog that Thorn had done to keep his head low. But that took a ridiculous amount of energy. And Juliette was weak as a kitten. She decided crawling was going to end up being her best option.

She was on all fours, crawling along the protective lip of the roof line. She'd done this before with bare knees. But people were cheering her on. It was a marathon race, she'd run to the very end and had gotten weirdly disoriented and fell. She had decided she was so close to the end, she'd just crawl the last bit. It was dehydration back then, she remembered. Easily fixed. She remembered! She was remembering! She'd been an athlete.

In this marathon for survival, Juliette's goal was to get back to the ladder she'd come up. It was the ladder she knew, and the building she knew. Her passport and her money were back in her room. If she was going to escape, she needed those things.

Down, in, grab, go.

That was her plan.

Her other plan, the one that she'd do if anyone grabbed at her, was to go over the building and maybe take them with her.

Death was the ultimate escape.

She pushed against the memories that crawled from their hidden places. She tried to slam them back, at least for the time being. But from the memories that snaked their way out, Juliette knew that she'd never let them take her again.

Never.