Chapter 21

Chapter

Twenty-One

April 20 th

12:49 P.M.

"We have a problem."

At Eagle's words, everyone stopped what they were doing to look over at the man who commanded authority just by being in the room. While Axe only had mild interest in whatever his boss was going to say, he along with the others waited attentively for news.

He was just praying the news was a lead on Beth.

Knowing Sarah was likely the one who had taken her didn't mean they knew where they had gone.

Right now, the where was the most important thing.

Having been checked out by Rock, he'd been cleared and now had a weapon in his hand. He felt better being armed even if the room was littered with dead bodies. Dead bodies that had now been all lined up as Prey worked on identifying each one of them.

Well, everyone else was working on that. All Axe could do was pace and worry about Beth .

"Tomas Butcher isn't amongst the bodies," Eagle answered, grimly. "And there's no sign of Baranov's body."

There was a chance that Tomas had somehow slipped away, maybe was even responsible for Sarah and Beth's disappearance, but he had seen Beth kill Leonid Baranov with his own eyes.

"Baranov is dead," he said firmly. "Beth killed him. I watched her do it. There was a moment there when I thought I was going to watch my wife get murdered right before my eyes. But Beth is too strong for that. She fought back and destroyed that sick monster. Trust me, it was a sight to behold."

"Not doubting you, Axe," Eagle said just as firmly, making eye contact to reinforce his words. "Your woman is amazing, an inspiration to all of us, her resilience and perseverance are legendary at Prey. If I could bottle it, I'd make a fortune."

"You already have a fortune," Ivory Morales, a member of Prey's infamous all-women Artemis Team sassed.

The expression on Eagle's face was tender as he looked over at the young woman. Eagle had rescued Ivory and her three sisters from a man who had abducted them as babies and kept them on a remote Alaskan compound where he trained them to be his own personal army. As much as Prey was a family and Eagle looked out for everyone, he had a soft spot for Ivory and her sisters. "More of a fortune then. Look, Axe, I'm not doubting you, I'm saying that the body has been moved. Let's assume Tomas and Sarah are going to run, you said Sarah seemed jealous of Beth, it makes sense they might not want to leave her alive."

Of course, he knew there was a chance Beth might already be dead, but the thought of her body dumped alongside Baranov's made him feel ill.

No way was she being tied for eternity in her final resting place to Leonid Baranov, the man who had caused her so much pain and suffering.

"Have you got a hit on her yet?" he asked Panther. Axe would forever be grateful that he had tagged Beth with a tracker before they went hiking through the woods in search of where she had been held prisoner. At the time, he hadn't thought anything was going to go wrong, but he'd rather be safe than sorry .

It would have saved their lives when they were taken by Tomas Butcher, and it had saved their lives today. Apparently, there had been some sort of blocker in place at the facility that had slowed Panther and the rest of the Prey tech geniuses down, but in the end, they had found him and Beth and he refused to believe the tracker wouldn't lead them to his wife now.

"The blocker is still in place down here," Panther replied. "We just used the last known location we had and went old school from there to find this place."

"Got something," a voice called out. Everyone's attention moved to Steel, the leader of Prey's most shadowy unit. More rumors were running around Prey about Delta Team than anything else. While Axe had met the men several times and worked the occasional op with them, he couldn't say he knew any of them well at all. Not even close.

If the rumors had even a grain of truth in them, he could see why.

"What?" he asked.

"Secret door here," Steel told them.

That got his attention.

Hurrying over to where Steel was standing, his team with him, Axe barely noticed his own team following him.

"How did you find it?" he asked when he saw the section of wall sitting partially open. As far as secret doors went this one had to be about the top of the line. He'd been in this room a couple of times, he'd done a visual sweep looking for weakness and all possible exit and entry points. Not once had he noticed this door.

Steel exchanged glances with one of his men but both simply shrugged in response. Exactly why these guys were so mysterious. They rarely spoke, they didn't give anything away, they had skills that topped anything Axe had seen before, and yet he was wary of believing the rumors because he knew how easy it was to spread them. Coming from such a wealthy family, his teenage years had been filled with rumors being spread about him, who he dated and what he did in secret. It was all crazy and he'd hated it so he made a point of only believing things he knew to be true.

"Let's go," Axe said, already brushing past the Delta Team guys to get through the door. This had to be where Tomas and Sarah had taken Beth because it was the only entry point Prey didn't use. They had a pretty good start, but they couldn't have left the compound area yet because if they had, Panther would have been able to pick up Beth's tracker again.

The hallway through the secret door was quiet, sloping down a little as it obviously went deeper unground than the rest of the facility. The corridor was sparsely lit with dim globes hanging from the ceiling at approximately ten-foot intervals. There wasn't a single sound emanating from anywhere in front of them, and as they slowly descended through the tunnels the sounds from behind them began to fade.

"Got something here," Dragon, a member of Delta Team announced, stopping suddenly beside something on the floor.

"Is that blood?" Axe asked, heart in his throat as he bent to see what the other man was looking at.

Dragon merely nodded, then stood and began to walk further down the hallway. Everyone else followed him as he seemed to be on a trail, sporadically spotting more droplets of blood when Axe was positive no one else would have seen them in this light without the use of luminol.

When they came to a point where the tunnel took three separate turns, Axe didn't hesitate to follow Dragon down the one he had chosen. The man was like a bloodhound, and since he didn't have anything better to offer right now he was absolutely going to stick with the man who seemed to know what he was doing.

They had just started to rise again, likely having bypassed under the facility and now ready to come back up and to the outside, when they spotted it.

A figure lying on the ground about twenty yards in front of them.

A body.

From the way it was lying at an awkward angle, a dead body.

Beth's?

Before anyone could stop him, Axe was running toward it.

Training meant nothing at this moment when his wife might be lying there dead.

It wasn't until he'd closed more than half the distance that he realized the figure was too big to be Beth, and that it wasn't naked like she had been the last time he'd seen her.

"Not her," he said, sagging to his knees several yards away from the body. "Not Beth."

The words were more for his own benefit than anyone else's.

She wasn't dead, that meant he still had time to find her.

"It's Tomas Butcher, and someone stabbed him in the throat," Trick said.

"Beth?" Scorpion asked.

"No," Dragon said simply, like he had been here to watch the events unfold. "It's her blood I've been tracking." He offered no explanation for how he knew that, and all of Bravo Team knew better than to ask. Delta Team wouldn't be offering any answers.

"Then it had to be Sarah," Rock said.

"But why would she kill Butcher when you said she was in love with the man, married him, credited him with keeping her alive when Baranov would have killed her?" Tank asked.

"Because Butcher wanted to keep Beth alive and Sarah didn't," Axe said softly, sure in his gut that he was right. "Sarah wants Beth dead, and she eliminated the only thing standing in her way."

April 20 th

1:17 P.M.

A scream fell from her lips as she was pushed backward.

No.

It couldn't end like this.

Beth seemed to fall in slow motion, landing with a bone-jarring thud back in the mass grave filled with bodies.

She cried out as her battered body landed awkwardly causing pain to scream along each of her limbs.

So close .

She had been so close to making it out.

She had managed to climb out of the pit, not an easy feat with a dislocated shoulder that had been relocated only to then be dislocated all over again as she was dragged along the ground while she was unconscious. But before she'd been able to make a run for it, Sarah had driven the bulldozer directly at her.

The force of it and the huge pile of dirt it pushed along with it, shoving into her, had been too much. Although she'd done her best to dart out of the way or do the impossible and somehow keep her balance even though she was being pushed backward, right toward the hole she had only just managed to escape, there was no hope for her.

The landing had been brutal, but the wave of dirt that fell with her was almost worse.

It rained down on her like a summer storm. Dirt got in her eyes, her nose, her ears, her mouth, but worse, it landed all over her body like a heavy weight she didn't really have the strength to dislodge.

Especially when that one load of dirt wasn't all that came.

More and more of it rained down.

It just kept coming.

And coming.

And coming.

The more she tried to shove it away the more it covered her, pinning her body down until her struggles became weaker and weaker, until they were nothing more than small, ineffectual tremors.

Buried alive.

Even though reality was telling her differently, Beth's brain didn't seem to comprehend that this was how her life was going to end.

It just … couldn't.

Not after everything she had been through.

Not after everything she had survived.

How could she die in a mass grave filled with the bodies of the innocent, and she suspected the not-quite-so-innocent, covered by a thick blanket of dirt?

It seemed so unfair.

Yet when had life ever been fair for her ?

Never.

Well, that wasn't quite true.

Life had been more than fair when it had given her Axel. Any other man would have just shipped her off to a hospital and left her to fend for herself. Sure, maybe she would be thought of every now and then. The poor girl with no family to take her in after such a horrible ordeal, but soon she would become just another successful op.

But that wasn't what Axel had done. He'd made sure that he built her a support system. He was patient with her as she navigated an entire world that was completely foreign to her. For the first time in her life, she had been shown kindness and compassion. Had been treated like a human being with equal rights, with needs and desires, with her own thoughts and interests. A real person, not just a slave to be used as others saw fit.

Now, as she lay there, slowly being buried alive by pile after pile of dirt, Beth found her biggest regret was what would be her final words to her husband.

They would haunt her as she took her dying breath.

Hate.

Despite Sarah's insistence that Beth was perfect, that couldn't be further from the truth. She had hated a lot of people in her life. Her parents for allowing her to be abused and participating in that abuse. Her uncles and cousins for treating her like she was less than human, and enjoying torturing her. Leonid Baranov for buying her like she was a piece of meat and not a person. Tomas Butcher for playing God with her life and using her as a way to punish Baranov. She even hated Sarah herself for going over to the dark side, from victim to perpetrator.

But never once had she hated Axel.

She loved him so much it hurt.

Hurt worse than the dislocated shoulder, the bruised ribs, and the assorted bruises and cuts. Her chest literally ached with the fear that Axel wouldn't know those words had been spoken out of fear that she would have to watch her husband die and be left alone all over again.

Axel wouldn't believe she hated him. Would he?

Surely, he had to know that he was her everything. How many times had they said that to one another ?

My man.

My woman.

My heart.

My life.

How badly Beth wished she could have one more moment with Axel to tell him how sorry she was for saying something that wasn't true. She knew he was trying to protect her the only way he could in what was a situation with limited options. Sure, she was angry that he would rather leave her alone than allow her the freedom death would have brought, but she didn't hate him.

"Don't hate you, Axel," she whispered into the growing darkness.

Already the thin layer of dirt covering her was enough to block out any warmth from the sun along with most of its light.

Ironically, Beth had always loved the earth. As a child, when she wasn't doing chores or being raped or beaten she was often outside in the garden. Tending to the vegetable gardens was the only chore she actually enjoyed. It had always been quiet out in the gardens, alone with the plants, there had been no one watching her, no one ready to yell abuse, no one just waiting to slap her or hit her.

Just her and nature.

Planting things, tending to them, and watching them grow, it had given her a sense of purpose, like she was worth more than being the family punching bag. She did that, her, alone, grew the food her family ate.

After Axel and his team had rescued her and invited her to live with them at the compound they were building, she'd made a vegetable garden there, too. She'd wanted to contribute, not be a complete burden, but it had wound up having the same therapeutic value the garden at her family's farm had. It gave her time to just be, without expectations, judgment, or fear of being hurt.

Now the thing she used to find peace was slowly suffocating the life out of her.

Sarah drove a bulldozer like she'd been doing so all her life, and it moved so much quicker than her damaged body could.

Although she had tried her best to survive, this time it wasn't enough. Her attempt at getting out of the hole had been thwarted, and now the dirt covering her was more than she could move on her own. Since nobody was there to help her, she had no choice but to be resigned to her fate.

The peace that had filled her earlier when she had refused to participate in the duel against her husband was gone. It had just … disappeared.

It was easy to be brave about death when it was on her terms. But now, once again, she was being controlled by someone else, having their will forced on her. That made all the difference.

Beth didn't want to die there.

Not now.

Not alone.

Not while Axel thought she hated him.

The weight of the dirt as it continued to rain down on her was enough now that it hurt. As effectively as it was going to cut off her ability to breathe, it was also slowly crushing her. Each individual grain was tiny, immaterial, insubstantial. But together they were powerful, strong, unbeatable.

No longer could she do more than suck in a few small mouthfuls of air. Her body was held immobile, the pressure of the weight of the dirt against her bruised ribs caused agony to spread throughout her body. When she'd fallen earlier, she'd landed awkwardly, and her dislocated shoulder screamed in pain along with her ribs.

With her eyes closed and the dirt quickly covering her face, Beth was encased in darkness. A darkness so complete it permeated her very soul.

Death.

She was staring death in the face.

It waited in the darkness ready to finally claim her. It had waited a long time, but that wait was now almost over.

Mouth and nose completely covered in a thick layer of dirt, Beth could no longer find any air. No air meant no oxygen, no oxygen meant she slipped further away from this earth, from her husband.

Drawing the last little bit of air left into her lungs, Beth held her breath. It wouldn't buy her enough time to survive, but enough to send a silent wish up into the universe .

It owed her after the crummy life it had given her, and she prayed it delivered.

Please, Axel, know that I love you, that I never hated you, not even for a single second. Know that I fought to stay with you and that I'm sorry I failed. You gave me everything. Peace, happiness, joy, love. I wish I didn't have to leave you, but I don't have a choice. I love you, now and forever, whether I'm alive or dead, nothing can ever change that.