Deathwish: Siren, #6

By Katie de Long

Deathwish is the sixth and final installment of the Siren series, by New York Time bestseller Katie de Long.

Love is pain.

Calder Roane has always been the spoiled youngest son, and is struggling to seize the reins to the family business following his mother's death. But when he wakes up imprisoned in a rusted death trap with several others, it's gonna take everything he has to get out alive. As the mystery unfolds and he tries to discover why he's there, a vulnerable and resourceful fellow prisoner could be the key. If he can win Milla's heart.
Under other circumstances, Camilla Greenwich would've grown up as Winchester royalty, born to a life of politics and privilege. But when the Roane family took her family's place, their actions corrupted the entire community, and cost Milla everyone she loved. Now, she has the chance of the lifetime: the chance to punish the heir to the Roane family empire, and those who've abetted him. But seizing that chance could well be her undoing. She'll have to get far closer to her enemy than she dreamed possible, and risk exposing herself. She'll have to become prey, alongside him.
As her war goes on and the collateral damage mounts, they're about to discover how deep the conspiracy runs. Each past sin is exposed, and in the end, they may be the only people who can redeem each other.

Deathwish (Siren #6)

It should be deja vu, waking up in a closed metal room, locked in with Calder Roane. But this time, it's not my doing. This time, it's out of my control.
I think I know why we're here. I assume it's a mob hit, giving me a taste of my own medicine. I assume, once again, that Calder doesn't belong here.
But does he assume I do?

Deathwish contains graphic and mature content that may not be appropriate for sensitive readers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Katie de Long
• Release date: Dec 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781540167033

Katie de Long

USA Today bestseller Katie de Long lives in the Pacific northwest, realizing her dream of being a crazy cat-lady. As a kid, Katie flagged the fade-to-blacks in every adult book she encountered, and when she began writing, she vowed to use cutaways sparingly. After all, that's when the good stuff happens. And on a kindle, no one asks why there's so many bookmarks in her library. For more information on Katie's work, visit delongkatie.com.

Book preview

Deathwish

(Siren #6)

Deathwish

Siren #6

It should be deja vu, waking up in a closed metal room, locked in with Calder Roane. But this time, it's not my doing. This time, it's out of my control.

I think I know why we're here. I assume it's a mob hit, giving me a taste of my own medicine. I assume, once again, that Calder doesn't belong here.

But does he assume I do?

One, Camilla Greenwich

He's next to me, his back firm against mine, our fingers pressed together. The position's not even slightly comfortable, but in the darkness, there's nothing left in the world but his fingertips against mine. Worlds of expression and connection in such a tiny bit of flesh.

Both of us, in the back of a van, him unconscious, and me nearly so. Our wrists cuffed behind us, palm to palm, fingers interlaced.

Something hard crashing into my head, sending me to sleep alongside him.

When I wake next, he's gone. But the handcuffs on my wrist aren't. No. My nightmare's only starting. I can only pray he's already dead, in a makeshift grave somewhere.

If he's still alive, he's in his own nightmare. So I cling to the memory of that last touch, my body half-asleep and almost dead.

And I open my eyes to the same foul-smelling darkness.

Those warm fingertips against mine, they're more real than the steel walls behind me, the ridged metal floor beneath me.

They're more real than the corpse next to me.

Oh, Calder. You should've run while you had the chance.

We. We should have run when we had the chance.

***

In the harsh light of an overhead bulb, the corpse's features are stark. Brown hair, mousy and mid-range, turned darker by the blood crusted in it and the light. Strong shoulders, and just a hint of a beer-belly. Workers' coveralls, the kind my dad wore for so much of his life.

His facial features are almost impossible to make out past the shadows thrown by the chunks of skin and hair exploded outward from his scalp. But they're close enough to make me remember every gory detail.

My dad committed suicide when I was young. He put a skylight in his skull, and took half his face in the process. I held his twitching hand in one one of mine, and the phone in the other, knowing deep down that he was already gone and no ambulance could bring him back. I knew death well, even at that age.

And there's no doubt in my mind that me ending up here, with this fellow, it's not an accident.

My new friend's hands are empty, but there's a gun at his feet. I can't reach it, not with my hands cuffed behind my back and very little mobility.

My stomach burns; I must have been like this for two days now, wiggling my wrists in the cuffs until they bled, and then some more, only to realize that even the lubrication of the blood won't let my wrists slip through. And who knows how long I was under before that, drugged or concussed.

I'm gonna die here, of dehydration or starvation, my thighs sticky from my own piss. But that seems like the least of my problems, at this point.

A glint at the body's feet catches my eye—a small key, perfect for the cuffs.  But even when I roll away and grope for it, I can't pick it up. The flooring has deep ridges, probably for drainage, and I can't actually see enough behind me to know how close I'm coming. If my arms were in front of me, at least I could see. It's my only hope, really.

I put as much of my weight on my restrained wrists as possible, and gradually manage to shimmy my shoulders off the ground and support my weight on my hands. Even curving forward, I can't thread my hips between my wrists. But this is a start.  At least I'm more or less sitting up.

I sit back on my hips again, taking the weight off my wrists. If I stretch, I still can't get them far enough up to rotate—the cuffs are too restrictive.

But if I don't find some way to get free, I'm just going to waste away here, naked and alone. Maybe a little pressure would help me stretch further. I test it, sliding my hips away from my wrists until my shoulder screams in its socket. I'm closer, but still quite a ways away.

I shift, testing my weight from wrist to wrist, trying to ease the joint's pain.

If there's even a chance Calder's out there alone, I can't let myself give up.

If I get a little more weight on it, I can pop my left shoulder out, and hopefully have the mobility to manipulate my right arm in front of me. Or maybe I'll just break my arm. But trying something's better than doing nothing.

It's a moot point, though—the tension from my own weight isn't enough. I need something more to increase the leverage.

My eyes fall on the chair, and the body in it.

I lean toward the corpse and seize his pantleg in my teeth, yanking on him until he topples forward, right toward my chest. His weight falls across me, and with a sickening pop, my shoulder dislocates and the ground slams against my back.

"Ahhhhhhh," I howl. It's not like anyone's likely to hear.

The muscles in the one arm spasm and twitch as nerves fire and misfire. I can't move my fingers. Can't entirely feel them. My heart races. But carefully, I can bring my arms forward, letting the limp arm just hang.

I shove the corpse off me, and reach toward the key, my dead arm following my good arm gracelessly. I prop it between my legs to steady the keyhole, and after several tense minutes trying to twist my wrist to get the key in right, it finally clicks and the cuffs open. I undo the ones on my ankles, too. Thankfully the same key works for both. Only once I'm completely unrestrained do I try to assess the damage to my arm, probing it with a hand to my shoulder.

My shoulder sits unnaturally under my palm—it feels as though there's a gaping hole in my body where the arm once connected neatly to the joint, barely covered by skin. When I probe the edges of the hole, my fingertips sink in disturbingly deeply. Pain blossoms in my head, and my vision goes red. Dimly, it sinks in that I yelled, and collapsed again.

I massage my shoulder, probing to see how I'm gonna have to jerk the arm back into the socket, or whether I tore something and won't be able to fix it. The ligaments are tense, but it helps with the spasms.

I don't quite have the leverage to get it back into the socket, not with as taut as the ligaments are. So I lean against the chair to prop myself into position, and put my full weight on it, until an internal crackle reverberates through my frame. Tears stream from me, but feeling comes back to my fingers almost immediately. My arm is still spasming, but as I massage it, they begin to ease. And though my movements are hesitant at first, I can move my arm.

One hurdle down. Now—where the fuck am I?

Two

The door's locked, and the walls are solid sheet metal. No vents within reach. No windows. Am I intended to escape from here? If so, the front door's the only way. And it's sealed tight.

The back wall's stacked with gallons of water. And there's a plastic cup in the sink. I greedily down most of a gallon before the weight of it in my stomach triggers nausea. I lay flat on my back to keep it down. Still, after days without food or drink, it's heaven.

Giddy laughs tumble from my deliciously wet throat. There's a curious irony to this whole thing. A week ago, I was murdering my way through mob underlings, and screwing my new fiance senseless. A fiance who I only got to know while I was torturing him much this way.

If it hadn't been so long, I might consider the possibility that Calder thought it would be fun to turn the tables on me. But those who took us, they weren't fucking around. They were armed to the teeth. I could see him deciding a mock-kidnapping would be fun, but not one involving heavily-armed men.

The bare bulb flickers, and that moment in the dark unleashes an embarrassing amount of fear. I might as well be a scared child, watching the lightning flash. I stumble forward a step and stand on the chair to reach the hanging bulb, and twist it in a little tighter. The flickering stops.

I almost step on the corpse when I get down. It seems disrespectful, so I grit my teeth, and heft his stiff body back into the chair. He seems marginally less creepy there, and it seems less disrespectful than leaving him on the floor.

Who were you, buddy?

I rifle through his clothes, and find a little notepad, but no wallet, phone, Swiss army knife... nothing that's gonna do me any good. And the only other thing in the room's a sheaf of blank paper. That'll make for a good escape attempt, surely.

It feels good to hear my voice. It doesn't seem right. I wonder what your name was?

I tip his face to the light, trying to memorize what's left. Stubble, a few freckles, and full lips. A hint of a tattoo above the edge of his t-shirt. I bet you were the biker type. The bad boy. Like James Dean. Mind if I call you James?

And then I can't help but laugh, bitterly. There's no way I'm at the point of talking to a corpse.

"Well, I certainly hope they didn't kill you on my account. I think you're supposed to be a message, but if they wanted to make it clearer, they should've picked someone more... weathered. Smooth skin, no scars—you're a pretty boy."

Like Calder.

I never thought I'd miss the weight of my engagement ring. I'd only just begun adjusting to it. But they must have taken it when they captured us. Now, the question seems pressing: can you be widowed before you're married?

I hesitate, and pick up the gun. It has a reassuring weight in my hand, but a closer inspection reveals the joke. "Really? A cap gun with the mechanism removed? I mean, I hadn't actually figured you sat there and tongued a gun willingly, but it does remove some of the verisimilitude. It makes it clear that you're a message, though."

Hysterical giggles bubble up, making me laugh until my empty stomach heaves. "At least they can't say I shot the messenger."

Three

James slumps in his chair, his skin puffy, and beginning to smell.

Still just you and me, eh? I guess I should be glad this place is pretty cold. And that I'm not trying to eat.

I think he was put here to intimidate me or mock me, but he's had the exact opposite effect, strangely. It's almost calming having him here. Like I'm not completely alone.

My head aches. The deep, ugly kind that makes me understand how the myths about Athena's birth originated. In my head, it's my dad's voice, reading the myth aloud from an illustrated book. I shiver, remembering how he pantomimed Zeus splitting his skull open.

Shit. I try to silence the flashback by focusing on James.

His skin's changing color, and it's difficult to tell how much of it's decay and how much is in my head. I haven't been feeling well. It's a dull queasiness that knots my guts and makes my temples ache. I wonder if I'm starting a migraine or something. Do you think they picked you for me because you have his lips?

It's the question that's been niggling beneath the surface since the first time I saw him. My dad's lips were thin, with a scar on one side where he once took a sliver of wood to the face while he was splitting it for the fireplace. James's lips are full, albeit distorted in death. More like Calder's. If it wasn't for the tattoos and the color of his hair and shape of his jaw, I could almost believe that Calder's been here with me the whole time, already dead.

So I cling to the differences, memorizing the curves and colors of the tattoo, and burning Calder into the back of my eyelids. The way his hair shone almost auburn in bright light. The set of his jaw when he called me on a lie.

But I need more. When the bullet went through James' head, it was slightly to one side. One of his eyes, once I've pried the lid up, is largely discolored with blood and damage, its color indistinguishable. But the other... distinctly brown.

I release a breath I didn't know I was holding, and lay on the floor until the world stops spinning. The dull ache in my stomach's faded, my body realizing it's no longer worth telling me I'm hungry, since I can't do anything about it anyways. But it still lets me know, in the dizziness. Time for more water, I guess.

Calder's hands gliding over me, dipping between my legs, fingertips dragging along the side of my breasts. His breath on my ear, his lips barely brushing me. "Mil, we're not going to hide. We're not going to let them win. They wanted to kill me because they knew I could be a threat. Instead, they've made me one."

I don't want to let that be the last word. This is too important. And I don't want to belittle him, since he's proven to be a damn good fighter, but a threat is severely overstating it. We're chasing ghosts, and the more we take out, the more of them appear.

I open my mouth to protest, and he silences me with a fierce kiss, one that steals my breath and makes me arch off the bed, pressing my legs together. That kiss... it almost makes me believe him. It almost makes me believe that the two of us can take on the world and win.

The tears turn cold on my cheeks, but I'm too exhausted to so much as wipe them away. There's a mild creak, and out of the corner of my eye, a shadow falls across James's face, as though he turned his head to look at me. I turn to stare back, but the shadow's gone.

Oh, Calder. Please, be safe.

Four, Calder Roane

I'm hungover. And I shouldn't be, since I don't remember the last time I even drank. The room is cold, colder than it should be. Milla's gonna shit a brick if she gets sick and has to take time off work. But none of the windows were open, so what can I do? There's no reason for the chilly draft against my skin.

A second later, it occurs to me that Milla won't care about time off work. Her job no longer matters. That takes a guilty weight off me. One less worry. I roll onto my side, hoping to pull Milla closer, let her warmth chase away the bad mood.

It's several long seconds before I remember she's not here.

If I didn't know better, I'd swear that the past year of my