Page 4 of The Intergalactic Duke's Inconvenient Engagement
Everyone looked at Rayna.
Okay, this was why she’d gone to Sunset Falls. She’d kept house while her father had been deployed, and she raised her littlesister Vaughn—she’d beendonewith being the one everyone looked to and needed. So done. And she’d actually been good at making mac’n’cheez and balancing the checkbook. This? She had no idea what to do here. She didn’t even know where here was. “We have to get out”—getoutgetoutgetout—“of here before he gets back. We can find a way to contact the police when we’re away from this place.”
To herrelief—and dismay—everyone nodded, even Lishelle who seemed much more the confident leader type what with the makeshift shiv clenched in her fingers.
Trixie cleared her throat. “There’s a bigger room that way.” She pointed past Lishelle. “Maybe…”
Lishelle looked at her sharply. “How do you know what’s there?”
“I got out,” Trixie said in a small voice. “Once. I prayed and prayed, but…”
Outsounded good to Rayna. Once was all she needed. Without another word, adrenalin snapping in her veins, she rushed across the atrium in the direction Trixie had indicated. The patter of four pairs of bare feet behind her kept pace.
At the end—well, not really end, but in the curve of the atrium, a thicker framing showed one glass panel was a doorway. Rayna hesitated, almost stumbling.
If sheopened the door and their captor was on the other side…
“I’ll cut him,” Lishelle snarled, as if she heard Rayna’s thoughts. Or more likely, the same thought was going through her head.
Rayna shoved at the pane, and it pivoted open.
To reveal another atrium, this one as empty as the black sky above.
For a head-spinning moment, she had the nauseating feeling they were just rats in a maze, theircaptor cruelly letting them think they had run of the place while they fulfilled whatever sick experiment he’d had in mind when he took them.
At least it was a smaller atrium, and the double panes with thick framing at the far side were big enough that she knew—guessed, hoped, prayed—there’d be something different on the other side. Would it be him?
She waved Lishelle up beside her. “Get ready,”she muttered.
The statuesque women nodded grimly and hefted her sliver of glass. Not much to work with.
She’d never had much to work with, so that was nothing new.
Rayna slammed through the next set of doors, hardly caring what she’d find on the other side as long as it wasn’t more of this. Let the nightmare be over, whatever that meant.
But one step into the room—another damned atrium—shestumbled to a halt. All the women behind her gasped as if on cue.
It was a paradise, a freaking tropical paradise, like some exotic, upscale hotel lobby.Welcome to Ye Olde Madman’s Inn of Glass Coffins.
High arched trusses framed panes that let in a light almost as bright as sunlight but somehow didn’t blot out the stars. The glow burnished the odd-looking plantings. Maybe it was just becauseshe’d spent the last seeming eternity running through a maze for her life, but the foliage struck her as utterly bizarre, like something from a Dr. Seuss fever dream. Her gaze tracked up one particularly tall, purple tree trunk to a tongue-like frond that brushed against the highest glass pane of the atrium.
There was something odd about the incoming light. She’d danced under black lights thathad a similar effect, giving everything a strange, around-the-edges glow. Except this was stronger, as if the light streaming in was radiating on wavelengths she wasn’t equipped to see. She lifted her gaze another degree, craning her neck, and she choked.
“The? Fuck?” Lishelle muttered behind her.
“Oh my god. It’s…it’s gotta be just a picture,” Trixie said uncertainly. “Like a planetarium?”
Despite the almost daytime brightness, the visible star field was incredible, vaster than all of Big Sky Country. The hazy band of the Milky Way had impressed her then, but this wasnothinglike that. The glowing stars covered half the view from dome, and centered at the top was a…
“It’s a black hole,” Trixie said.
“No such thing,” Lishelle snapped. “Well, there is such a thing, but not…”
“Notaround Earth,” Trixie finished.
Rayna didn’t want to believe what the young woman seemed to be implying. But the black hole stared down at her like an inescapable eye.
Her own eyes almost couldn’t make sense of it: at once a gaping void and a chaotic sphere of unimaginable energy pulsing out the radiation giving everything around her a surreal cast.