Wrong Door

Chapter 2: Wrong Door

"Move, move, MOVE!"

The corridor was pure chaos, bodies slamming into each other in the dark, guards shouting orders nobody was following, and somewhere close, too close, the wet crack of a fist meeting bone. Ryan flattened himself against the wall as three inmates barreled past, one of them dragging a length of pipe he'd already used on something. Or someone.

"Carter!" Ossie's voice again, farther away now, swallowed by the alarm. "Where are you going, this way's blocked, they're—"

Ryan didn't hear the rest. A hand grabbed his collar from behind and slammed him face-first into the wall.

"You're the one who's been asking about Preston." The voice belonged to a guard Ryan didn't recognize, not one of the regulars. His grip was too tight, his breath too controlled for a man supposedly fighting to contain a riot. "Funny timing, this blackout. Real funny."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Sure you don't." The guard's forearm pressed against Ryan's throat. "Somebody wants a word with you. Somewhere quiet."

That word, quiet, was the one that made Ryan's blood run cold. Nobody wanted quiet during a riot. Riots were loud by design, the perfect cover for something that needed to happen without witnesses. Ryan drove his elbow back into the man's ribs, twisted free, and ran.

He didn't know the layout past the main block. He'd never needed to. Now every locked door he passed felt like a countdown, every dead end a trap closing. He turned a corner into a corridor he didn't recognize, administrative, carpeted, nothing like the concrete he knew, and shoved through the first door that wasn't locked.

It slammed shut behind him and the noise of the riot dropped to a muffled hum.

The room was dark, but not empty. Ryan's pulse spiked as his eyes adjusted, taking in a desk, a bookshelf, a private space that belonged to someone with far more authority than any cell block guard. He'd made a mistake. A very specific, very dangerous mistake.

The lights snapped on.

"You have exactly three seconds to explain why you're in my quarters," Samuel said, "before I stop caring about the explanation."

Ryan's stomach dropped, but he didn't let it show. Showing fear to Samuel Vale was the one thing he'd sworn he'd never do, not even now, bleeding from a cut above his eyebrow he hadn't noticed until this second, cornered in the last room in Blackridge he wanted to be caught in.

"Door was open," Ryan said. "I panicked. Sue me."

"Every door on this wing locks automatically." Samuel crossed the room slowly, the way a man moves when he already knows he's caught something dangerous and is deciding how to handle it. "Which means either the entire security grid failed at the exact moment you needed it to, or someone let you in on purpose. Which is it, Carter?"

"I don't know. I didn't plan this."

"No." Samuel studied him, and there was something in his expression Ryan couldn't name, something that made the room feel smaller than it already was. "You didn't. Someone else did."

Before Ryan could answer, the alarm outside changed pitch, three short bursts instead of the continuous wail, and Samuel's head turned toward the door like a man who'd just heard a gunshot in a room full of silence.

"Get down," Samuel said.

"Excuse me?"

"I said get down." Samuel grabbed his arm and pulled him behind the desk with a force that left no room for argument. "Now."

Ryan hit the floor hard, breath knocked out of him, and opened his mouth to demand an explanation when the door handle rattled. Not knocked. Not announced. Tested, quietly, the way someone tests a lock when they don't want the person inside to know they're trying.

Samuel went still.

"That's not a guard," he said, low enough that only Ryan could hear.

"How do you know?"

"Because every guard in this building knows better than to touch that door without clearance, riot or no riot." Samuel's hand moved to something on his belt, and in the dim light Ryan realized it was a weapon, drawn without a sound. "Whoever that is knows I'm not supposed to be interrupted. Which means they know exactly who's in here with me."

The words landed like ice water. Ryan's mind raced through every possibility and none of them were survivable. Nobody outside this room should have known where he'd run. He hadn't known himself until thirty seconds ago.

"Someone's tracking me," Ryan whispered.

"Someone's been tracking you since before tonight." Samuel's eyes never left the door. "The blackout wasn't an accident, Carter. Neither was that door being open. Someone wanted you running, and they wanted you running somewhere specific."

"Here?"

"I don't know yet." For the first time, something like uncertainty crossed Samuel's face, and on a man like him, uncertainty looked almost like fear. "But I intend to find out before they do."

The handle rattled again, harder this time, metal grinding against metal like someone had switched from testing to forcing. Ryan's whole body went rigid. Whatever was on the other side of that door wasn't giving up, and wasn't planning to knock a second time.

Samuel rose in one motion, weapon steady, and positioned himself directly between Ryan and the door, close enough that Ryan could feel the tension radiating off him like heat.

"Whatever happens in the next ten seconds," Samuel said without turning around, "you do not move. You do not speak. You do not exist. Do you understand me?"

Ryan opened his mouth to argue on instinct, the same instinct that had gotten him in trouble every day since he'd arrived at Blackridge, and then he saw it. A shadow shifting under the door, pausing directly in front of it, still and deliberate, exactly the way a person stands when they're listening for breathing on the other side.

Then the shadow moved.

Not away. Toward the hinge, low, at exactly the height needed to force the door from its weakest point, and Samuel's grip tightened on his weapon as the first metallic groan of metal bending under pressure filled the silence between them.