How Beauty Loved the Beast - By Jax Garren Page 0,3

work it out.

Two weeks without her workout buddy and his intense blue eyes and contagious laugh had felt surprisingly interminable.

But if he were here, Hauk, her whatever, would charge down the hall, guns blazing. For all her dancer’s strength, Jolie had nothing on the six-foot-seven, ex-Army Ranger behemoth and his combat skills of doom. So that couldn’t be her plan.

She waited until the woman’s footsteps clacked down the hallway, surely to seek those guards she’d been yelling for. Jolie dropped back down with the folder, replaced the tile, grabbed the phone (it had whatever it had) and glanced out the door before darting down the empty hallway.

She’d memorized the layout of the complex and had a good idea which direction she needed to move in. She rounded the corner, heading for the factory floor. Once there, she had options instead of being stuck in a maze of hallways with—

Guards bearing down on her. Three of them, startled to see her. Unlike the big-wigs of Ananke, they didn’t recognize her, which was good and bad. Good because they didn’t know what she was worth. Bad because (one guard raised a gun) she was dispensable.

Hands of Atropos. The mercenary soldiers of Ananke were the shoot-first-don’t-even-bother-asking-questions type. They got big promises of women, beauty and luxury, plus a fat-ass paycheck, in exchange for undergoing a magical lobotomy that stripped their will and made them mind-slaves to Ananke.

Yeah, magic. Jolie hadn’t believed in it until she’d seen it. Ananke was into some seriously dark shit, specializing in various forms of mind control. There would be no negotiating with Atropos.

Like Hauk had taught her, she dropped to the ground and rolled. Bullets clanged against the wall above her. She kicked off a wall and skidded toward a perpendicular hallway. Out of range, she flipped up to standing and dashed forward. “Map...map...map...” She thought over the map and readjusted her course. She needed a lot of turns to avoid the bullets.

There was a route that would work.

Footsteps pounded behind her as she jerked around corners and sprinted down stretches. The factory floor was close. She could hide in the machinery there. Or if she was lucky...

An oversized door was directly down the hall. She readied Grant’s badge as she ran, slipped it through the reader, and the doors opened before her just as the guards appeared around the corner.

The doors wouldn’t shut in time to stop them.

A chain above her head connected a machine to the ceiling. She ducked to the side where her pursuers couldn’t see, gathered her strength and jumped. The chain was cold under her fingers as she hauled herself up. Loud, too, but the last of the machines were still shutting down, the AC gusted and in general there was enough clanking and whirring and ambient noise that she hoped they wouldn’t notice.

The guards dashed in beneath her and immediately started a search of the ground. Hand over hand, she pulled herself up the chain to the rafters. From here, a maze of beams could take her to a window and then out the side of the building. Brayden had a distraction waiting at the north entrance—Plan B. She checked her phone’s compass for south and headed that way.

She was going to make it. She touched her earphone. “I’ll need that distraction in sixty seconds, my friend.”

“You got it, Red Hots.”

She smiled at the nickname and checked her phone’s clock. With a little hustle, she’d be in time for her show tonight, too, although Pussy Will-Oh!’s manager, Catrina, was an associate of the Underlight and would forgive her if she missed over a mission.

But Jolie liked dancing, and she didn’t want to let her troupe down.

She glided along the beams of the ceiling toward a window. Hauk would be proud; he couldn’t have done better himself. As soon as he was home from the hospital—please let that be soon—she’d tell him all about it.

And maybe, if she was feeling really brave, they’d discuss that “boyfriend” thing.

Right now, anything seemed possible.

Chapter Two

A cry of “Churros!” silenced the laughter behind the abandoned electric company where Pussy Will-Oh! performed. They had a few minutes before the ordeal of costuming needed to start, so the eight ladies and two gentlemen of the troupe lounged around the loading dock in the light of an old flood lamp, some smoking, most just chatting.

With squeals of joy, dancers swarmed the new arrival to collect cinnamon pastries. Jolie stayed on the railing, kicking her high heels against the metal and