Page 79 of Dark Gambit: The Play

"I'll be in the living room if you need me."

"Thanks." Eric waited for the door to close before daring to look down at Darlene.

She had a smile on her face, which alleviated his anxiety, and when he pulled out of her and lifted her nightgown to check for bruises, he was relieved to see that there were none on her body. There was a small bruise on her right wrist where it had been pressed against one of the chains, but other than that, she seemed fine.

"I really hope it worked, my love." He dipped his head and pressed a soft kiss to her parted lips. "If we have to do it again, we will need to do it in a dungeon where the chains can be embedded in concrete." He flexed one arm to look at the muscle. "I turned into a damn gorilla."

How he hadn't caused her more damage than that one little bruise was a mystery. One thing was for sure. He needed to be careful with Darlene from now on. She was still human, and he was much stronger than he'd thought he was.

As he carefully lowered one leg to the floor and then the other, the pain wasn't too bad, and when he straightened up, it got just a little worse. Hopefully, that meant nothing was broken. There was no blood either. When he checked in the bathroom mirror, the red marks that the posts had left behind on his skin were already fading.

"The advantages of being an immortal." He washed himself in the sink, wetted a few washcloths, and returned to the bedroom.

The room looked like a war zone, and after he'd cleaned Darlene up, he covered her with the blanket, pulled on a pair of pajama pants, and went to the kitchen to grab the Dyson.

"Is she okay?" Max asked.

Now that Eric was back to his normal self, his animosity toward Max was gone, and he was grateful to his friend for his help.

"She's out like a light. I wonder if the noise from the vacuum cleaner will wake her up."

"Not likely." Max grinned. "I pumped her with enough venom to knock her out until tomorrow."

Eric's lips pulled back from his teeth. "Do me a favor, and don't talk about that? I was just thinking that I'm calm enough to appreciate what you have done for us, and now I'm back to raging."

Max lifted his hands in the air. "I will never mention it again. Whiskey?" He rose to his feet.

"Definitely, and a lot of it." Eric started toward the bedroom.

"Coming up," Max said.

62

KIAN

It was nearly nine o'clock at night when Leon and Marcel called to report what they had learned from Sofia.

"Did she give you a hard time?" Kian asked.

"Not at all," Leon said. "She was very helpful, and you are going to love some of her ideas. In fact, you might want to get Turner on the line if it's not too late."

Kian hadn't expected Sofia to contribute ideas. In fact, he'd been sure that she would resist providing them with more information about her people. Perhaps she'd fed them misinformation? Then again, Emmett and Eleanor had been right there with her, and she'd known that they could verify everything she'd told them, so it wasn't likely that she'd fed them lies.

"Before I do that, did you get the location of the tunnels from her?"

"There are four tunnels that she knows of," Marcel said. "She marked the map, but naturally, the entrances to the tunnels are guarded, the dirt road leading to the first entrance is peppered with cameras, and the last tunnel doesn't go inside the compound. It spills right outside its walls, and there is another gate to go through. Bottom line, getting to the area around the compound where the Kra-ell are hunting in order to grab one is not feasible, but we can grab the guards from the entrance to the first tunnel. It will require tampering with the cameras, but that's not a big deal. Sofia says that the guard shifts last about twelve hours, so that gives us plenty of time to grab them, pump the pureblood in charge for information, thrall them or compel them to forget that they were interrogated, and put them back at their posts before their replacements arrive. That gives us a much longer window of time to work with than kidnapping a pureblood during a hunt. They might communicate with the other guards at certain intervals throughout the day, so that should be the first thing we address when we capture them."

"Just as an aside," Leon interjected. "Sofia bases her assessment of their shift length on what Igor's personal guard told her about his own schedule. That doesn't mean that the guards at the tunnels operate on a similar one."

"We also came up with a way to use a combination of spiders and mini drones to kickstart a resistance," Marcel said. "The spiders can deliver messages back and forth, and the drones can drop earpieces. Sofia says that the human quarters are rarely inspected, and that we can safely drop earpieces in the children's playground. She sketched a layout of the compound that's to scale and is very detailed. She doesn't know what's inside the Kra-ell quarters, but she's familiar with the office building where Igor and the other purebloods in charge spend most of their time. I'll scan it and send it over to you."

That was excellent intel. If need be, they could launch a missile at the office building and eliminate the Kra-ell leadership while minimizing civilian casualties.

"Let me get Turner on the line and bring him up to speed."

Turner answered immediately. "Hello, Kian."

"I have Leon and Marcel on the line. They have interesting new information."