The Sanctuary

37

WHEN DANNY’S MIND awoke it did so slowly, like a slug crawling from a hole in the ground.

Though the restraints no longer held him down, he was still on the table where the doctor had worked over him for two days. The lightbulb still glowed on the ceiling above him. His chest still rose and fell in a steady rhythm.

A dense fog hung over his mind, but he was alive. The torture was finished, he remembered that much. There was something else. He couldn’t put his mind on it.

He tried to lift his head, but pain flared in his neck and he abandoned the attempt. The warden had told him to move his legs. It was strange that this memory came to him even before the memory that the warden had come at all, but he’d felt pain in his neck and that pain had somehow triggered…

Danny blinked. The warden had come. He’d said something important.

Ignoring the pain in his neck this time, Danny lifted his head off the table and stared down at his feet. Red pinpricks dotted his shin. The leather straps that had held his legs dangled over the sides of the table. But the warden had said something, and as Danny lay with his head cocked up, the words came to him in one lump sum.

Renee has decided to join us.

He’d passed out.

This time Danny moved without calculation. He threw the full weight of his left leg over his right and rolled against the two restraints that bound his arms to the table by his sides. There was no reason in the movement, only a raw reaction. Instinct stripped bare of the training that might hold it in check.

The sudden shift in weight tipped the table as if it had been shoved by an angry rhino. The whole thing twisted wildly under him, wrenching his bound arms as he crashed toward the floor.

But he got his feet down first. Both of them.

He stood half bent with the wooden table strapped to his arms behind him, balanced on one of its legs. Pain sliced through his strained shoulders.

He grunted. But now his thinking was more precise, and his next movement was fully intended for a single purpose: to be freed from the monstrosity on his back.

Roaring as much from pain as rage, he hefted the table onto his back, spun around with all of his strength, and slammed the table into the concrete wall.

Wood cracked, but he wasn’t free. So he did it again, grunting loudly as the table crashed into the wall a second time. And a third.

But the table didn’t break apart. Instead, the strap that held his left arm snapped on the fourth try.

Ten seconds later, Danny stood in the middle of the room next to the inverted broken table, now missing three of its legs.

He was still locked in the cell, but setting himself free of the table wasn’t pointless. They would be coming for him, he was sure of that. The warden’s intentions were plain. He was going to use Renee as he’d used young Peter—as a means of breaking Danny. Pape would keep her alive until then.

They wouldn’t know that he’d broken free or that he now had the table legs and splinters of wood to use as weapons. Bostich would have to open the door to the cell, and when he did, Danny would kill him in any one of several ways that quickly came to mind.

Why?

In a moment of clarity he knew that he’d vacated his resolve to eschew violence, regardless of the impulse that called for it. No matter what the situation.

He stood up straight, taken by the deep conflict in front of him. And then another question struck him. Why had the warden left him in a cell with his legs free and a table to break? Why had he told Danny about Renee? The man was as shrewd as any Danny had known.

He glanced down at the leather belt still buckled around his right forearm. It had broken an inch from the buckle, but the rough edge of the tear didn’t run the full width of the leather. It had been cut with a knife two thirds of the way through.

The same with the strap on his left arm. The warden had assumed he’d try to free himself once he’d learned that Renee was in the prison. Why? Because he wanted Danny to break out of the deep meditation cell.

Why? Because he intended to lead Danny into a trap.

But that same trap could have been just as easily set by leading Danny with misinformation. Knowing about Danny’s unshakable love for Renee, the warden might have only claimed to have Renee. How would Danny know the difference?

Renee might very well be safe at home, oblivious to the warden’s twisted games. Danny allowed the thought to wash him with hope.

But the moment of reprieve was short-lived because it struck him just as quickly that he could be wrong. The warden might actually have Renee up in the prison as he’d claimed. And with that mushrooming thought, his instinct to save her at any cost reasserted itself like a hurricane slamming into an island.

He stared at the door. The lock was on the outside. There was no getting past it. If the warden intended to draw him into a trap, he would have left the door unlocked.

Danny moved forward on numb legs, eyes on the handle. If the door was open he would go, even knowing that he was being led. He could not remain here while she might be suffering.

He stepped up to the door, put his hand on the latch, and twisted. The latch moved freely and the door pulled open.

His pulse surged. It could only mean that the warden did have Renee. He’d made a way for Danny to find her, knowing that he did not have the strength to allow her to suffer. Knowing that Danny would follow his heart and try to save her.

The light behind him cast a glow down a corridor that ended in twenty feet before turning to the right. From there he knew he would climb one set of stairs to the segregation wing. And another to the administrative wing.

Why?

Why had the warden gone to this trouble? Why hadn’t he just come for Danny and led him to Renee?

But then Danny knew. Pape wanted him to come of his own will, even knowing it was a trap. He wanted to lead him as he’d led Renee. The act of going to save someone invested a person in the rescue and intensified the pain of any failure.

The crushing of hope, however thin that hope, was more miserable than having no hope at all.

Even knowing that his disposition now was to overthrow his vows, knowing he was throwing himself on the mercy of his own emotions, Danny retreated, picked up two large splinters of wood, each roughly a hand’s span, and slipped them under the waistband of his shorts. One of the table legs had split off at an angle so that it formed a sharp wedge at one end. He grabbed it and strode for the door.

So, then, it came down to this. There was no more room for ideology or thinking. It was Renee up there now, not him. He would crush them all to save his bride.

And if they hurt Renee, he would hurt them.

Danny stepped out of the cell and headed down the corridor.