“I know.” I sounded a bit breathless, but not too bad. “My dad thought I was such a problem that he tried to kill me. It didn’t take.”
The man frowned, his forehead creasing. “Why do you keep talking about your father? I have no interest in your family. Not yet, anyway. If you continue to be problematic for my employers, they may wish to meet your father.”
Shit.
Not random. Not ransom. Not my father.
What the fuck was going on then?
I didn’t let my confusion show on my face, forcing my tone to stay light. “That might be difficult for them since he’s on the run now.”
Not a flicker. Either he’d already known about my father, or he simply didn’t care. Most likely the latter.
The man grabbed my hair and yanked my head back, giving me no choice but to look up at him. “I won’t mark your face again.”
I didn’t have to wonder what he meant by that because his fist collided with my ribcage even as the last word came out. I gasped, choked, but I couldn’t catch my breath because his hand was around my throat now, squeezing. I pushed against his chest with my bound hands, but there was no strength in me. Black spots danced in my vision, and my knees gave out, but I didn’t fall.
He was silent as he hit me again, but I couldn’t hear the impact over the blood rushing in my ears. He must have been counting, or he knew how long he could choke and beat me until it was too much, because he suddenly stopped.
I dropped to the floor, but I barely felt my knees hit. I was sure it hurt, but everything else hurt too much for me to really notice. I supposed I’d see the bruises… if I survived this first. And judging by the way I was feeling at this moment, not surviving could be a viable option.
Except he wasn’t trying to kill me. He could have, I knew that. Even with as much pain and oxygen deprivation that my brain was trying to handle, I knew that things could have been much worse.
They could still get worse.
I had to get through the pain, figure out where I was, and how I could get out.
“Serge.”
A scrawny guy burst into the room and didn’t even look twice at me. He muttered something in another language, and the big guy – Serge, I supposed – snapped something back in that same language. Judging by the way the little guy scurried away, Serge was the top dog. Here, anyway. He’d mentioned bosses.
I sucked in another burning breath. Bosses. Who the hell in my circle of people would have bosses that would want me beaten up?
Serge leaned over me, and a part of me wanted to kick him, hurt him the way he’d hurt me, but I knew that if I did, I’d get another beating. That one might knock me out, and if I was unconscious, I couldn’t keep working on the problem of my escape.
“If you are not a problem, we will not need to have this discussion again.” He straightened and put his hands in his pockets. “Someone will bring you food once you are well enough to eat.”
The fact that he knew that I wouldn’t be able to keep anything down until the pain dissipated told me that I wasn’t the first person he’d beaten like this.
The question I wasn’t sure I wanted answered was, how many of those people had died here?
Three
He left the light on, and while I wanted to think that he was being kind, I doubted it. Serge didn’t strike me as the sort of person who did things out of the kindness of his heart. He’d done it for some reason. Maybe to show that if I was agreeable, things wouldn’t be so bad.
As if anything that happened in this room wouldn’t be bad.
I still didn’t have windows, but I felt like I could better judge the passage of time this way. While I didn’t know what day it was, or even what time of day, I was confident that only a few hours had passed before the door opened again.
Then again, that could’ve had less to do with light and more to do with the fact that the pain in my torso had lessened but not completely faded. It wasn’t Serge this time, but I didn’t lower my guard as the scrawny guy from before brought a paper cup and plate over to me. Just because someone wasn’t big didn’t mean they couldn’t be vicious.
My father was proof of that.
The guy set the food and drink down in front of me, removed the tape from my wrists and rattled something off in what sounded like Russian but wasn’t quite Russian. Croatian maybe. Or Romanian. One of those countries that had been part of the Soviet Union before it dissolved. I did know some Russian. I wouldn’t have needed it as much as an FBI agent as I would have if I’d been trying to make it into the CIA, but I’d studied it along with Spanish, French, and Korean. Spanish was the only one I’d really been any good at, but I knew enough Russian to know that it wasn’t what this guy was speaking.
“Thank you.” I shifted around, not bothering to hide my winces of pain as I moved. If I let this guy think I was weaker than I was, I might be able to use it in the future, either to catch him off-guard or to play him and Serge off each other.
For the first time in a while, I wished I’d made it further at Quantico.
“Welcome.” The word was heavily accented, but now I knew that he understood at least some English, probably more than he let on.
Filing that away under possibly useful information, I turned my attention to the food in front of me. Despite how much I was hurting, my stomach growled. I forced myself to take a small sip of water first and was pleasantly surprised to find it cool and clean. The food was a simple peanut butter and jelly sandwich and an apple, but the fruit wasn’t rotten, and the bread wasn’t moldy. I hoped that meant they cared whether I got sick. I took my time eating, in part to keep myself from throwing up if my body decided it didn’t want to accept food just yet, but it was more about having something to do.
After I finished, I leaned back against the wall and wrapped my arms around my knees, holding them close enough to let me rest my head. The light was still on, and I found myself able to relax. Well, as much as anyone could relax in this sort of situation. I let my mind wander rather than forcing it to start looking for ways out. The food had given me some energy, but I needed some non-chemical-induced rest. I doubted I’d be able to sleep, but if I could rest for a couple hours, I’d be thinking a lot more clearly.
Forcing my mind away from my current circumstances, of course, meant that my thoughts went to Jalen. I hated how we left things, and I hoped that he didn’t think I was ignoring him because of Elise. Then again, maybe that was better. If he knew I’d been taken, he’d be out of his mind trying to find me and feeling helpless when he couldn’t. I hoped that if he did know I was gone, he’d go to Clay, or at least to Jenna, who’d bring Clay in on things. It wasn’t that I trusted Clay more, but he’d been trained in this sort of thing, and he had resources that Jalen didn’t. If Jalen had been able to find a missing person, we never would have met…
I’d been hoping for a white Christmas, I thought as I stood in front of the window and watched the snow fall in thick, wet flakes that promised even more accumulation. Now I was thinking that I might’ve been hoping too hard. It was a snow emergency. Non-essential businesses were closed, and the schools would have been too if they hadn’t already been on break for the holidays. People were being told to stay off the roads unless absolutely necessary, and snowplows could barely keep up around the hospitals and emergency services.
Muscled arms slid around my waist and pulled me back against a broad chest. I rested my head on Jalen’s shoulder with a sigh.
“Do you think Santa’s going to be able to make it through all this snow?” Jalen’s breath was hot against my skin, and I shivered. He tightened his embrace. “If he does, are you expecting something special in your stocking this year?”
My mind immediately flashed back to the previous year when Jalen had dressed up like Santa and crawled into bed late Christmas Eve, a ring box in hand. I didn’t think Jalen could top that, but I was pretty sure I could.
Before I could spoil the surprise, I turned around and coiled my arms
around his neck, pushing up on my toes to brush my mouth across his. “That depends,” I said. “Is Santa going to give me what I asked for?”
“And what was that?” Jalen’s lips curved into a sensual smile.
“A handsome man, all trussed up and blindfolded, wearing only a bow.”
“I think that can be arranged even if Old Saint Nick can’t make it here.” Jalen’s hands slid down from the small of my back to my ass, each one cupping a cheek for a moment before he gave me two quick smacks.
I made a pleased sound and ground my hips against his, smiling as I felt his erection pushing at my stomach.
“Are you sure you’ve been a good girl this year?” The wicked grin he gave me said he’d already decided which list I’d made.
I shook my head. “Not at all. But I don’t want coal in my stocking.”
“Do you think I can come up with a better punishment than that?” His grip on my ass loosened, and a moment later, his hand moved underneath my silky pajama shorts.
“Yes, please,” I breathed, my eyes closing. In the time we’d been together, he’d introduced me to all sorts of delightful punishments.
Spankings, of course, sometimes with his hand, sometimes with a belt or flogger. Orgasm denial. He’d once kept me on the edge for two exquisite hours, begging and sobbing for him to let me tip over the edge. On the opposite end, last year, he’d given me a pair of panties that had a vibrator that fit right against my clit, then had me wear them to a party Jenna and Rylan had thrown. He’d practically had to carry me out by the end of the night. Then there was…
I gasped as he pushed a finger into my ass. Yeah, there was that too. Anal wasn’t always a punishment, but he could make it be one. I grabbed the front of his shirt and buried my face against his chest as he worked his finger in and out, the dry friction burning even more than usual.
“How do you want it?” he asked, teeth scraping the top of my ear. “Up against the window? Bent over the chair? In the playroom, on your back, legs in the air?”
All of them sounded wonderful, but at that moment, one choice stood out. “I want to watch the snow.”
He nodded. Without missing a stroke, he backed us up until I could feel the chill from the glass. He claimed my mouth with a harsh, bruising kiss, his tongue plundering my mouth, exploring every inch of it. I was breathless by the time it broke, barely noticing as he spun me around and pressed me against the glass. My silk shirt did little to protect my skin from the cold, my nipples immediately pebbling. He tugged down my shorts until they dropped the rest of the way on their own, then he kicked my legs apart.
“I hope you’re ready, because this is going to hurt.”
The voice registered a second after the words, and I screamed. That wasn’t Jalen behind me. Not his hands on my hips. Not him pushing his way inside me. I didn’t know who it was, but it wasn’t Jalen.
I screamed again, but I couldn’t hear myself. All I could hear was laughter and the loud grunts of the man forcing himself into my body.
This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. It was a nightmare. It had to be.
I needed to wake up.
I knew the world I was waking up to was bad, but this was worse. There, the bad was limited to reality. Here, my imagination had no limits.
And I didn’t know if I could survive them.
Four
I was screaming when I jerked out of my nightmare, my throat straining, burning. My lungs were on fire, screaming for oxygen, but my ribs protested every movement, racking my entire body with pain. Choking, gasping, I tasted blood in the back of my throat, and I remembered the last time I’d felt like this, unable to breathe, my mouth filled with my own blood.
“Shut up!”
I sucked in another breath and gagged, coughed. I wasn’t yelling anymore, but I wasn’t exactly quiet either. It was hard to be quiet when I felt like I was coughing up a lung.
“Shut up!”
Suddenly, I was off the floor and being slammed into the wall. The little bit of air I’d managed to get rushed out, leaving me gaping like a fish and wondering if I was going to pass out. Serge put his face right in front of mine, his eyes icy.
“I told you that if you behaved, we would not need to talk again.” His voice had dropped from shouting to something flat and much, much scarier.
He was going to hurt me again, and this time, it wouldn’t end with me in pain, but I’d be broken. Probably dead. I didn’t want to be dead. I needed to convince him that I would be quiet.
But I didn’t want to be quiet. If he was going to kill me, then I sure as hell would go down fighting. I hit out with my bound hands, catching him on the chin. His head snapped back, then slowly came down, his expression stony.
“Let me go!” I twisted, trying to get free, trying to kick him. All reason had fled. I wasn’t thinking like an FBI trainee, methodically trying to break free. I was scrambling, desperate.
I didn’t want to die. Not now. Not like this.
I hadn’t survived my father to die like this.
“Stop.”
He shook me, and my head bounced off the wall. Pain shot through my skull and sent stars flashing in front of my eyes.
Serge shouted something over his shoulder, seeming oblivious to my feet bouncing off his massive thighs. I wondered if he felt anything at all. Pain. Excitement. My nightmare came back, and I knew I’d prefer violence to excitement.
“The first time was a lesson,” Serge said. “But my employers will be upset if you are marked up.”
Oh shit.
That didn’t sound good.
Shit. Shit.
“Why not?” I asked. “Why will they be upset?”
I was still trying to squirm, but I was rapidly losing strength. A sandwich and a couple hours of sleep were no match for what I’d been through. I’d thought I could handle it because I’d spent nearly three months at Quantico. What a joke.
I was a joke, thinking I could do something.
The scrawny guy came running in, carrying something in his hand. I couldn’t see what it was, but I had a feeling I wasn’t going to like it.
Serge dropped me to the floor, then crouched down next to me. “I had hoped you would be a smart one, learn from your introduction that it would be better to let things happen.” He shook his head and held out his hand to the other guy. “But since you decided to be problematic, I must now do something I don’t want to do.”
My eyes widened. He’d had no problem beating me. How bad did it have to be if he didn’t want to do it?
I cursed as something sharp pierced my arm. I looked down even though I knew what I’d see. A syringe sticking out of my arm.
“What the fuck?!” I tried to jerk my arm away, but I knew it was too late. Whatever had been in the syringe was now in my bloodstream.
Wonderful.
The ceiling was swirling.
Round and round and round. Bright colors. Shiny colors. I liked the colors. The room was better with the colors. Instead of gray, they were red and green and blue and silver and orange. Swirling like circles and triangles.
I shifted on the floor, and the swirls went with me. That was new too. I liked it. Before, when it had been dark, I’d been bored. It wasn’t dark now, and I wasn’t bored. I was playing tick-tack-toe with the swirls.
Green won first and got cocky. Red didn’t like that and got distracted. I beat red and then played yellow. Yellow cheated by putting a unicorn in the center, and that was when things got crazy. The colors took sides and then everything else started fighting too.
The triangles on my wrists hurt so I rubbed them together until the triangles turned into rectangles, and I threw them away. I pumped my fists in the air and cheered on the buffalos until I fell asleep.
Running. Running. It was dark, and the trees were scary, but they weren’t chasing me. They cheered, yelling bad words and things in other languages that I couldn’t understand. I wanted to tell them to talk to me or stop yelling, but I was having a ha
rd time breathing. My sides hurt. I was out of shape. But I shouldn’t be out of shape. I ran all the time. Lifted weights. Boxed.
But it hurt to breathe. Ribs and stomach hurt too. Why?
It was hard to run, not just to breathe. My feet felt funny. Tingly numb, like I’d sat on them.
Whoever was chasing me needed to stop because I couldn’t run anymore.
I was too tired.
I turned…and screamed…
My eyes popped open, and I stared around the room. The colors were gone, but he was still there.
Standing against the wall. Those dark eyes boring into me. Watching me. Daring me.
“Get away from me!”
I held out my hands, pointed at him.
“He shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be here. He’s not here. No. Not here. Can’t be here.”
He took a step forward, and I scrambled backward, my head thumping against the wall. It hurt, but I didn’t care because he couldn’t be here.
“No. No. No. You’re not here. You’re not here.”
I shook my head, then dug my hands into my hair. I closed my eyes, pulled my hair. He had to go away. He wasn’t here. Not here. I never had to see him again. Never again.
“Look at me, Rona.” His familiar voice cracked and warbled. “Look at your father. Don’t be a bad girl. Look at me.”
“No, no. I’m not hearing you. You’re not here. Go away.”
“I’m here, and I’m going to finish what I started.”
“No!” The word ripped out of me, and I screamed it again and again until the colors came and wrapped me up.
They were soft and nice. They invited me to play again. Hangman this time. I said yes. I was always good at hangman. I liked words. I always thought of great words that no one ever guessed.
Quixotic.
Lackadaisical.