Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 69662 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 348(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 232(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69662 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 348(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 232(@300wpm)
For a moment, I was shocked at myself. Never had I been taken off guard, not in the past ten years, at least. I was always on point with my surroundings, taking in every single detail, not missing anything.
I had to be completely focused if I was going to survive. But this slip of a girl, this beautiful, perfect creature who looked at me with sleepy eyes, disheveled hair, and who still wore my T-shirt, was rewiring my brain.
I didn’t know if I liked that, if it terrified me, or if I wanted her to keep doing whatever witchcraft she was doing to make me feel absolutely fucking insane.
I expected her to lash out at me, to start arguing, pick a fight over last night, to continue our arguing match that we shared before we both broke down and gave in to the physical aspect of being near.
What I didn’t expect was for her to pull the chair out and sit down, smooth her hands on her hair, and look at me as if she were utterly exhausted and it had nothing to do with needing more sleep.
“Will you tell me more of what they did to you? I’m trying to understand how we got here.”
I leaned back in my chair, ran a hand over my jaw, and exhaled wearily. I didn’t want to tell her any of this, didn’t want her to experience my horrors even if it was secondhand.
But if she wanted to know some of it, if she wanted to know the CliffsNotes of the man that I’d become, the monster who sat across from her, then I’d tell her what she needed to hear to understand why I would destroy her father… and why she was mine.
I sucked in a painful breath as the frigid water pelted against my already abused, naked skin. The man holding the industrial hose laughed before shutting it off, only giving me a second to catch my breath.
At eighteen years old I’d been in the Bratva’s official “training program” for the better part of a year. Although they’d been beating the shit out of me for far longer than that.
And although I was being conditioned to be stronger, fiercer, and to have any empathy and humanity stripped from me, they couldn’t take it all yet.
They might be able to make me stop feeling pain, stop having feelings, but I was still clinging to those last pieces of my emotions, those last bits of hope of who I was in my former life.
They sprayed me again and again, the water so powerful it left bruises on my battered body.
“That’s enough,” one of my “handlers” said in Russian.
His voice was thick and harsh, sounding like he’d been smoking for the last twenty years.
“Put him back in his room and toss him some bread for dinner.”
The water was shut off, and I immediately sank to my knees. I stared at the white tile beneath me, my blood mixing with the water and swirling down the drain in the center of the floor.
A cloth was tossed at me, and I gripped it in my torn-up knuckles as I braced my other palm on the ground and pushed up.
Every part of me roared out in pain, with jagged wounds on my back, my kidneys bruised from the numerous punches I took day in and day out, and my skin opened up in long slices from the knives during the countless fights.
But I was still alive, could still feel my heart beating in my chest, could feel the air moving through my lungs.
…could still picture her in my mind.
So I wasn’t completely lost, not yet, but I knew it was coming. I knew they would strip every part of who I was until I was exactly who they wanted.
Razoreniye.
The handler came forward to haul me back to my cell, but the look I gave him had the bastard freezing then taking a step back. They all saw what I did to others who came at me.
I stumbled to my cell, and when the heavy metal door was closed behind me, I sank down on my pallet of dirty fucking blankets, looked at the two slices of bread and questionably brown-looking water, and tossed them aside to collapse forward.
I lay there for several minutes, my eyes heavy, my body growing more painful the longer I lay there and my bones settled, my muscles relaxed.
I was seconds from drifting off to sleep, when the sound of an airhorn blasted through the speaker that was mounted in the corner of my cell.
My eyes snapped open and I groaned, rolling onto my back and staring at the stone ceiling, the wire-covered fluorescent light too bright, the sound of the electricity moving through my body until it felt like my skin was about to peel off.