Total pages in book: 94
Estimated words: 88918 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88918 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
He was hit.
Her heart collapsed, and the roar of blood thrashed in her ears.
No no no no no. He can’t be hurt. He can’t die. He can’t. He can’t. He can’t.
Shadows moved in around her. Then footsteps. A lot of them.
She turned her neck and felt a cool hand on her cheek.
“Tate and Van.” The low rumble of a man’s voice. Tiago’s voice. “I know a lot more than their names.”
“Help.” She cringed away from his touch, but his hand stayed with her. “I think Tate was shot.”
“He was definitely shot.” His fingertips crawled across her lips. “Directly in the chest.”
She couldn’t breathe. This wasn’t real. Her body locked up, and her mind screamed in denial. “I need to see him. Let me see!”
A phone rang. Muffled and cheerful, the chirp sounded close. Somewhere on the floor.
Cole Hartman. He was supposed to call back with an address for a doctor.
The hand on her lips slipped away. A moment later, the chirping grew louder, clearer. Then it died.
“Who’s calling him?” Tiago’s voice drifted from above.
“I don’t know.”
It didn’t matter. That call was an invitation for believers and dreamers. There were no dreamers in hell. Only sufferers and tormentors, prey and predators, and she epitomized both sides.
She was also a fool. Because dammit, she still hoped.
She hoped Tate was alive as Tiago carried her away from him and out of the apartment.
She hoped to live as he sat her in the backseat of a car and drove her to the compound.
She hoped for strength as he hauled her into the basement chamber.
But as she trembled on the concrete floor, it was hard to hang onto hope. The pain in her body became intolerable when her muscles began to spasm and a seizure thrust her into the black void.
Voices and footfalls ricocheted around her, but her mind was a mass of wool. She couldn’t focus. Couldn’t fight. They would do whatever they wanted to her, and the slow pulse of time would be a new kind a torment.
At some point, her brain disentangled, and her senses came online. A pillow, hard and thick, bolstered the back of her head. She lay face up, squinting against the harsh lighting. And hurting. The pain concentrated in her stomach, constricting and twisting and threatening to take her under again.
Oh God, it hurts. Make it stop.
She shifted her gaze away from the lights and focused on what was directly above her. Broad chest, thick biceps, and a scarred and swollen face with silver eyes. As her mind sharpened, she realized her head was on Van’s lap. With his back against the wall and his arms chained to a horizontal beam behind him, he watched the activity on the other side of the room.
Her heart rate exploded. If Van was here…
She gathered the strength to turn her neck and collided with the crystal blue fury engulfing Tate’s eyes.
He’s alive.
Her breaths seized, and her arms quaked to hold him.
Shirtless and heaving, his chest bore a ghastly wound that bled beneath the skin. But it wasn’t the critical, penetrating type of injury she expected from a bullet. It looked like someone had swung a hammer as hard as possible against his ribs.
If he was in pain, he didn’t show it. His red-hot expression suggested he had so much adrenaline and testosterone pumping through him he felt nothing but violent rage.
“He took a bullet in the chest for me,” Van said quietly. “Saved my life. Only reason he’s alive is because he was wearing an armored shirt. His ribs are probably broken.”
She knew his soft tone was meant to calm her, but beneath the whispered words shivered something she knew too well. Fear. She felt it, too. Dread. Terror. The horrifying grip of doom.
Tate hung from chains that encircled his wrists and connected to the rafters, his feet bare and raised on toes, as if to ease the strain on his arms. It was the same place, same position, same fate as the man who died there only hours earlier.
Standing beside him, Tiago held a phone in one hand and Tate’s shirt in the other. He spoke in a low voice to Armando—the only other person in the room. When he tossed the shirt on the metal table in the corner, that was when she saw it.
The lethal razor blade curved from the end of his finger like a claw.
An artist’s instrument.
His favorite weapon.
“No.” A mangled keening sound wailed from her throat. “Tiago, please, I’m begging you. Don’t do this. I’ll do anything.”
“You’ll do anything for him?” He tipped his head toward Tate, holding her gaze.
“Yes. Anything.”
“Hm.” He teased the claw across Tate’s pecs. “I’m more interested in finding out what he’ll do for you.”
CHAPTER 23
The scent of blood stung Tate’s nose. Not his blood. The death from earlier tonight hovered in the air and stained the concrete floor. He’d heard the man’s tortured screams through the transmitter and could now see the source of that agony glinting on the end of Tiago Badell’s finger.