Total pages in book: 154
Estimated words: 148220 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 741(@200wpm)___ 593(@250wpm)___ 494(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 148220 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 741(@200wpm)___ 593(@250wpm)___ 494(@300wpm)
“What the hell?” Charlie sits forward in his chair, frowning at the monitor showing the security feed from the camera nearest the barn’s entrance.
Confused, I stare at the same screen. Lissa’s clearly visible. The view is at a downward angle, because the camera’s mounted at about the same height as the top of the stall doors and on the same side of the aisle that she is. But although she’s still crouching slightly, her knees half-bent, now her upper body is upright and she’s not facing forward anymore. Instead her back is pressed against the stall door behind her, her head against the bars. Almost as if she’s trying to make herself as unnoticeable as possible, flattening herself against the nearest wall. Maybe she heard something? She seems tense, straining—but I missed whatever alarmed her because I’d been looking at Hotel.
Charlie sucks in a breath. “Oh fuck fuck fuck.”
I glance at another monitor and my stomach drops. The different camera angle reveals a thick forearm reaching through the bars, the giant hand clamped over Lissa’s mouth, her wide, terrified eyes—and the huge shadow behind her.
Tusk.
Paralyzed by shock and horror, I watch her fight him. She claws wildly at his hand and wrist, drawing bloody streaks, but his grip doesn’t loosen. Yet she must have gotten away from him. She had to have gotten away because he’s locked behind those bars. No way to pull her inside his cell, no way for him to get out. So if Tusk had hurt her, they’d have found her there in the aisle, in front of his stall.
Abruptly she’s yanked upward, off her feet. Then higher. As if he’s hauling her to the top of the stall but nothing’s there but more bars. The original stalls didn’t have ceilings, just empty space up to the rafters, so the horses wouldn’t hit their heads if they reared up. When they made these stables into prisons, they simply laid more bars across the top of each box stall. I’ve seen the fighters using them to do pull-ups. And I’ve stared up at them from my bed, thinking that even though the bars aren’t as narrowly spaced as the ones at the front of the stall, they’re still too narrow for my brother to fit through. But a woman with a small frame—especially one who is half starved, because Papa prefers girls who are model-thin—might be able to squeeze between them. I’ve just never tried it because I thought the cameras would catch me in the act.
But everything above the stall doors is in the cameras’ blind spots. And Lissa’s almost as scrawny as I am.
Unable to breathe, I watch Tusk drag her even higher. Lissa kicks wildly, trying to pull out of that grip, and my bright, hopeful certainty that she got away from him withers into cold, sick dread.
He hauls her over the top of the stall door. Her head and torso vanish from the cameras’ view—and with that disappearance my frozen horror shatters into terrified desperation.
“Lissa!”
I bolt for the door, the tray of pills crashing to the floor. The image of her legs flailing from a half dozen different angles is seared behind my eyes, and it’s the only thing I see as I charge blindly across the aisle.
“Cherry, stop!”
I scream again, this time in rage and frustration when Victor catches my arm and yanks me to a halt. Fighting him, I try to get closer to the bars, frantic to see inside the stall. Tusk’s powerful, hulking form seems to fill his cell, a thickly muscled mountain of naked, hairless skin. On some level, I’m aware that Victor’s hold is saving me from the same fate as Lissa, because Tusk could grab me, too, the moment I neared that stall door. But those six hours that I’d rejoiced over, thinking that she’d have so much time to escape this nightmare, have become six hours that she’s been stuck in a terrifying hell. I can’t bear the thought of delaying her rescue another second.
But even throwing my weight forward gets me nowhere. My high heels only slip and scrabble against the concrete floor. Victor’s fingers are like steel clamps around my upper arm, but the pain of his tight grip and his bruising strength barely register over the dread and agony ripping at my heart. My breath comes in sobbing gasps as Victor draws his Taser and aims it into Tusk’s stall.
“Back away from the bars.” Victor snaps out the order over the commotion coming from the other stalls—the fighters yelling, wondering what the hell is happening. Matt’s voice is mixed up in those shouts, an extra edge of fear in it. Fear for me. “Get into the restraints. Now.”
Obediently Tusk turns around and backs up against the stall door, raising his arms straight up and placing his wrists into the manacles welded to the bars for this purpose. No one’s fooled by his meek compliance. Victor’s aim doesn’t waver as he gestures Charlie forward. The younger guard approaches the bars slowly, cautiously—then, in a flash, he reaches out to snap the manacles closed, as if fearing in that instant Tusk will catch him and drag him through the bars, too.