Total pages in book: 158
Estimated words: 144908 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 725(@200wpm)___ 580(@250wpm)___ 483(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 144908 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 725(@200wpm)___ 580(@250wpm)___ 483(@300wpm)
Reese looked nervously at his wife, tightening his hold on her hand. Already, he had put her through so much. He would be asking her to accept so much more. “Yeah, I remember her,” he admitted. “From the prison. When I was in Crawley. She was always coming around. She had full access to the prison. The warden gave her anything she wanted, and all the guards deferred to her.”
Czar nodded. “Helena told you things about herself. Personal things. I want you to think back and try to remember every single detail you can and tell me what she told you.”
Ambrielle sized him up as her father had taught her, pushing all emotion aside. This man was her enemy—no, not her enemy. He was her opponent. She could hear the power in his voice. He was compelling. She felt his power. Every single person in that room wanted to do his bidding—apart from her.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to fall in line with everyone else and be part of the Torpedo Ink family. She absolutely did, but she knew what was coming. She knew what Czar would demand of Master, and she wasn’t having that. She had to be calm and come up with an excellent plan or nothing she said would matter. Czar was extremely intelligent. Far more so than people around him ever saw, mostly because they took him at face value. She wasn’t going to make that mistake.
“Reese,” he prompted.
“Yeah, I’m trying to remember the details. It isn’t like I want to remember her.”
“Start with her description. Tell me what she looked like.”
“She’s tall, dark hair, wears it so it curls around her chin. I don’t know what women call that kind of hairstyle, but it never looks messy. She was always put together. Her clothes, her makeup, her jewelry, even her shoes. She seemed always aware of how she looked. She had this interesting snake ring that she wore on her index finger.”
Reese curled Tyra’s hand closer to him as if holding on to her was holding a lifeline. “What else? She didn’t really have any curves to speak of. She looked like a model and walked like one. Like you’d see in a magazine. Like you could hang her on a coatrack. She was beautiful but cold. She had tattoos on her back. They covered scars she had. They were the oddest scars I’d ever seen. I asked about them.”
Reese brought Tyra’s hand, locked in his, to his chin and rubbed. “She laughed, but it came out almost a cackle. A weird, strange sound I’ll never forget. She called them loom scars and said the children of today would benefit from them. That they would learn their lessons so much faster if they knew the loom would activate if they weren’t prepared and hadn’t studied properly.”
Czar’s head came up abruptly. That meant something to him. Ambrielle looked around the room and then up at Master’s face. Loom scars meant something to all of them, yet she’d never heard of such a thing. She’d seen odd scars on Master’s back. He had a multitude of scars, but there were some she couldn’t identify. She should have asked him.
Czar’s sharp gaze collided with Destroyer’s and then with some of the other men of Torpedo Ink. “You’re certain she used the term loom scars when she addressed the scars on her back?”
“Yeah. I asked her to elaborate, but she refused.”
It was very clear to Ambrielle that the Torpedo Ink members knew what a loom scar was. All of them. Did they all bear those same scars? The ones on Master’s back?
“If she has scars from the loom, Czar,” Code said, “she had to have been a survivor of our school. No one in the other schools had the loom used on them.”
“You’re certain?” Czar asked. “You know that for a fact, Code?”
“I’ve checked over and over. The original idea was for the loom to be used in the school Gavriil and some of the others went to as well, but it was too large to move and a second one was never built. After it was destroyed, Sorbacov never had it replaced—at least, I’ve never come across any evidence of it.”
“Then we’re definitely looking for a girl from the same school we were in. One who managed to survive,” Czar said, his tone thoughtful. He looked around the room again. “How? How did she manage to get out alive, and we didn’t know?”
“Did she get out?” Absinthe asked. “She still works for the Russian. It seems to me the Russian took over for Sorbacov, possibly even when Sorbacov was alive.”
Czar’s gaze narrowed on Absinthe. “Sorbacov would never have stopped using small children for his pleasure. He was seriously addicted to the rush he got from watching the torture and abuse. That was how he became aroused. He wouldn’t have stopped just because we had all disappeared.”