Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 71852 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 359(@200wpm)___ 287(@250wpm)___ 240(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71852 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 359(@200wpm)___ 287(@250wpm)___ 240(@300wpm)
Drake said nothing and retreated somewhere Clover couldn’t see him. The door opened with a low clang as soon as he stilled, and Clover found himself flinching despite his earlier thoughts. Would Apollo be the one to abuse him next? Break his promise to Drake and offer Clover to someone else while making Drake watch? He held all the cards and had no reason to keep his word.
Clover dared look up to at least see the approaching danger. Drake stood in the corner with his fists clenched, his face like a mask drained of any feeling. A man in black stood several footsteps away from him, an assault rifle pointed straight at Drake’s chest, pinning him to the wall with the wordless threat.
Was Clover sensing smoke or was his brain fucking with him?
Two of the guards pointed guns at them, but a third entered holding an elongated tool with a black handle. A taser?
No. The tip glowed.
Drake’s facade cracked the moment he noticed it too, and he uttered a broken sound. “Come on, please, don’t…”
Clover didn’t miss the way his eyes darted to all corners of the room, assessing, planning, but the fire burning in Drake’s black gaze died when Clover felt steel against his head.
There was no escape.
He realized what was happening when it was far too late. Someone pressed the electric branding iron to his shoulder blade, and the world went aflame with both pain and his screams.
When he sank his face into the leather of the bench, talk of this location not being secure came as if from behind a wall.
Merciless hands pulled Clover off the bench, and when he was forced to walk out, no one cared when he tripped and fell over several times.
So he wouldn’t die here. His agony would last for an eternity.
Chapter 13 – Drake
Blood dripped from the wounds on Clover’s back, its rivulets gravitating to the laminate floor as the boy struggled to keep up with the two men dragging him along the corridor. He tried to walk on his own but kept stumbling over his feet, battered flesh constantly tense when movement aggravated the harm already caused.
It was all Drake’s fault.
It was his hands that had broken Clover’s skin with a cane, his cock that had raped him, his need for revenge that had put them in this position in the first place. Clover didn’t deserve any of this. It should have been him.
With his hands cuffed back and a chain between his legs allowing only so much freedom, he didn’t stand a chance against the five men escorting them from the torture arena. Were he on his own, maybe he’d have risked it, since choice would then have been between the freedom of a quick death and days of torture, but if he as much as tried to struggle, one of the men would have gotten to Clover first.
Though maybe a broken neck or a quick bullet to the head would be preferable to what awaited them both in the future. A future he knew painfully well and had promised to protect Clover from. But now that his will had been castrated, his lover brutalized, and his close friend captured, the truth penetrated Drake’s brain like acid.
This had never been about Clover’s safety. If it was, he’d have listened to Tank. Waited. Made a solid plan. No, the powerful drive that infected Drake’s mind and compelled him to confront a pack of hyenas with his bare hands was the pure need for revenge. A drug, he’d craved all those years without even knowing, yet finding out it was close, almost within his grasp, crumbled all inhibitions a rational mind should have had.
It was as if the knowledge of Apollo’s whereabouts had eaten through not only his sense of self-preservation but also the plain old ability to think. Clover had trusted Drake’s judgment, and now he was suffering for it.
All his senses were on high alert, so he did hear scraps of conversation. Something about their location being compromised. About the need to move. He didn’t even want to dream about this being an opportunity to run. Not with Clover barely walking on his own. Drake had done enough damage. There was no need to plant false hopes in Clover’s battered heart.
“Take them to B1,” Apollo said before turning into one of the corridors in the endless maze of dark, windowless walls.
One of the guards answered, but Drake was too focused on the broken skin before him, the hunched shoulders and matted hair.
Clover would have been better off if Drake hadn’t fallen in love with him.
His mind jarred when one of their captors opened a nearby door before tossing Clover inside. The flickering light in the room was yet another stab into Drake’s brain. He’d spent too much of his life in windowless rooms with fluorescent lamps that came on just like this. He could already hear Julie Andrews’ voice whispering into his ear.