“If the patella shatters, you'll never walk quite right again.” I was scooting away from him as fast as my legs would allow. He smiled coldly. “But you already know that.”
My heart fluttered weakly. It was no longer a question of whether he planned to kill me; it was a question of how long he intended to make me suffer before he did. This was to be a rehashing of what he had done to me in the IMA's base under Richardson's regime. But this time, there would be no quick patching-up at their on-site hospital, no. This time, he would beat me until I died.
Using the wall, I managed to sway unsteadily to my feet. My knee throbbed painfully as my weight again shifted upright but that was the least of my concerns. He came at me again and I twisted, driving a hard kick at him from my good leg at his bad one. He narrowed his eyes, so I knew it must have hurt.
“Finally learned some self-defense, did you?”
I braced myself.
Adrian grabbed me by the front of my shirt — hard. Too hard. The cheap fabric ripped, cracking against my skin as it tore with a sharp sting. I tried to wriggle free, but only succeeded in widening the tear.
“I could peel your skin like an apple,” he said. “That's what I have my men do to the girls who think they can try and run. I wonder, do you think that Michael would care at all for you then?”
I shook my head wordlessly, too afraid to speak.
“Aye. Pretty faces make men stupid.” He flicked out his knife. I reintensified my earlier struggles to get away, but his grip was firm, and he pressed the cold metal beneath my chin. “When they're not so pretty, that's when the men who would help them flee rightly enough. Because without the distraction they realize that their lives simply aren't worth the forfeit.”
No.
“I could do that to you, Christina Parker.” With the slightest pressure, he forced me to turn my head or risk being sliced. “Or,” he said, “I could cut out your innards like a Cornish game hen and leave you to die in a pool of your own filth as you choke to death on your own blood.”
I drove my knee up, intending to get him in the balls. I got him in the stomach instead, winding him temporarily, but his reflexes were good. Cat-like. And while he favored the leg where I'd shot him, he was nimble enough that it didn't slow him down as much as I'd hoped.
He caught me by one of my arms and twisted, pulling up at a sharp angle, hard enough that the joint screamed and I saw a smattering of red pulsating stars.
“I could take a hammer to your cheekbones and smash in your face like a pumpkin on Halloween.”
Maybe his actions would have been easier to understand if he was a victim of fate. If something had happened to him to make him this way. But no, I'd seen his file. Michael had shown it to me along with the other documents Angelica had gathered. Adrian Callaghan had engineered his own fate. He'd killed his parents, joined a terrorist organization, and slaughtered his way to the top of a bloodthirsty mob.
Sometimes evil didn't need an excuse. Sometimes evil just was.
My face slammed into the wall. I had to turn my head to the side to keep my nose from being crushed. It felt as though the blood in my arm had been replaced with white-hot shards of glass, searing and lacerating all the way up to my shoulder. Tears pricked my eyes. Had he dislocated it?
“I could do all of that.” His voice came through the haze of pain. “But first I've got something rather different in mind.”
What?
Then his hands were on me. Putting pressure on my arm by twisting my wrist in the direction opposite the way it naturally bent. I screamed hoarsely, backing straight into him instinctively. Anything to stop the terrible agony.
Without letting go of me, he whirled me around, using my own momentum against me, to send me stumbling to the floor. I curled instinctively, guarding. We had done this before. He put me into the IMA's on-site hospital with internal hemorrhaging. I had lost so much blood, I almost died. He was going to kick me in the kidneys.
The muscles in my stomach tightened as I coiled up, ready to defend myself or roll away. With a cold smile, he tackled me, and both my wrists were pinned down before I quite realized what was happening. His fingers were like iron, and he was holding me tightly enough that if I clenched my fingers there was a strange ache from the pressure of his grip on the tendons.
My breath started coming faster. He was straddling me, pinning me to the floor by my hips. In that moment I realized what he'd meant by “different,” and what it was he planned to do. My brain exploded into dozens of pieces, each faceted with different emotions: terror, dread, and a sick sort of relief. Relief because maybe, if he thought he had broken me this way, he wouldn't do any of the other things he'd threatened. He wouldn't torture me like Suraya.
But I knew better; I knew he would do both.
“Let me go.” I strained to move my limbs — any of them. But I couldn't move. Not really. Not enough to make a difference; I was a butterfly beating her wings against a boulder. “Let me go,” I repeated, more urgently. “No — ”
“I don't think you understand how this works.” He stroked my cheek with the flat side of the blade and I flinched, remembering his earlier threat to cut me. “You don't give the orders here. You look to your fucking gods and you pray, you pray with those pretty lips of yours that I don't decide to send you to hell for the merry fun of it.”
“You're not human.”
“No.” He leaned in, close enough that I could detect the sweet, powdery smell of his skin. Like powdered sugar. Or latex gloves. “I'm something much, much better.”
What followed was too terrible to recount.
Chapter Twenty-One
Offer
Christina
I had resolved that I would not scream, that I would not give him the satisfaction. It was a promise made hastily, and was broken just as quickly. Adrian was good at hurting people; it was his job — and he loved his job.
Oh, how he loved his job.
I was trembling. I couldn't seem to stop. There was a tightness in my limbs, as though each part of my body was a bead that a cord had been threaded through and then pulled taut. I was trembling, and yet I could not move. I didn't quite dare.
I knew there would be blood. Quite a bit of it. I wasn't ready for that, visually. I didn't want to see the red smears splashed across my skin like warpaint — a war I had lost so brutally. So I didn't look.
But I could still feel everything.
I could still remember everything.
I thought that Michael had broken me, but I had been wrong; he had barely scratched the surface.
This was what it meant to have your soul destroyed.
I whimpered but my voice was hoarse, and the sound died almost as soon as it began. I imagined my throat as a scarred landscape, red and pitted and barren.
He watched me, pleased. An artist surveying his masterwork, examining it for flaws. Except instead of creating, he destroyed, he broke, he shattered. An anti-artist, whose medium was blood and suffering.
I hated him.
I hated him.
I hated him.
Why was he looking at me like that?
Don't look at me.
I hate you.
“That was disappointing,” he said. “I had hoped that you would manage to hold out a little while longer.”
“Fuck you,” I said, and flinched.
He saw it. Of course he did.
“Oh, don't feel too bad. Michael screamed, too.”
My heart faltered. I swung my head towards him.
“They all do,” he finished, “in the end.”
In the end. “Did you kill him?”
“Not yet.”
Then what — ?
Another possibility occurred to me as his smile sawed on my heartstrings. I could almost hear the snap. I choked on the lump forming in my aching throat. “What do you mean? What did you do?”
“I told him that I'd spare you from what I had planned if he gave himself up in your stead.”
/> “No,” I said. “No. You're lying.”
But I knew, in my heart, that he was not. Michael had said himself that he would do anything to keep me safe. Oh, Michael, what have you done?
“My original plan was to shoot you in the kneecap,” he said, bringing me back to unpleasant reality. “Then slice up your pretty face. Maybe do to you what I did to Suraya, except I'd leave you alive to suffer in shame.”
I could taste vomit in the back of my throat, hot and sour. I swallowed, gasping at the effort.
No, I thought sickly. Anything but that.
“But Michael was so desperate to offer himself up for you, I allowed for a change of plans. How does it feel, to know that I've had both of you at once? That while I was fucking you, you were fucking him, too?”
I couldn't remember ever hearing him curse before. The very way he pronounced the word, so that it rhymed with look, made me feel sick to my stomach.
“Shut up.” A shudder wracked my shoulders. I bit my lip and over the muted sting, I could taste flakes of drying blood. “Shut up, you bastard. You're a filthy, demented liar, and you deserve to burn in hell.”
But what if he isn't lying?
What if he had raped Michael?
I remembered Michael's pale face, his anger and his fear. Was this what he had been trying to shield me from? Had Adrian made his plans known so early on?
Suddenly, everything — his secrecy, his erratic behavior — it all made sense. Even then, he had been trying to protect me in his way. Using anger to push me away because he wanted to shield me from the truth.
No wonder he had been acting so strangely. He had been carrying this terrible knowledge on his shoulder, like Atlas bearing the weight of the world alone.
Adrian pulled out his phone.
I thought he planned on showing me something. A picture, a text. Something to offer up as irrefutable proof, to say, Hey, look at this. The incongruity of that took me off guard, and I could only stare, dazed, as the flash went off, leaving a large, plum-colored blotch to dapple my visual field like a bruise.
“Not as good as the Sniper might have done.”
He had taken a picture. It took a moment for that to sink in. The sick fuck had taken a picture.
Adrian pushed his mobile back into his pocket, and caught me staring at him. “But it's a start.”
I didn't want to ask, but the words were pulled from my lips. “A start for what?”
“For Michael to know what he's missed.”
The truth would break him. As little as I knew about the man, I knew this instinctively; it would break him.
“Wait.” I started to say, please.
But that would accomplish nothing. He wanted me to beg, wanted me to suffer. Anything I said to him would only give him more fuel for Michael's pyre.
Adrian stopped, and waited to see what I'd say.
I drew in a deep breath. “Go to hell.”
Michael
Agony wasn't unfamiliar to me. I'd been eviscerated. Shot in the shoulder, in the chest. The last time I'd been shot, the bullet had come close to grazing my heart. I'd had fingernails ripped out. I had nearly been drowned.
I looked at the handcuffs cutting into my wrists. Sweat and blood coursed down my body in brackish rivulets making the cuts itch and sting. It was like being attacked by a swarm of wasps — and yeah, I'd had that happen, too.
I was hard to kill. But some people like a challenge.
The door opened and I knew who it was by the sound of his footfalls. I'd been expecting him. Surprised he hadn't come back sooner, to check on his progress.
“Come to gloat?” I asked. The hoarseness of my voice made me sound weak. There wasn't a lot I could do about that now, unfortunately, and that pissed me off.
“You never did know your place.”
“I knew it.” I lifted my head. “Did you? I hear you're afraid of a little rebellion.”
“Where did you hear a thing like that?”
“It wasn't hard to figure out. People are defecting left and right. There's more disappearances here than at a fucking magic show. You've had to put on quite a show for your people, haven't you? Putting fear of God into them because the pay grade just isn't high enough, and you're starting to wonder if this is your last act.”
I laughed bitterly.
“Being a tyrant never works out from a historical standpoint. Eventually someone starts a revolution and then everything from the old regime goes to shit. Then someone steps into the power vacuum and takes charge, and the whole cycle starts anew. But you know all about that, don't you, Callaghan?”
His eyes narrowed. “It's nothing I can't solve.”
“You're sweating, you bastard. You're concerned.”
“Not as concerned as you should be.”
He plunged two fingers into me and if my cuffs hadn't been holding me upright, I would have fallen to my knees. He would love that.
I clenched my teeth and felt fresh beads of sweat roll down my spine as all my muscles tensed at once, like a spring coiling up. Fragmented thoughts chafed in my consciousness like splinters left to bleed from the inside-out. Don't scream. For the love of all that is holy, don't scream.
A bead of sweat rolled down my forehead and made my eyes sting. I flexed my spasming hands, causing pain to ripple down my arms and pool into my stiffening shoulders. He thrust, hard, and I — scream scream scream — choked back bile in my bruised and bleeding throat.
But I'd gotten to him. For a moment, I'd gotten to him. His empire was slowly slipping, and he was doing everything he could to keep it in his power.
“If only little Christina Parker could see her white knight now.” He slid his fingers free, and I made a harsh noise. Adrian made a small noise of amusement, his eyes taking in my reaction. His fingers were coated in blood.
“Don't say her name to me right now, you fuck.”
“You're cut from the same cloth.” He smeared his fingers across my chest. I didn't recoil. But only barely. “You even bleed the same,” he added softly.
A curl of doubt unwound inside me. It teased through my brain like smoke, the kind of insidious haze that almost always precedes a fire.
“You promised not to touch her.”
“No.” Callaghan leaned in close enough for me to smell the mint on his rancid breath. “I said I wouldn't do what I had initially planned.”
He gave me a moment to soak that in.
Something inside me fell, crashing hard.
“You never read Faust, did you, Michael?”
Fuck, what had I done?
“She cried out for you, you know.”
“You son of a bitch.”
“She spoke your name.”
Oh God.
“But by the end — ” he was fucking enjoying this “ — she was saying mine.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
I wanted to gouge out his eyes. Pop them like rotten grapes. I wanted to wrench every last drop of blood from his body and then bury his worthless corpse someplace not even the vultures would be able to find.
“Begging me to stop, yes — ” he was still talking, why was he still talking? “ — but begging, nonetheless.”
Blood, coppery and hot, filled my mouth. I'd bitten through my lip. The sting was as harsh as reality, and jerked me back to the present. Callaghan tilted his head, as though a thought had just occurred to him.
My fucking ass, it had.
“Has she ever said your name that way, I wonder? Knowing that you have the power and the will to end her life in a single swing? Has she ever said it with such fear and reverence?”
“That's not reverence, you sick fuck.” I could feel the pressure of my anger building up behind my eyes, like water on a hot stove left to boil. “You son of a venereal-inflected poutain de merde. You whoreson.”
I shook my head.
“When I get out of here, I swear to fuck, I'll carve a hole in that space between your asshole and your dick, and I'll pay someone to fuck you
with a chainsaw.”
Adrian clucked. “Michael. That's so unlike you.”
“I'm going to fucking kill you slow, you motherfucker.”
“Michael.” He sounded amused.
“What?” I looked at him, chest heaving, eyes wild. “What the fuck do you have to say to me now?”
He waved his phone in front of me. I flinched back from the bright, white light, which left dark blotches hanging over my eyes in the semidarkness. It took me a moment to realize what I was seeing, although once I recognized what I was looking at, I knew I could never unsee it. I would have known that face anywhere, even like this — and my fucking heart, it broke.
The strength and resilience in her eyes was gone. Her face looked hollow, gaunt, empty. He hadn't just broken her body; he had broken her spirit, and made her feel helpless. I could see the look that meant all hope was gone. He had fucking put that there. He had made her feel as though she were weak.
All that anger drained out of me, leaving only helplessness. And guilt. So much guilt.
My eyes were stinging, irritated by the sweat and the blood running down my face. “How could you?”
He shoved the phone into my mouth, choking me on the taste of metal and plastic and blood. I heard the sound of his zipper and closed my eyes, trying not to think of how she had felt when he had been doing the same thing to her. How he must have laughed when he made me that fucking “bargain.” How he must have lorded it over her.
This was all my fault.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Horror
Christina
They came for me as I slept.
It was the beeping sound of the code panel that woke me, actually. I opened my burning eyes, which were crusted over with the hardened remnants of my tears. I could make out two men through the blur, both guards in full uniform. They seemed miles high from the floor. Funny how everyone seems like a giant when you've fallen.
For a blissful moment between sleep and consciousness, I had forgotten my agony. But then, as wounds opened up anew with the shifting of tendons and muscle, I remembered everything and a heady, toxic fear permeated my flesh and blood alongside the pain as I began to wonder if he had sent these men in to finish the horrible game he had started.
Cease and Desist (The IMA Book 4) Page 25
