by Krista Holt
“I didn’t hurt her,” he argues. “She did that all to herself.”
“Still. He’s going to be upset.”
“Yeah, well, he didn’t say nothing about her being so much trouble either.”
They fall silent. Only the sound of my breathing and the engine grates on my ears. Every pothole and every bump we hit tosses me around in the back of the van. My head hits the side one time before a random hand reaches out and pulls me back up into a seated position.
One of their phones rings, and I strain to listen to them talking, but they turn on the radio to drown out their conversation. Dean Martin croons over the speakers with the help of a big band. The sound is so contrary to the setting, it might as well be nails on a chalkboard.
The song fades, and several more play to completion. And then suddenly, we stop. I hold my breath as the engine dies.
The door on the side of the van opens, the wheels squeaking in protest against the metal track. I draw my legs underneath me, wanting to kick something if I can. It doesn’t matter, though. I don’t have the chance. A hand grabs the hard plastic binding my wrists together and drags me toward the door. The plastic bites into my skin and I gasp in pain.
They turn me around until my legs dangle out the door. I swing out a leg, praying I hit something. One of them cusses at me. “Unless you want me to tie your legs together, stop that.”
They drag something else across the back of the van. There’s a grunt and then a hard body shoves me into the metal frame, hitting my head on the corner. I moan as the sounds of a scuffle play out around me, multiple voices yelling back and forth.
“Freaking hero, over here.”
“How did he get out of the zip-tie?”
“Did you even fasten it, Ace?”
“Get him down.”
“Watch her.”
I want to run, but I can’t. Stars still dance in my eyes, and my head hurts. They toss something out of the van, and it lands hard on the ground outside, scattering what sounds like rocks.
“Get her,” one of them orders, sounding out of breath.
They grab my elbow, yanking me to my feet. The tights covering my feet don’t do anything to protect them. I limp over the hard rocks, trying to walk on my own.
I can’t see out of the bag over my head. I can’t tell where I’m going or what’s in my way. My feet hit something, tripping me. I start to fall, unable to fling my arms forward. But a hard hand stops me from hitting the ground, jerking me back upright.
Metal scrapes against something. They shove me over a threshold, and I trip again. A heavy door closes behind me, and the sound echoes. It smells inside. Like metal, hot metal. The ground underneath my feet changes, it’s smoother.
We keep walking. My right hip hits something hard, and I gasp. The guy jerks me around it and keeps me walking a few more feet when another door opens. And shuts.
He turns me around and shoves me in a metal chair. My wrists take the brunt of the impact as I sit on the cold surface. The pain brings tears to my eyes, but I can’t make a sound. A firm hand lands on my shoulder, pushing my back against the chair.
Please don’t touch me. Please, please, please.
“Stay in the seat,” he says roughly, letting go of me.
I exhale through my nose in relief. Feet shuffle against the floor, and then the door opens and closes again.
Then nothing.
I rub my wrists together, but the plastic cuts into the already tender skin. I brace myself against the pain and try again, jerking my arms, but the plastic digs in, and the pain becomes unbearable.
Carefully, I test the area in front of my legs. I don’t run into anything, so I lean forward, putting my head in between my knees. Squeezing my head and using gravity, I pull the bag off.
I blink a few times, trying to adjust to the dim light. We’re in a metal room with cracked concrete floors. A single light hangs above us, brightening up the center of the room, but not much else. An empty metal table sits a few feet in front of me. Old paint peels from its sides, and the surface bears hundreds of scratch marks and dents.
Scott is in a chair to my left. His head lolls over the back of it, too far back to be conscious. Using my toe, I nudge the edge of his chair. His head sways, but he doesn’t respond.
“Scott,” I hiss, but it’s incoherent with the duct tape covering my mouth.
I try to rub whatever is binding my wrists against the metal frame of the chair. The skin on the inside of my wrist tears and I cry out.
Twisting my head to my shoulder, I rub the edge of duct tape covering my mouth against my coat. I repeat the motion over and over and over. It peels away from my skin gradually, but it’s not happening quickly enough. They’ll be back soon.
I nudge Scott’s chair again, pushing it harder. It rocks momentarily on three legs, before jarring the fourth leg to the floor. He moves slowly, leaning forward with a painful moan. It doesn’t take him long to figure out the same thing I did. He drops his head in between his knees and tugs the bag off his head.
His eyes sweep around the room before landing on me. Bruises are already forming on his face, highlighting his sharp cheekbones. He mumbles something I can’t understand, and then with a jerk of his muscular arms, the plastic thing holding his wrists snaps, freeing his hands. He rips the duct tape off his mouth without wincing and is on his knees at my back before I can blink.
He breaks the tie on my wrists quickly. “Come on,” he says, grabbing my hand, “we need to go before they come back.”
I pull the tape off my lips and tears spring to my eyes. Rubbing the tender spots on my wrists, I follow Scott to the door. He opens it slowly, leaning out to check the hallway. Confirming it’s empty, he holds a hand out, signaling me to follow.
We enter a long, dark corridor. Corrugated metal acts as walls, lining the narrow pathway. Every sound we make echoes off of it. It’s too dark to see, but we run down the hallway, our hands out in front of us in case something lies in our path.
Scott skids to a stop in front of me, throwing his arms out to stop me as we come face to face with our captors. There are four of them now. The fourth isn’t as big as the others. He has a slimmer build, but he’s still solid muscle.
Three sets of eyes land upon us. Scott tries to turn me around, begging me to run back down the hallway away from them. But I can’t move. The fourth man turns around, and my heart is dealt a final blow.
“Nic?”
CHAPTER 37
He opens his mouth when he sees me. “What is this? I thought you had them both tied up!”
“Nic!” I yell as one of those goons jerks my arms behind my back, dragging me back down the hallway. “Nic!”
He follows in my wake, staring me down. But I don’t recognize him. His brow is drawn down into a glare. His lips pull into sneer and his hands tighten into fists.
Who the hell did I fall in love with?
The door slams closed between us, cutting me off from him. Or him off from me, I’m not sure which. They shove me back into the metal chair as he steps into the room.
“Nic?” I search his face, hoping to find a trace of the man I’ve come to know. He’s not there. He’s gone. What stands in his place is foreign. Dangerous. He glares at me like he doesn’t know me, doesn’t want to know me. Doesn’t care at all about me.
“Use rope,” he says to the men. “It’s obvious they’re fairly smart for congressional staffers, and I don’t want another escape attempt until we’ve had some time to talk.”
He walks over like he owns the room, stopping on the other side of the table. They tie our hands back up, this time dropping the bound limbs in our laps. He watches it all behind a mask of indifference, neither flinching nor showing the slightest bit of concern for us . . . or me.
This guy is a monster. One I had stupidly welcomed into my life.
Someone tosses my bracelet toward him. It skids across the top of the metal table. It must have fallen off when Scott broke the restraints on m
y wrists. Nic glances at it. “You haven’t been very good about keeping this on, Reagan.”
Anger flares in my stomach. I knew he wasn’t a good guy, but, this, I didn’t think he was capable of this. I thought he had to have some boundaries, at least when it came to me. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
“Keep it, you bastard.” I glare at him, shifting my wrists. The rope chafes against my already hurt skin. “I don’t need it anymore.”
Scott whips his head around. “You know this guy?”
“Yeah, I do. Well, I thought I did.” I look at Scott, who seems completely lost, and then back at Nic. “Meet my ex. This is Nic. Or not. I’m not really sure who the hell he is actually. Savage, Selvaggio. It’s all interchangeable, right, Nic?”
Scott’s jaw drops at the news. Nic, on the other hand, smiles darkly.
“Selvaggio?” Scott sputters. “Selvaggio? Son of a bitch!”
“Boss, is this the chick you’ve been pumping for information?” The men laugh behind my back, but Nic doesn’t. He stares straight at me, unblinking.
I want to scream. No, this is not happening. This can’t be happening.
“The family business, huh?” I yell, losing my last shred of restraint. “All your phone calls, the disappearing for hours, days on end, tracking me. I was stupid, but you . . . you could have left me alone! You didn’t have to come back into my life and screw it all up, again!”
“Reagan,” Scott cautions me.
“Shut up. Both of you,” Nic grounds out. Leaning over the metal table, he plants his hands on the edge.
White-hot anger fills me. This man. He took us, kidnapped us. Grabbed us off the street. And that’s probably not even the worst thing he’s done this week. How could I be so blind? Why did I think I could change him?
“Now,” he says, “I know a little, from what Reagan has told me—”
“Screw you,” I erupt. “I haven’t told you anything.”
Shock covers Scott’s face, like he’s not sure what to believe.
“Really?” Nic arches a brow and gives me a patronizing look. “You’re among friends here. There’s no need to lie anymore.”
I want to hurt him. It’s bad enough that I fell in love with the wrong man, but to make it sound like I was passing information to him . . . I can’t handle that. No!
I jump out of the metal chair, lunging for him. My hip hits the table hard enough that it skitters across the flooring, unleashing an ungodly screeching sound, and forcing him to take a step back.
“I never told you anything!” I shout. “Don’t you dare—”
The next word out of my mouth turns into a scream as someone pulls me backward by my hair, jerking me down into the chair. A strong hand slaps me across the face so hard, it feels like my teeth rearrange themselves, but I don’t have time to focus on it before the same hand engulfs my thin throat, squeezing until I can’t breathe. My eyes go wide, and my hands scratch at his, trying to get free. He leans into my face, forcing me to look at him, to stare into the eyes of a man who’s enjoying my struggle. I whimper, gasping for air.
“Let her go! Now!” Nic roars, slamming his fist down on top of the metal table. The booming sound cuts through the air.
And then the hand drops from my throat.
I cough, sucking in air hard enough to make me wheeze. My pulse throbs in my head, echoing off my brain, loud enough to drown everything else out. I inhale my next breath, making a raspy sound. A tear rolls down my face in relief. I’m breathing.
Another quickly follows in its path as I realize, I was wrong. So wrong. I barely hold back a sob.
“Now that I have your attention,” Nic says, the voice I’d grown to love is gone completely, taken over by something cold and heartless. “It’s time we had a talk about your work.”
My breathing is still frantic as my lungs work hard to pull in air through greedy lips. Running my tongue along the inside of my cheek, I find the cut. I taste blood and my stomach lurches. My face aches, and my ears are still ringing from the blow. Scott’s eyes are filled with concern, but I can’t take my eyes off him. How could I be so stupid?
He stares at me from behind a mask of cool indifference, and I retreat, hiding the shock and the pain behind blazing anger.
“I hate you,” I cry, “I can’t believe you did this.”
His eyes snap to me, but he doesn’t say a word.
“Reagan . . .” Scott cautions from his chair.
I ignore him, staring at Nic. “What do you want?”
“Simple,” he replies in a calculating manner, like the snake he’s apparently always been. “I want to know who the whistleblower is.”
“Go to hell,” I spit.
He smirks at me. “Careful, Reagan. You don’t really have much to bargain with, now do you?”
“I would rather die than give you what you want,” I reply, waiting for him to take the opening I provided him with. To respond with a coldhearted, “That can be arranged.” Except it doesn’t come. No, he just grins, but there’s no humor in it.
“You’re forgetting that I know you.” He pulls out the chair on his side of table. “Which means, I know all your little idiosyncrasies, your habits,” he pauses. “Your weaknesses. I know how you care about others. How you go out of your way to be nice, how you can’t stand to see someone you care about in pain.”
His dark eyes flick to something behind me, and he nods. It’s a long, torturous second of my pulse racing in my head before a fist swings out and connects with Scott’s jaw, knocking his head to the side with a sick crunch of flesh and bone.
He groans, spits some blood onto the ground, but doesn’t say a word. He shakes his head ever so slightly, telling me not to say anything.
So I don’t. I stare at the ground, biting my lip and slamming my eyes closed as Scott takes another punch. And then another. He coughs up blood this time, wincing as his lip splits open.
“Please stop this,” I beg.
“Tell me what I want to know.”
“Reagan, no!” Scott calls out, right before another fist lands on his face and then his side.
“Nic! Stop!” I scream.
“Tell me what I want to know, and it stops.”
There’s a grunt, followed by the sound of Scott’s body dropping to the floor. The men drag him back to the chair, his head hangs to the side, blood streaming from one corner.
“I can’t tell you that, but please, anything else!”
“What is he to you?” Nic asks, a flash of emotion stirs his words.
“Does it matter? You can’t do this to him.”
There’s another punch. Another sickening sound of flesh hitting flesh and a groan of pain. Blood mists my face, covering my coat, turning my skin sticky. I think I’m going to be sick. There’s blood on my face. The moist feeling launches bile up my throat, but I force it down.
“Please, stop,” I beg him.
“No.”
Scott is past words, barely holding onto consciousness. And with one more punch, he loses it. His body crumples to the floor in a broken heap.
“I’m not going to ask again. Tell me the name.”
My gaze switches from Scott on the floor to Nic sitting on the other side of the room, leaning back in his chair, his fingers tapping at his knee. Aloof. Detached. The stench of blood and the brutality doesn’t even faze him. He’s immune to it.
“What—what if I don’t?” My voice shakes.
He looks at me blankly. “Make it easier on both of us and just give me what I want.”
I try to sort out all of the things I can do rather than give him what he wants. Anything but what he wants. I don’t want to betray Cameron and the investigation. I don’t want to be a coward, but my grand plan dissolves when someone takes a step toward me from behind. Shoes grate against the concrete floor, and I cower. Closing my eyes, I brace for a blow that never comes.
When I open them, Nic is watching me. “Just. Tell me,” he heaves.
“No.” The
re’s another scrape, and then a hand grips my shoulder, a rough finger running over the pulse point in my neck. Fear seizes me, shaking my body. My throat squeezes tight. “We don’t know,” I gasp. “We subpoenaed agents affiliated with the task force. We’re trying to force the whistleblower out of the woodwork, but we don’t know who it is.”
“Enough,” he says calmly, and the hand drops away. “Would you tell me if you did?” His fingers drum on the metal table.
“No,” I honestly admit.
The corners of his mouth tug up slightly before he chases them away, forcing his lips into a grim line. “I don’t know if you’re lying to me or not.”
“You might have to beat it out of me.” I glare at him. “Not them, but you.”
He looks away. “I think you’re telling me the truth. You have no idea who this guy is. The girl I know wouldn’t let me hurt that guy,” he gestures to Scott’s prone body, “if she could prevent it.”
“You know nothing.”
“I know you,” he retorts. “I know everything about you.”
“Then you know how much I loathe you.”
“I do.” He stands out of the chair, pushing it back with his legs to lean over the table toward me. “But, I will let you both go if you tell me one more thing.”
The promise is too tempting. “What?”
“Everyone on that list was a Fed?”
I clamp my lips together, hating myself for even considering answering his question. Then a hand grabs my chair, jerking it backward. The front feet leave the ground and my heart flies to my throat.
“Yes, yes,” I scream. The chair drops back to the ground, along with my pride.
“That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Nic stands and buttons his suit jacket, ignoring the fact that I just fractured in front of him. Broke to smithereens.
The horror brings tears to my eyes, and the anguish that I let this happen rips me apart on the inside. The fact that I let him get this close hurts like a physical blow, more than the hair pulling and the slap across the face ever could. It should have never gone this far.
“Wake him,” Nic snaps at the men. His long fingers drag the bracelet inscribed with his fake promise into his cupped hand at the edge of the table. He plucks it up and holds it in his hand, closing his fingers over it.
