She didn’t have time to turn and see the men that had descended upon them before her world went black.
#
When she woke up things were cold and they were damp. She was one something hard. The floor. That was a floor. She could get that much out of the situation. It was dark. Or maybe that was just because her eyes seemed unable to open. Her head was throbbing. Every time she tried to open her eyes the muscles in her head protested and screamed and told her to stop.
But she needed to move. She needed to find Erik. He’d been crying out in pain the last time she saw him. She needed to make sure he was okay. But all she could offer was a groan as she rolled on the ground. She was on her back now. That was a start.
But sometime else was shuffling near by. That might be a problem. But it could be Erik. She really needed to open her eyes and do something about all this. The shuffling was getting closer and her eyes were still closed, her limns still felt heavy, everything around her felt bruised.
“Erik?” she called out in a weak voice, one strained with the pain in her throat but it was enough to be heard because whoever was in the cell with her chuckled. That couldn’t be a good sign.
“No quite,” the voice said and she recognized it immediately.
She forced her eyes open through the sharp blinding pain of doing so. There he was. Drake was standing next to her, clothed this time, though what he wore was ragged and torn. He looked tired and he had bruises in places she didn’t remember before but he seemed no worse for wear and like he might be feeling in much better shape than her.
“Drake?” she coughed out and he was at her side in a second, kneeling down next to her.
“Just take a minute,” he said. “You’ve been through a lot.”
Had she? She didn’t remember anything, just being knocked to the ground while hunting for clues. Clues that, apparently, found their way to her first because there Drake was, mostly unharmed.
“Where am I?” she asked.
He’d settled on the ground and pulled her head into his lap. He was running his fingers through her hair and offering a gentle massage at her scalp. She relaxed into it, hunting for the smell of him despite the clothes and the unfamiliar damp of the place they were in.
“We’re being held in a facility not far from the school,” he said.
“I take it these aren’t friends of yours?”
“No.”
She could hear the ominous grim tone in his voice from where she lay. They’d found drake, but the danger was nowhere close to being handled. It was just as well. At least they were together. For now, she could take that, with danger lying ahead.
Flames
Flames of Freedom (Book 2)
C.J. Scarlett
***
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Chapter 1
The only way for Alessia to make sure she didn’t go nuts inside the cell was to make lists of things she needed to know. She needed to know what happened to Erik and Diego, she needed to know if Diego betrayed them. She needed to know where she was, what day of the week it was, how long she’d been here. At a certain point, the breadth of the list was a little too daunting to be anything but anxiety inducing, but it made her feel like she had a goal to move forward. Even if it was a list longer than there were days in the week.
Drake could provide a few answers.
“They brought you in this morning,” he said. “You were out the entire time. A bump on the head you’ll probably feel for a while.”
“And the others?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “You’re the only one I saw.”
So, if they did have Erik and Diego, they kept them somewhere else. She hoped it was a psychological factor and not proof that they’d somehow gotten themselves badly injured, or worse, during the scuffle. She knew Erik put up a fight before the world went dark around her.
“Who were you with?” Drake asked.
She lay on his lap, her face up to the ceiling, staring at the way the dim, sterile-looking lights flickered a little too uncomfortably, the chemicals within shifting around. Part of her wished they’d just burn out completely. Darkness might be better than the flickering of the light that buzzed in every corner of the room like a swarm of flies. His fingers, however, moved through her hair with such grace and ease that it was hard to focus too long on the irritating parts of their confinement.
“Erik and a contact we met that said he knew you,” Alessia said.
“Who was that?”
“Someone named Diego.”
Drake didn’t say anything and it brought Alessia’s eyes over to his face, looking at him for signs of his thoughts. She had to get up and crane her neck to get a look, his fingers had stilled in her hair and slipped off like water when she lifted her head and sat up completely. He glared into the air in front of him like he could see whatever it was he hated, just there.
“Hey,” she said softly, placing her hands on either side of his face. She hadn’t felt his skin since that night together that had ended so perfect for her, yet when the world crashed in around them, disaster struck. His face was rough with aged skin and the prickle of whiskers that hadn’t been shaved in some time. His skin was so warm to the touch, evidence of all the fire burning beneath the surface. “Look at me.”
He only obeyed when she pulled at his jaw and his head followed on a swivel. He looked at her, his eyes softening, just a bit. He blinked and seemed to banish whatever thoughts had been there.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“Drake. We’re locked together in a jail cell, this isn’t the place to try to avoid things. This is the place where we face them head on because we don’t have a choice.”
He let out a humorless laugh and shook his head. He looked back at her with a cynical smile but kept shrugged all the same. “He’s part of my past that I wish I could forget. And for his sake, I wish we’d never met.”
“What happened?” she asked.
“Are you sure you want to peel back the curtain, and see the beast underneath?” he asked, his voice getting smaller and more vulnerable than she knew he was capable.
“I’ve seen a lot of you, recently,” she said and blushed at her innuendo. “Whatever it is, I’d learn one way or another. At least give me the opportunity to make my own choices on what to do with the information, instead of hiding it.”
He smiled at her genuinely now, even if it was a little bit sad. Still he nodded and sat up, pulling her to sit in front of him, their crossed legs touching at the knees. It felt like some kind of grade-school activity and less like some mysterious backstory reveal between lovers. But she focused. He wanted to see her eyes while he spoke and she would grant him that much. She steeled herself, her hands squeezing her own thighs for some support, and readied herself for whatever it was.
“I knew him from those attacks over the summer,” he said. “I was never directly involved and this is only scratching the surface of things in my life I wish I hadn’t experienced. But Diego messed up. And he paid for it.”
“Did they hurt him?”
“They forced his girlfriend—who wasn’t a shifter and somehow got tangled up in this mess—to where the vest that blew that day.”
Alessia felt an impossibly cold shiver start at the base of her spine and work its way up her body like a riptide of pain and cold. She suddenly felt nothing but unrelenting pity for that man. How awful that was. It sounded like the kind of disturbing thing she’d hear about in films or spy TV shows, not looking her back in the eye. This was real and Alessia’s hand came up to cover her mouth, without realizing it.
“That’s horrifying.”
It didn’t need to be said. But if she didn’t let out at least a little bit of what she felt and everything she feared then she might explode. An innocent woman forced to die and take people with her as a punishment against an agent who didn’t quite do his job right. Who was it that had
them hostage and how much longer did any of them have?
She tried to remember what Diego had said. The things he’d tried to warn them about, names of people who were dangerous. Now Alessia had wished she’d paid far more attention to his attempts at giving them warnings.
She had tumbled like Alice down a rabbit hole but the world waiting here was far worse than anything she could ever imagine.
Chapter 2
Answers didn’t wait long to find Alessia. She measured their time there with the meals they were given. Twice a day, so she figured it must be a morning and night offer of whatever grubby, disgusting food they threw into their cell. At first, she didn’t want any part of it, but Drake insisted that it wasn’t poisoned—he’d tested that theory already. Besides, he said, if they wanted to kill us, we would have never made it to the jail cell anyway.
He had a point. And Alessia didn’t realize how badly she was starving until the stale bread was in her mouth and making its way down to fill the void in her stomach. It didn’t do much to fix it completely, but it was a start and the grumbles calmed down.
She counted two rounds of these feedings, two days, before they saw another human. She wasn’t someone Alessia recognized. She was tall and muscular and had intimidating dragon tattoos running down her arm. Alessia didn’t need more hints than that to know she was looking at another dragon shifter.
“Looking good as always, Tekkin,” the woman said, nodding to him. “You’ve got yourself a little cellmate. We have bets going to see how long it takes you two to just lose it and fuck each other. You survive through tomorrow night and Jared and Troy lose, so keep it up.”
Alessia felt her face flush and she looked down. She didn’t want to seem so easily riled, so easily weakened in front of these people. But she was tired, her body ached from the beating it had taken and now the hard floor she slept on. She was quickly losing any sense of pride to keep feelings of inadequacy at bay.
“Did I make you shy?” the woman asked with an over-exaggerated fake pout. She was talking to Alessia now. “It’s okay. We’re all adults here. It would be far from the most scandalous thing that’s happened here.”
“What do you want, Lana?” Drake snapped.
“I’m here for your little bedfellow,” she said. “She’s up for questioning.”
“Then you’re taking me with you.”
“You had your chance to give orders, Drake; it’s over now. You stay put or we give you a reason to do so.”
“Try me.”
The energy in the room changed. She wondered if it was just her imagination making it feel as though the heat in the room raised. She could see what she thought was the ripple of the heated air coming off the ground. She was terrified.
“I’ll go with you,” she said, quickly, standing and exerting virtually all the energy she had left. She stumbled a bit and Drake moved to catch her but she pushed him away. She couldn’t afford him losing his temper and something terrible happening.
“Smart girl,” the woman, Lana, said and the tenseness of her stance was gone suddenly. Drake, however, was still poised to strike like an overzealous attack dog.
She moved to unlock the door and swung the cell open. She stepped in. There was a three-second pause where it seemed everything would be fine. There was always a three-second pause for things like this. It always seemed like life teetered on a perilous three seconds’ worth of decision making before something terrible or wonderful happened. It was that way at birthday parties or graduations. Unfortunately, it was in these three seconds that Drake decided to do something incredibly stupid.
He lunged at Lana. Alessia didn’t know what he hoped to accomplish once he had her on the ground. But it didn’t even go that far. She moved in first, perhaps sensing it or maybe seeing the slight shift in weight before he moved. Alessia heard once that shifters had better reflexes than normal humans. And Lana wasn’t the starved and exhausted one kept in a cell. So, the elements were on her side and she dropped Drake into the ground, hard.
She, unfortunately, didn’t stop there. She pulled out a small device and pressed it into his back. Alessia heard the familiar click and the spark of a taser.
“Stop!” she shouted and she was the one lunging at Lana now, before she realized it. But, like before, she was very quickly disposed of, dropped to the ground as the sounds of clicking stopped.
“You two have far too much energy,” she said, stowing the weapon. “Maybe we should run you a little ragged to get you tired at the end of the day. Or maybe feed you less.”
She moved forward and yanked Alessia up to her feet by a tight grip on her bicep. She pulled so hard that Alessia was worried, for a brief moment, that her arm might pull right from the socket and that would be that. During her time as an undergraduate student, she learned all about how the Russian tsars would implement dislocation of joints and forced replacement as a form of torture leading to execution. She shivered at the idea.
“Come on, princess,” Lana said. “Time to break the ice with some friends.”
Lana’s grip stayed on her arm so hard that she was sure it would bruise by morning. Behind them, Drake stayed groaning on the ground as she locked the cell behind them and they moved down the hall to parts she hadn’t yet seen of her strange prison.
**
They didn’t blindfold her because this place was far too complicated for her to ever keep track of how many turns they took and how many small flights of stairs they’d taken on. Several pairs of eyes brushed over her as she moved through the halls and Lana kept directing her where to go. But none of these eyes were friendly and none of them were Diego or Erik. She wanted to ask where they were, if they were alive, if they were even here. But she doubted she’d get an answer.
“Saved a seat, just for you,” Lana said as they turned a corner into a room and she was dropped into a metal folding chair, banging her elbow in the process.
“Thanks,” she said dryly and Lana smirked at her.
“We’ve got some more people on their way in, but feel free to get comfortable; you’ll be here for a while.”
Lana left her in the room and Alessia knew better than to think there was a way to simply walk out and escape this place. She had yet to see any cameras but she had no doubt that she was being watched. So she sat there, making her back as straight as possible and opening her eyes as wide as they could be. She was tired, she was in pain, but she wouldn’t let them know that. If it was mental warfare, that was one thing she was certain she’d be better at.
The room had nothing to give it away, no decorations, no writings, nothing but this chair and a few more folding metal chairs across the room from her. She knew an interrogation room when she saw one. Though she never imagined herself inside one and never imagined it taking place in this steampunk dungeon of a place they kept her.
Shifter politics only got on the news when it was shifters attacking nons. She had never even considered looking at the politics of shifters against each other. She had a feeling this group wasn’t the same one Diego had once belonged to. At least she desperately hoped it wasn’t that same one. She wasn’t even sure it was the same group that Drake had been in that day they kidnapped her.
How many factions were vying for some kind of power here? And which one had she landed herself in the hands of?
She swallowed and stared at a hole in the wall. She wouldn’t be frightened. She wouldn’t let them get to her. Her mind was a steel case, a locked safe. She wouldn’t let them break her for the tears and begging they would barter in. She had no information. They must have known that by now. This was all about tricking her into begging for her life while they may have already made the decision to kill her.
She went pale. She felt her stomach drop. But she wouldn’t show it.
**
She had no idea how long she’d been in the room before the door behind her burst open and Lana was back. This time with Erik under her tight grip and a man Alessia had never seen before walking in behi
nd them.
Erik looked incredibly worse for wear. One of his eyes seemed to be healing and several cuts were strewn across his face, still gooey with blood that hadn’t quite set in as a scab yet. He looked more tired than Alessia felt and barely stood on his own. A new bruise would be added to his body as Alessia stared at Lana’s grip on him just before she shoved him forward. Alessia didn’t have enough time to try to catch him and he clattered to the ground in a heap of limbs trying to break his fall.
“There, now we’re all here,” she said. “I’ll be outside.”
The last part had been said to the man who came in the room with her. He was tall, broad shouldered, generally the intimidating military type. He was definitely an ex-Marine or ex-soldier at least. Maybe he’d been discharged during the time when shifters weren’t allowed to openly serve in the military. Either way, he looked like he knew his way a little too well around an interrogation room and torture chamber. Somehow, Alessia found herself immediately missing the familiarity of Lana.
“My name is James,” he said. “Not so scary, right?”
Alessia hated being talked to like a child. This man would try to good cop them, maybe even bad cop them too. She stayed stoic. She stared at the wall. She had no information worth divulging; it wasn’t like she was trying to hide some grand scheme or was protecting others out there in some secret organization. She was very much in the wrong place at the wrong time. But she wasn’t about to beg for her life to anyone.
“Do you two have names?” he asked, pulling up another chair and sitting down in front of them.
Alessia didn’t answer and it didn’t seem like Erik had the ability. James bounced his head between the two of them, watching closely as neither answered and Alessia hardened her face even more.
“Right,” he said. “Look. You were the ones trespassing on us.”
“It was an abandoned building,” Alessia snapped before she could stop herself.
The Artistry of Love Page 47
