CHAPTER SEVEN
Bocca
“Time to wake up, pretty boy.”
This was day two of torture. I knew it was only going to get worse. Their patience running thinner the more the seconds ticked on.
Everything was stiff and there were points of burning pain throughout my body. But I wasn’t going to crack. Never. At this point, it was just a waiting game. Waiting for what? If I were the hopeful kind, then I would have said freedom. But I was a realist. So at this point, death was the only answer. I still hadn’t given up on trying to escape but the more damage my body took, the weaker I grew. It was a matter of time before I wouldn’t even be able to move, let alone get myself out of this situation. That said, I wasn’t going down without a fight. They couldn’t break me—I wouldn’t let them.
“Is it a new day already?” I asked and my voice sounded raw and strained. I smiled the best I could. My busted lip throbbed as the cut opened and I could feel the fresh blood make its way past the dried scab. “I need a well-balanced meal and coffee. Never start a day off without it.”
That earned me a punch to the gut. The air rushed out of my lungs at such a fast rate that it burned my throat. A coughing fit followed and I tried hard to grasp onto some fresh air to fill my lungs. I knew better than to taunt them, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself.
“This will all be over if you tell me what I need to know,” he said and I could tell he was trying his best to hold back his anger.
My head flopped back and I cut my eyes up to look at him.
“This will all be over if you just kill me.”
Then he was in my face, his thick hand grabbing a fistful of my hair and yanking my head back so far it caused tears to sting the back of my eyes.
“I’ve been too easy on you. That ends today,” he seethed and this time he couldn’t control how much I was getting to him. “I will strip you down until you have nothing left.”
Yeah, okay. Still wasn’t going to get me to unlock my box of secrets.
“Get him up. Strip him.”
He took a step back and the three other men in the room stepped up. Ties and tape were cut. I was hauled up, my head having a hard time staying upright. With a deep breath in, I mustered up all the strength I had left. I ripped my arm free from the one on my right, swinging and hitting the one on my left square in the nose. The crunch sound that filled the room enough to let me know I’d broken it. My elbow went back catching the one on my right in the throat and making him stumble back before he could regain his grip on me.
However, my victory didn’t last long. The cold, sharp blade sliced through my side making my body want to drop instantly.
I was held down and my clothes stripped off.
“The fuck is that?” The one that I hadn’t managed to get a hit on grunted out in disgusted confusion.
I looked down and shrugged. I wasn’t going to tell him that he didn’t know what he was missing. Those things might not have looked like much but they were comfortable as fuck. Enough fabric to keep my junk from flopping about but made so that I could still feel the breeze on my ass. Yeah, maybe some people wouldn’t understand, but I didn’t give a fuck.
“Shut up. Chain him up,” the leader barked, clearly unamused by my choice of underwear.
Before I could blink, a chain was tossed around my neck and a lock clicked into place. Then I was flipped over and the click of the zip tie told me that my hands were going to be stuck behind me from now on. After a beat down that consisted mostly of kicks to my guts and ribs, I was left alone on the cold floor.
I took a moment to regain my breath and clear my vision. The urge to vomit was overwhelming but I swallowed it down. My eyes followed the chain and saw that it was bolted to the wall. I guessed I had enough slack to make it to the middle of the room and that was all. This was better. Sort of. I could move, though my hands were still bound. It sucked that they were behind me but maybe I could make that work to my advantage.
I gave myself a few more minutes before I attempted to move. Every single part of my body screamed at me as I crawled over to the wall and flopped down with my back right over the hook bolted into the wall. My eyes glued to the door as I fumbled around with my fingers. Once I made contact I gave it a wiggle. It was in there good. I gripped the ring and tried with all my might to get it to turn. I needed some sort of leverage and my fucking hands free.
I knew I had to keep my movements slow. It was too quiet and if I moved too quickly the chains would rattle and possibly give me away. These guys weren’t dumb. I suspected they already thought I’d be working to find a way to get out.
I gripped and turned and struggled until the bones in my fingers felt bruised. It was no use, that thing was screwed in tight.
Exhausted, my body sagged and I all but slumped to the side. I tried to prop myself up awkwardly on my elbow but the pain from the stab wound on my arm shot fire through my veins.
I coughed and was surprised when I didn’t get a mouthful of blood. As I took a slow, deep breath in, my lungs burned and my ribs ached, but I could tell they weren’t broken. Not yet, anyway. I suspected that it was just a matter of time before one of their kicks or punches made that a reality.
Then lights cut without warning. I strained to hear if there was any sort of commotion.
Nothing.
The silence began to ring in my ears telling me that this was planned. There was no rescue attached to the darkness. The unheard sounds of panicked chaos and gunshots only told me not to get my hopes up.
My brothers didn’t know where I was. The fact that I would have been the one that they turned to in a situation like this was crippling because I wasn’t there to help them find me. Without my talents, they were like the blind leading the blind. And the lack of information I’d left behind wasn’t going to help either.
This was such a mess. I really didn’t think that anything could have gone wrong. Not only had I been so wrong about that, but I had been stupid to think that I’d be safe. It wasn’t like me to approach any situation like that. It wasn’t like the club either. Maybe we had too many hands in too many different cookie jars right now, and it was reckless of me to add another one.
But I couldn’t leave these guys to keep running their business. I had to save the girls. It was just me and my club that had the information about this. I hadn’t reached out to anyone else. But it wasn’t like I’d had the time to do so. And I doubted Lucy had either. No, she would have told me if she had. There was no way I could have turned a blind eye. Still, I wondered if I had done more damage. They were all dead now. I hadn’t saved them. I hadn’t even had a chance to. And I didn’t even want to think about what had happened earlier. I could have saved her. Couldn’t I have? Something told me that her end would have come no matter what. But the brutality of how she went out, that was on me.
Fuck! Even as I sat there, I couldn’t shake the images from my mind. I had never been truly disturbed or haunted by anything thus far in life. I guess, in a way, it was maybe time. As I thought back to all the fucked up things I’d done and had been a part of, I realized why they hadn’t bothered me like this did. Every single fucker that paid by my hands or was taken out because of something I’d found, fucking deserved it. She—number fifteen, she didn’t deserve a damn thing. I had nothing but a number to call her. It seemed so impersonal. And all I could think about was if I would even recognize her if I saw her on a missing persons report?
Then my mind wondered if that maybe it wasn’t better for them. Yeah, shitty, dark hole to go down. But if I wasn’t there to save them the life they had after they left those cages would have been unimaginably bad. Condemned to a life of being used and raped and God knew what else. Beaten. Tortured. Treated like an object rather than a human. It didn’t justify suffocating and being burned alive, but at least they had peace now. I had to believe that because if I didn’t then I would break.
I couldn’t save them.
And I was starting to doubt that at this point I’d be able to save myself.
I tried to focus on the things that would help to keep me going.
My brothers.
My club.
I had to free myself to save them. We’d been found out and I had a good idea that once they were done with me they’d be on their way to hit up at least one of the compounds. It still bugged me how they knew. But there was no time to obsess over answers I wouldn’t get.
And I knew there were more girls out there to save. Ones they had trapped somewhere else. Future ones that would be snatched when they would least expect it. This had only slowed them down but I knew it wouldn’t stop them. Life would go on in the criminal world and I had no doubt that even as they took time out to deal with me, that they had scouts out there grabbing up new merchandise, as they saw it.
Just as my eyes drifted closed, the lights flicked back on again. My eyes snapped open, my gaze landing directly on the door as if I knew someone was going to come walking in. Then the room went dark again.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. They were watching me somehow. In the darkness, I searched for a camera that I had missed when I looked the first time. The brightness had messed up my vision and I waited for my eyes to adjust to the black again. It was no use. I couldn’t see shit.
Testing out my theory, I waited a few minutes and then slowly closed my eyes again. I let my body relax and sag naturally. Sure enough, the lights cut on again and as soon as I opened my eyes, they cut back off.
Yes, I had no doubt now that they were watching me. This was child’s play. I knew what they were doing. Hell, I’d done it to people before. Tactics to disorient and wear a person out. Wear them down. Get them so sleep deprived and confused that their brain will spill things just to make it stop.
Now that I knew they were watching, I made it my goal to find out how. I had to arm myself with every little thing and know every single detail about my surroundings. I could use this tactic to my advantage. I was prepared for it to take a long fucking time to do, considering that I only had seconds of light every time. I had to plan this out just right. I picked a corner of the room and kept my eyes pinned onto the top near the ceiling, making sure not to move my eyeballs as I lowered my lids. The thing was not to move my eyes once I opened them but to use my peripheral as best as possible. To take in as much as I could in one fucking blink.
It took several tries. It was probably over an hour because I had to make it believable. I couldn’t let them catch on to what I was doing. Finally, I spotted it, or at least I was pretty sure that was it. There wasn’t a camera in any of the most obvious places. But there was a patch of peeling wallpaper that looked as if it had been pulled away to conceal something. And the small hole that had been cut out for the lens to see through was strategically hidden in the flower pattern. This wasn’t some random abandoned building. I mean, maybe it was at one point, but these guys had clearly spent time setting it up as a torture room. Maybe there were more rooms set up just like this one. I suddenly doubted that I’d been the first person brought here.
Now that I had the information that I needed, I didn’t care to play their game any longer. I rolled over, giving them a nice shot of my ass.
There, take that, fuckers.
Tucking my face into the corner where the wall met the floor, I closed my eyes. It was the best I could do to shield myself from the light. I got lost deep inside my head and ignored their lame attempts at torture. I was sure it would only get worse.