Six

 

 

Bas became dimly aware that he was conscious when he heard voices.  And then he wished he hadn’t woken up.

Because there was pain.  So much fucking pain.  He tried his best to suppress the moan that begged to break free by breathing out through his nose but he knew he wouldn’t be able to stay quiet for long.  He just needed to figure out where those voices were coming from, how close they were to him.

He tried to peel his eyes open but furrowed his brow when he realized they wouldn’t.  Were they swollen shut?  It was hard to tell and since his arms were pinned above his head, he couldn’t touch them to find out.

He tried again, putting a little effort into it and felt the painful pull of losing a few eyelashes as his right eye finally peeled open.  It was then that he realized that his eyes weren’t only swollen shut, they were stuck shut from dried blood.

With blurry vision, he tried to look around and take in his surroundings.

Was he in a warehouse?  It was a fairly large room with a few square pillars in it, but it didn’t feel like a warehouse.  It felt more like a…..ah, basement, he realized when light flooded into the room on his left and then he saw the boots of someone descending the stairs.

He quickly re-closed his eye.

“He still out?” a voice said.

“Si.  The chingada no move.”

“Have you checked him closely?  Fuckers like him know how to fool you,” the first voice said as it moved closer to Bas.

Bas didn’t twitch or move a muscle but he prepared for the moment the voice would get close enough for him to wrap his legs around the asshole and squeeze.

“Gentlemen?” the voice said.

“Si?”

“Come here.”

Bas heard footsteps approaching.

“Do you see this?” the man said and something about his voice sounded familiar.

Familiar in a that’s not fucking possible way.

“Do you see that?” the voice said, sending fear skittering up and down Bas’s spine like spiders.

It can’t be his brain screamed silently in his head.

He could tell that the man was just off to his right, not standing right in front of him like the idiots who had been guarding him.

“See the way his pulse is throbbing in his neck?”

“Si.”

“If he was unconscious, that pulse would be a steady, dull movement.  That right there is something that even the most trained agents cannot hide.  He can mask his breathing, he can freeze just about anything in his body to make him appear to be out, but that?  That you cannot hide.  And if it were only you standing there right now?  I guarantee that this man would’ve wrapped those thick thighs around you by now and you’d either be knocked out on the floor or, more likely, dead from a snapped neck.  Isn’t that right, Bas?”

The one eye that Bas could move peeled open and he glared at the face that he hadn’t seen for almost a decade.  The face of the man who Bas was certain had died in Iraq, hell, they’d all been certain of that even though they’d never found his body in the wreckage of that explosion – Liam Murphy.

“This? This is what you’ve been doing, Murph?  We were brothers and then you just fucking ghosted on all of us,” he whispered through bloodied, swollen lips.

“I tried to have a life, Bas.  Not that you ever bothered to try to find that out.”

“Bullshit,” Bas snapped, sending blood-tinged spittle flying everywhere, “We searched for you Liam.  We all did.  And we wanted to do more but we were ordered not to.”

Liam’s jaw clenched as he stared at Bas until he finally mumbled, “I don’t fucking believe you,” as he turned away.  When he got to the bottom of the stairs he paused and glared over his shoulder, “Make him hurt,” he said to the three men in the room.

Bas opened his mouth to yell something obscene but then he caught something in Liam’s eyes, a brief second as his eyes flicked to Bas and there was……vulnerability in them?  Bas couldn’t be sure because whatever it was, it was gone a moment later, replaced with the hard blackness that Bas had seen earlier.

Was Liam being forced to do this?  Was there something he was trying to tell Bas?

Bas could only think of those questions for a moment before the hard sound of a billy club hitting his ribs echoed into the large room….followed closely thereafter by another, and another and another, until the blessed blackness sucked Bas under once again.