“Don’t you fucking touch her.”
He grins.
My blood goes cold and still, stuttering in my veins, but I don’t let the sharp fear show on my face. I can’t show them fear. I can’t show them how badly I’ve fucked up.
This situation is why I never got close to anyone. This is why I walked away from everyone who ever walked into my life. It’s why I’ve separated myself from my brothers for all these years. It’s why I fought so hard not to fall for Holly.
You can’t fight the demons I fight when you have something to lose.
And finally, with Holly, I have everything to lose.
Everything.
I tried to warn her that this would happen. That the clock on our time together would wind down into the most horrific scenario I can imagine. Not the torture per se. I’ve been on the receiving end of enough of it to know that this isn’t the real hardship. The real hardship is being separated from her while it happens. Not that I want her to see this. As long as she doesn’t see, she won’t have to remember.
My mind wanders to wherever she is. In my head no one ever put their hands on her. She’s still safe and untouched. That’s a fantasy. I’ll allow myself the one while I wait. One turns into another. It doesn’t take long. Her eyes on me. Her hands on me. Her body stretched out against mine, warm and sleepy.
At some point I stop imagining the way things were and start picturing the way things could have been if everything else in my life had gone another way.
But if I had been normal, if I had a family that gave a shit, I might never have met her in the first place. I’d do all of this again if it meant being with her.
They take a minute to gather themselves, my team of assigned torturers. Blood from a cut on my forehead stings my eyes while they circle around me. I don’t bother looking. Their shadows will get closer, and when they do, more damage will come. I flex my hands behind the chair and try to keep circulation moving through them. Pointless tasks to pass the time.
A fist into my gut yanks me back to the present.
“Of course if you tell me everything I want you know,” he continues conversationally, as if he didn’t just strike a fatal blow, as if he isn’t panting and sweating from exertion, “then I won’t have any reason to question her. She’d be safe.”
This is a lie, of course. It’s part of the torture dance. The rhythm.
Two of them come close and tip the chair. My skull helpfully breaks the fall. Blurred-out vision is a good sign that they’ll crack it soon enough and then I’ll be out of my misery. One well-placed kick to the head and it’s lights out.
My heart speeds up at the thought. When I die here, that’s the end. There’s no hope for Holly. I’m the reason she’s valuable to them at all. If I’m no longer on this plane of existence they’ll kill her and bag her and the world will never know where she went.
The only way to help her is to stay alive.
The only thing to look at down here on the floor is boots.
Black boots.
Steel-toed boots.
The boots move out of sight and my body braces. It’s hard to fathom the exact pain of getting kicked with steel-toed boots. My muscles know it’s coming anyway.
They wait until I relax, then aim the first kick at my gut.
Something comes loose in there. Bone, maybe. Part of an organ. Probably something essential, but it’s sheared away now and my entire gut feels thick with blood. This is the perfect interval to land another kick, and—
Fuck.
They do.
One of them puts a boot on my knee and presses down. He starts slow and increases the pressure until the full weight of him is on the joint. I’d be a surgery case if I could get out of here. Gather round, med students. See what a broken body really is. But that’s the joke, isn’t it? I’m not getting out.
The pressure releases from my knee at the same moment another kick lands in my stomach. I taste pennies and spit blood in the general direction of the closest steel-toed boots.
“Tell me who’s paying you. Who hired you to kill the colonel.”
“No one,” I grind out.
“If you don’t tell me, I’ll have to ask the pretty girl with the brown eyes and the brown hair and the pretty tits. You ever fuck those tits? Bet they feel great around your dick.”
“I’m going to beat your face in with my fist,” I say between gritted teeth.
“That’s my line, dickwad.”
My torturers hold a brief meeting somewhere above my head and decide to pick me up off the floor. This is not an improvement. I thought they’d kick me to death down here, which I had planned for, and now what? Now the chair’s back up in its place.
One of them stands in front of me, the toe of his boot on top of my foot, and deals glancing blows to my face while another one unties my hands.
My shoulders scream from being held in this position and suddenly freed, the pain a warning that it’s a trap. And of course it is. Of course my hands are only free for a minute, and then they’re above my head, held in place by a thick length of rope. Turns out there’s rope hanging from the ceiling. Every good torture factory needs rope hanging down from the ceiling.
Enough rope to hold a man in place for a series of electric shocks.
Water is the first part of the plan. At first I think there’s two of them coming with the bucket but it’s only double vision. It’s the ringleader, Blue Shirt, his face split open with a smile.
“You’re going to talk,” he says, his grin gruesome and deranged.
“The prisoner’s dilemma is a paradox,” I tell him.
He pauses, glares at me, then dumps the bucket over my head. It’s hell frozen solid and it stings the cuts on my skin and forces a gasp out of me. Not my best moment. “What the fuck did you say?”
“You wanted to talk, I’ll talk. The prisoner’s dilemma. It’s a paradox.” Goosebumps pinch the back of my neck and sprint down my arms. My stomach is hot with the injuries and cold with the water and I’ll give them some credit. It’s miserable. “It’s where two people in two different rooms are questioned. That’s what happening here, in case you needed me to spell it out.”
In exchange for this I get a punch to the jaw that snaps my head around, followed by the first electric shock. He aims it at exposed skin above my collarbone and it arcs around the front of my throat and squeezes. Pain follows a second later.
My teeth grind together. It’s a hell of a thing when your teeth fight to crush themselves. The pressure in my jaw from the combined reflex to shiver and the activated muscles keeping my teeth shut tight could make my head fall off and flop onto the floor. They’d be so pissed if that happened. A headless guy can’t say a damn thing against the woman he loves.
I think of Holly in that basement in France.
I heard her voice before I saw her. I was hurt then, too.
Were you shot?
In the back. It’s all very Roman.
She’d touched me then, her touch lighter than air. Holly had no idea who I was. She had no idea what I’d already done to her. No idea what I would do. Her fingertips circled the wound. I heard the hitch in her breath. And what did she say?
You can’t die.
I’m serious.
So serious, and all for a small wound. If Holly saw me now she wouldn’t know where to put her hands. There are too many cuts and bruises. Too much blood. A smile twists the corners of my mouth and Blue Shirt notices. He doesn’t like it. He stomps one foot down on mine, and damn it, I don’t have my own pair of steel-toed boots. At least one toe breaks. Maybe more.