“So you just came over by yourself!? Can you do that?”
Grover chuckled. The movement hurt his chest where he’d been hit, but he ignored the twinge. “Sort of. My commander approved it and my team should be here in less than a week. Probably sooner, once the video those assholes took hits the airwaves.”
“You sound almost…happy to be here.”
“I am,” Grover agreed without hesitation.
“You’re insane,” Sierra told him.
“Actually, my plan worked better than I could’ve hoped.”
“Your plan?”
“Yes. To get myself taken so I could hopefully talk to other hostages, find out if anyone had seen you. Knew anything about you,” Grover said.
“Wait, you purposely got yourself kidnapped?”
“Yes.”
“That’s…crazy!”
“But it worked. I found you.”
“Okay, but now what? You found me, but we’re both prisoners now.”
“We wait.”
“For what?” Sierra asked.
“For my team to do what they do best…kick ass and take names,” Grover said without hesitation and with complete confidence.
“Right…”
Grover heard the disbelief and incredulity in her tone, but it didn’t faze him. He didn’t blame her for being less than hopeful after so long, and he also agreed what he’d done was reckless and over-the-top…but it worked. He was actually talking to the very woman he hadn’t been able to push out of his mind. “They’ll be here,” he told her. “We just have to be smart and stay under the radar until that happens.”
Sierra snorted once again.
“What?” Grover asked.
“You want to know how the next few days are gonna go?” she asked.
Grover tensed, but she didn’t give him time to answer.
“They’re gonna take turns beating on you—gotta give the newest members of the group a chance to practice their torture techniques. You’ll be tough and resist answering any of their questions at first, then they’ll stop fucking around and get to the more extreme torture. Waterboarding. Beating the soles of your feet so you can’t walk for days. Flogging. Dousing you with gas and threatening to set you on fire.”
Grover’s fists clenched. He wasn’t afraid of torture. He’d been through it before and had a high pain threshold. He also knew Trigger and the rest of his team would find him, get him out of there sooner rather than later.
But he couldn’t stop thinking of the most likely reason why she was so intimately familiar with Shahzada’s torture techniques…
“That happen to you?” he asked in a low, growling voice.
“Yeah.”
That was all she said, her voice quiet, resigned.
That one word made rage bloom inside Grover so fast, it was almost scary. He was going to kill every one of the men who’d touched her. They’d die slow, painful deaths.
He wasn’t sure what to say to comfort her before she went on.
“But not for a while. I think I was their first prisoner. They practiced on me. I learned pretty quickly that the sooner I broke, the faster they stopped. I never thought that psychology degree I earned would do me any good out here, but I was wrong.”
She chuckled lightly, but Grover couldn’t hear any humor in it.
“Tears have worked surprisingly well on them. At least for me. They love to see their prisoners helpless and crying. So I’ve learned how to cry on demand pretty quickly. But the most useful thing to remember—never let them know something’s important to you. They’ll focus on that, do their best to use it against you. For instance, if nudity bothers you, don’t complain when they take your clothes. They’ll never give them back. It amuses them to make their prisoners suffer.”
Grover wasn’t surprised by any of her intel. It was something the team had been taught early on in their training. “What’d they use against you?” he asked softly.
“When I was first taken, and didn’t know better, I begged them to let me keep a ring given to me by my grandmother. She died when I was fifteen and I inherited her wedding ring. I cherished that ring. But when they learned how badly I wanted to keep it, they taunted me with it for months. Promising to give it back if I gave them information about the base. At first, I believed them, told them whatever I could—which wasn’t much. I worked in the damn mess tent. But they had no intention of ever giving me that ring back, of course. They were just using it as a way to further torture me.”
“I’m sorry,” Grover told her.
“It’s fine. They can’t take the memories of my mam away, so fuck them.”
Grover contemplated her words in silence. He’d been at least partially incorrect. While Sierra wasn’t broken…the soft, sweet woman he’d once met was gone, possibly for good.
Replaced by a harder, stronger woman who would do anything in order to survive.
Despite abhorring how it had come about, he didn’t hate the change itself. Ironically, it made the two of them more alike. He’d seen and experienced things that had made him harder, stronger…and it’s ultimately what you did with those changes that mattered. Her captivity had obviously turned her into a survivor; that’s why she wasn’t broken.
She’d taken the worst thing a human could go through and turned it to her advantage in the only way she could…by letting it make her stronger, as well.
The connection he felt with this woman was already strong. Now it seemed to get more intense with every minute that passed.
It was whacked. They were in a precarious situation. He couldn’t even see her, for God’s sake, but he couldn’t deny he was impressed. Though, his heart bled for her at the same time. He couldn’t even begin to fathom the hell she’d been in for the last year. She’d had to become hard to keep herself from going insane.
“My advice is to give in to what they want. I’m not saying to give them any information that will help them hurt, kidnap, or kill anyone else, but the faster you seem to break, the quicker the torture will end.”
“Okay,” Grover agreed. Nothing she said was a surprise. Putting her mind at ease was his only goal.
“And if they use me to get you to react, you have to remain unaffected,” she said.
Her words seemed to echo off the rocky walls of their prison.
“What?” he asked, not sure he’d heard her correctly.
“They’ll haul me out in front of your cell and beat on me to try to get a rise out of you. If you show any kind of reaction, they’ll only do it longer. The best thing you can do is ignore it.”
“Motherfucker!” Grover swore. It was a common enough tactic by captors, using one prisoner against another. But the thought of her being tortured right in front of him, and Grover not being able to do a damn thing about it, brought out his rage all over again.
“I mean it,” Sierra said. “The more you protest, the more they’ll hurt me. And if I don’t react when they’re hurting you, please don’t take it personally. It’s for the best. They’ll get bored and quit as long as I don’t say or do anything to try to make them stop.”