All the while I looked around I still couldn’t quite work out what sort of building this was. A house? An office?
Something else. what sort of house had the cell like cubicle I’d been held in and vents like where I’d just crawled from?
It didn’t matter. Whatever it was and wherever I was, I needed to get out.
I made a run for the doors, opened them and landed smack into a wall.
The impact made me rebound and recoil. I stumbled backwards but gathered my footing only to see that it wasn’t a wall I crashed into.
It was Balthazar Kane.
Balthazar Kane. My worst nightmare.
“Oh my God…” I breathed.
“God will not help you here, sugar.” He snarled and landed a slap straight across my face.
As the pain lanced through me stars speckled my vision.
Part of me thought I should have prepped for the slap.
In the last few weeks I’d been slapped twice. In my life no man had dare hit me. The previous two slaps came from people who were holding back. Pa and Armand.
When Balthazar slapped me, the stars blurred my vision. I could feel myself falling and then there was darkness.
The man knocked me unconscious…
My eyes fluttered open and I found myself staring at something gold and silky.
And, my head…
It had that sensation again. Like it might explode . Not as bad as last time though although it was still pounding.
I blinked several times and moved my head.
Now I was looking at rails. Gold rails. It reminded me of a bird cage.
I shuffled and saw more rails then I made the mistake of bolting up right because now my head felt like it just might fall off.
It would have been the least of my worries because the reason why the rails reminded me of a cage was because I was in a cage.
I was in a fucking cage!
“No…” I cried and brought my hands up to my cheeks.
I was in a cage.
I shook my head as I looked around.
This was a bedroom. There was a massive four poster bed in the center of the room with a large French window leading out what I thought was a balcony.
But this… this was a cage. A human sized cage in the room. the gold silk was the padding on the floor. the bedding, like what you’d have for an animal.
The room door opened and Balthazar came in carrying a mug. He looked so ordinary with his mug.
He wore a knitted gray jumper , black slacks and had his dark hair slicked back. If not for the scar running down his cheek he really would have looked just like a regular guy. He smiled when he saw me and set his mug down on a little table by the wardrobe.
“Hello pet, you’re awake.”
Pet…
My soul shivered. My soul quaked and doom filled me. When Pa told me the other week that he’d put me in a cage if I disobeyed him this was what I imagined. Or where they kept dogs at the pound.
“Not talking?” he cajoled.
“Please let me go. Please…” I resulted to begging.
He came over and got to his knees meeting my level and holding on to the rails of the cage.
The way he looked at me, his coal like eyes lightening with desire I almost thought he was going to actually turn into a monster.
“Say that again pet.”
“Please let me go. You don’t have to do this.”
When he closed his eyes and seemed to relish my words I realized he got off on the begging.
“I could listen to you beg all day. Miss Jia.” He opened his eyes and his stare hardened up.
My throat went dry when he stood up, opened the cage door and came inside.
I backed away on my hands. I didn’t want him to touch me. I didn’t want him to come near me.
There was a limit though, a limit to what I could do. My back reached it when I came up against the cage wall. The rails stopped me from going further.
He knelt down and crawled to me, right up to me and hovered over me, resting his hands either side of me.
“You fascinate me Jia Marchesi. You’ll definitely make a good toy. So glad you tried to escape. It gave me the idea to bring you up to my room. I hope you last longer than the last girl, and you’re not a screamer. No one but me will hear you.” He brought his hand to my cheek and moved close to my lips.
I almost died when he pressed his lips to mine.
Tears streamed down my cheeks as he kissed me and I started to shake.
He laughed at me and moved away again settling back on his hands.
“Sweet like honey,” he stated moving back. “I can’t wait to taste the rest of you. Later.
“Please no. I don’t want to. Please.” It was instinct to plead and continue to try even when there was no hope.
“You will Jia. You will want to. Trust me if I think anything other than that you’ll die quicker.” There was something maddening in his stare that reached out to me and terrified me more.
Uncontrollable tears spilled down my cheeks and all he did was laugh.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Xander
“Here. I think this should do the trick,” I stated and tapped a few keys on the key pad.
Dorian smiled. “Holy fucking hell Xander. You and I have got to have some kind of play date when this shite is over.”
“Man I wouldn’t say no to that.” I chuckled and couldn’t believe I was laughing.
The last few hours had been a much needed distraction. More than anything we were moving, we were actually doing something and if it went to plan we’d truly be ahead of the game.
“Me either. Don’t leave me out,” Wes chimed in with a warm smile.
“Of course not.”
As if I could leave Wes out of anything.
I could imagine the three of us around computers getting up to all kinds of crazy. We were what you called very dangerous technically minded people.
Together that could mean destruction.
Destruction to certain people who wanted to keep things secret and remain unseen.
That was what we’d done here today.
Dorian brought some of his equipment and gadgets to the house. Some of the stuff was again things I’d never seen because he’d made them himself.
We’d tracked the location of where they had Jia in Twin Falls and realized the place wasn’t listed on any map. There was just desert land there. To the naked eye.
The place was an underground facility. It spanned the distance of a few acres of land seemed to have all sorts happening there.
I thought it was some sort of headquarters.
The security and surveillance being used was no mere set up. It was all state of the art and stuff I’d never come across. So I did what I usually did whenever I came across anything like that.
I created a virus. It was something I stumbled across by accident in college.
Most hackers could get through firewalls using specific software. I could do that too. That was like child’s play to me. But my specialty was reading codes and it didn’t take long for me to figure out how the algorithms were written and in cases like this write something to override the system by attacking it.
It was actually simple really, but I shared my secrets with no one, not even Wes. All I did was copy the code and create a flaw in one of the connecting structures. The key was to create the right kind of flaw. Mine was set to duplicate itself on the same connective coding.