After a moment of looming, Cyryl pulled a couple of cable ties from his pocket and proceeded to fasten my wrists to the arms of the chair.
“What are you going to do to me?” I whined in panic. “I said I’d tell you anything you want to know. You don’t have to hurt me. Please, Cyryl—”
“I’m not sure how much you know about me, Danny,” he commented, cutting off my pleas. “Probably everything. I’d be surprised if you would come after Ares without doing your research on the whole team. So you would know that I was born and raised in Warsaw, Poland.”
“Y-you don’t have an accent,” I replied, sounding pathetic.
Cyryl gave me an amused look, his weathered face creasing up briefly. According to my documents, he was in his late forties, but an exact birth date was unknown. Like a lot of their crew, they’d done a decent job wiping away evidence of his existence.
“Neither do you,” he replied. “Isn’t it funny how a simple change of accent can change a stranger’s perception of a person?” He crouched down in front of my chair and pulled a small fabric pouch from his pocket. It was folded up and secured with Velcro, and when he unfolded it, I was unsurprised to see several sharp metal implements.
Still, I gave a dramatic gasp and thrashed a little in fear. “What are you doing? I said I’d tell you! Just ask me what you want to know!”
“See, that’s the thing,” Cyryl commented, selecting a long, thick needle from his pouch, “I find people tell better truths when they’re in pain. You already knew that I worked for the Agencja Wywiadu didn’t you, Danny?”
“I don’t even know what that is!” I protested, tugging on my restraints.
Agencja Wywiadu was just a horse of a different color. Government-funded spy agency but with less rules around what was considered humane treatment of prisoners. Compared to some other government agencies, they were still on the “nice” end of the torture scale.
“Sure you don’t,” Cyryl commented, “and I’m the Queen of England.”
He pinched the skin on the back of my wrist and pushed the needle through. I gave an obligatory scream, because it was either that or burst out laughing. I’d had piercings that hurt more than that, so I was going to assume Cyryl hadn’t tortured someone in a long time.
“Who are you working for, Danny?” he asked in a calm voice as I sobbed and thrashed.
I moaned. “I already t-told you. I work at the bank in Cloudcroft. I’m a teller.”
Another needle through the skin of my forearm, and I bit my cheek to stop the smile that wanted to creep up. It was so tempting to mock him, to tell him that he was doing it wrong . But that would be the fastest way to blow my cover, and I was smarter than that.
“Who was the guy who killed Mauricio?”
“I don’t know,” I wailed. “That had nothing to do with me!”
Cyryl seemed to think his methods were sound, because we continued like this for seven needles—none of which hurt much more than a tattoo on my sternum—and none of his questions got any kind of truthful answers out of me. He was out of his league on this one.
Eventually, someone knocked on the door, and Cyryl shot me a frustrated look before going to answer it. Moana was there, whispering something to him. Her gaze flicked past Cyryl to me, tied to a chair and bleeding from my arm as I sobbed, and her eyes widened.
“Cyryl—” she gasped. He cut her off by shoving her out the door and closing it firmly, leaving me right where I was.
He also left the needles piercing my skin, which was a test if I’d ever fucking seen one. Hah, foolish man thought I would fall for that? Think again. My pain tolerance was second to none, as was my patience.
With nothing better to do, I counted the seconds while Cyryl was gone. Then the minutes. It was around an hour and a half before my cell door opened again, and Mo stepped inside with a basic first aid kit in hand.
“Please,” I croaked, giving her huge pleading eyes, “Mo, please help me. I told Cyryl everything, I answered his questions, why are you still doing this?”
She tightened her lips, focusing on my arm as she tugged the first needle free. I cried out and she flinched, but she didn’t say anything until all the needles were removed.
“This will sting,” she said quietly, holding up a spray bottle of antiseptic solution.
I cringed. “Worse than having needles shoved through my skin? I doubt it.” My tone was bitter and angry, and her jaw tightened.
The spray did sting, but it was the kind of sensation I’d long since become numb to. My brain registered it as pain, but it never quite reached my parietal lobe to make me feel it.
Mo did her best to gently clean the puncture wounds, then finally cut the cable ties so she could bandage up my entire forearm. “They’ll hurt for a bit but should heal okay,” she said, sitting back on her heels to meet my gaze properly for the first time since entering my cell. “It’ll be worse the next time Cyryl visits, though. This was just a warning.”
I made my whole body tremble as I hugged my injured arm to my chest. “Mo, I know you barely know me, but… you know I’m not who they think I am. This is all a huge mistake or a setup.”
She bit the edge of her lip, seeming conflicted. Then her expression shuttered, and she pushed to her feet. “You might have Jae fooled, but the rest of us aren’t so gullible. I suggest you start talking soon, or you’ll be praying Kai had shot you back in Shadow Grove.”
The door slammed shut with a heavy thud behind her, and I took a moment to stand and stretch the kinks out of my back from sitting in the same position so long. It was nice to have Mo confirm that Jae was still taking my side. Perhaps he just needed a little longer to plead my case to Kai. Because I was under no illusions that this was being done without his specific orders.
Breathing a sigh, I returned to my makeshift bed and lay down. My torso still ached with bruises from Sam’s attack, and I peeled up my T-shirt to check the damage. My ribs were all intact, which was a relief, but blue black welts decorated my stomach. All things considered, Cyryl had been rather gentle piercing my arm.
I didn’t doubt Mo when she warned that it would escalate from here. That was to be expected. But the longer I held out, the longer I failed to fight back or failed to try and escape, the more they’d second-guess themselves.
Ultimately, I needed those doubts to start playing with Kai’s head, whether indirectly through his team or directly… if he ever had the guts to face me himself.
Part of my Guild contract had been to duplicate his phone. I never really speculated on the motivations for my contracts; if someone wanted to pay the Guild’s fee, then it was none of my business why they wanted what they asked for. But now that I had some time on my hands, I gave it a little thought.
They wanted his phone duplicated, then have him killed once the data was verified. Much like my job with Edward Gates, with the addition of a kill order. That meant that the client wasn’t positive the intel they wanted was actually on his phone, and they’d have likely modified the job if it hadn’t been there. That was the whole reason I’d been given tech support for what would have otherwise been a run-of-the-mill honey trap.
Thinking of tech support had my mind wandering to Leon, wondering whether he was still searching for me. Somehow, I knew he was, even if we hadn’t been on amazing terms when I’d been abducted. There was something between us. Something electric and undeniable… chemistry on crack.