by Pam Godwin
“You have high-tech weapons and medical supplies.” Badell paused before him, head cocked. “But no IDs. No passports. Nothing to connect you to anything or anyone. We both know you won’t be providing your brother’s number.”
A knot formed in Tate’s throat. He’d given Badell too many reasons to be suspicious. The man might’ve been clinically insane, but he was smart. There would be no ransom demands, because he smelled the trap.
Across the room, Lucia’s whimpers grew louder. She rolled off Van’s lap and pulled herself across the floor, grunting and sobbing in her determination to get to Tate.
“Lucia, don’t.” He jerked uselessly against the restraints. “Stay where you are.”
“No.” Her legs dragged behind her, slowing her down, and she cried out in frustration.
It was gut-wrenching to witness, cracking things inside him that hurt far worse than broken ribs.
He gave Badell the deadliest glare he could manage for a man hanging in chains. “She needs medicine. A doctor.”
“Whether she gets that is up to you.”
“What do you want?”
“Tell me why you’re here. In Caracas.”
Given Tate’s weapons and the bullet-resistant shirt, Badell knew this wasn’t a pleasure trip. He also knew it was personal. He only needed to watch Lucia as she hauled herself toward Tate. Her anguished cries shuddered with heartbreak. And love.
Love.
She loves me.
The intensity of that realization sent waves of pain through Tate’s fractured chest. At first, he didn’t understand it. It made him feel desperate and terrified, but underneath the panic was something new, something wholly unexpected.
When she smiles, I feel a peace unlike anything I’ve felt in my life.
Van’s words hit him with soul-deep comprehension.
Lucia’s smile was his responsibility, his goal, his everything. Her life, her health, all of her was his to protect.
She didn’t belong to Matias or Badell or any other man. If anyone even thought to lay claim to her, he wouldn’t step aside. He wouldn’t back down. He would fucking fight for her with every breath in his body. She was his.
I love her.
Not the kind of love he’d flirted with before. What he felt for Camila paled in the dense, feral glow burning in his chest. This was deep, consuming, world-changing love. His past, present, and future, his entire existence took on new meaning.
His reason for everything was right here, in this room, dragging herself toward him. Her pain was his pain. Her tears, her happiness, her fate—all of it was his. Protecting her wasn’t an obligation. It was his purpose.
It was the most significant thing he could ever do.
In that moment, he knew he would endure anything to make sure she smiled again. He would kill, bleed, cry, break, and die for her. There was nothing, absolutely fucking nothing he wouldn’t do for her.
Fortitude built in his mind and girded his spine. It wasn’t just a willingness to fight for her. It was an insistence.
“You know why I’m here.” He leveled Badell with a look that encapsulated the depth of his conviction. “As for finding out what I’ll do for her, the answer is yes.”
“Yes?” Badell’s eyebrows rutted together.
“Get her and Van out of here. Give her the treatment, let them go, and my answer is yes to anything you want from me.”
Lucia burst into a sobbing wail and sped up her harrowing crawl.
“Fascinating.” Badell stepped out of her path, studying her as she closed the distance.
“Tate.” She collapsed beneath him and slid a trembling hand over his bare toes, along the arch of his foot, and curled cold fingers around his ankle beneath the jeans.
His eyes burned, and his heart rate skyrocketed. God how he wanted to cradle her against him and console her. He wanted to clutch her hair and press his face to hers and smell her and hold her and kiss her. His inability to do so filled him with such maddening anger he couldn’t form words over the scalding heave of his breaths.
Across the room, Van wore a bleak expression, but there was something else in his eyes. His strength and redemption was rooted in his love for his wife. He understood.
“The human spirit intrigues me.” Badell closed the blade on his finger and pocketed it. Then he leaned down and gripped Lucia’s hips, lifting her until she was eye-level with Tate. “Show me what you want, Lucia.”
Her hands immediately slid around Tate’s torso, and tears streaked her ashen cheeks as she tried to pull herself against him.
Badell adjusted his hold, hooking an arm across her stomach and giving her what she sought—contact, connection, togetherness.
Tate clutched the chains that suspended his arms and pressed toward her, chest to chest, breathing her in. Their lips met, and he fed her what they needed. Commitment and unity. Substance and meaning. Promise and love. His tongue rubbed against hers, dedicated, possessive, licking away the salt of her grief as everything inside him roared with desperation.
It was a kiss that would carry them through the night. A kiss that hoped for tomorrow. A kiss that would survive the end of time.
Too soon, Badell pulled her away and carried her back to Van.
“No! No, please!” She sobbed, thrashing her head and feebly wheeling her arms. “Let him go! Let him go! You can’t do this.”
She continued to cry as Badell positioned her on her side with her cheek on Van’s thigh, facing Tate. The placement was deliberate and cruel. He wanted her to watch.
“You think you love her.” He returned to Tate, his dark eyes gleaming with morbid curiosity. “I’m not convinced.”
“Do we have a deal?” He gritted his teeth.
“She’s a beautiful woman. And compassionate. If you’re into that kind of thing.”
“Give her the medicine, Badell.” He yanked at the chains, coughing against the agony in his ribs. “She needs it now!”
“I understand your urgency.” Badell cast her a passing glance. When he turned back, the indifference in his expression faded, replaced with impatience and a hint of anger. He sucked on his teeth, his voice dropping an octave. “Once I’m convinced of your feelings, when I fully understand the lengths you’ll go for her, I’ll give her the medicine. Then I’ll let her leave. I’ll set her free.”
Lucia screamed her protests, her words too hoarse to be discernible.
“How can I trust you?” His heart stammered, dying a thousand deaths.
“Lucia?” Badell called over his shoulder. “Have I ever broken a promise to you?”
“No,” she wept weakly, miserably.
“We should get started.” He removed the blade from his pocket and attached it to his finger. “She doesn’t have much time.”
CHAPTER 24
Tate memorized the delicate lines of Lucia’s face, the fall of glossy black hair around her tiny shoulders, and the love glistening in her deep brown eyes. He devoured her pain and beauty, anchored himself to it, to her, as hands grabbed him and spun him toward the wall.
The hands, as he’d learned when he was driven to the compound, belonged to Armando. Badell’s torturer. The man who raped Lucia just hours earlier.
While Armando adjusted the chains, Tate played out all the slow, agonizing ways the rapist would die. Didn’t matter the method. Blood would spill. More blood than that which coated the wall inches from his face.
Why was there a sheet of wood on this wall and not the others?
“The chains usually prevent movement.” Badell tested the links that ran from Tate’s wrist to the ceiling. “But you’re a big guy. Strong.”
His hand vanished from view, and his footsteps shifted behind Tate.
A featherlight scratch moved across his shoulder blade. Chills swept through him, stealing his breath.
It’s the razor. He knew it. His clenching muscles knew it, and he tried to relax, to convince himself to accept it. But dread turned his body into a shaking block of ice.
“Nooooo!” Lucia screamed just as shocking, fiery pain seared through his skin and muscle.
His head fell back as violence and fury roared from his throat. It was so excruciating his limbs convulsed and slammed him against the wall.
Fuck, fuck, fuck. Breathe. It was just one cut. Just one. I’m better than this.
“See, if you buck like that, you’ll rip the chains from the ceiling,” Badell said at his ear. “I can’t have that.”
He was still heaving with blinding pain when Armando wrestled his forearm against the wood above his head. Blinking away the spots in his vision, he watched in horror as Armando stabbed an icepick through his arm and pinned him against the wood board.
The pain was unimaginable, shooting through him in shocking quakes of agony. His head hung on his shoulders, and his knees buckled, causing his weight to pull on the arm nailed to the wall. Nausea rose, and his vocal chords shredded. He tried to stifle his screams, but they were constant. Or maybe it was Lucia. Her anguish had become one with his own.
When I fully understand the lengths at which you’ll go for her, I’ll give her the medicine.
He needed to breathe. Breathe. Breathe. In and out. Stay alert. Focus. He was strong.
As his lungs found their pace, he planted his feet beneath him, lifting on toes to minimize the movement of the icepick through his arm.
“Why do you care if I love her?” he growled in a thick, guttural voice. “What do you gain from this?”
“Your loyalty to her intrigues me. I want to examine it. Challenge it.” Moving into his line of sight, Badell studied him with a pensive expression. “To truly understand the veracity of love, a man must be tested. He must pay for it.”
What is the price you’re willing to pay?
Cole’s question repeated in his pain-addled mind, and he spat the words. “I’ll pay, you son of a bitch. Just name the price.”
“The price of love is devastation.”
“How the fuck would you know?”
A muscle bounced in Badell’s cheek. “I’ve paid it a thousand times over.”
The sick fuck wasn’t capable of love. Not that it mattered. He was lord and king here, Hell’s monarch in human flesh. There would be no mercy.
And so it began.
The blade sundered his flesh from neck to waist, striping, curving, digging, cutting. Cutting. Cutting. Hours of continual pain immersed him in a bottomless pit. He went into shock, but it didn’t numb the insufferable misery.
He kept his feet firmly beneath him and cheek pressed against the wood, staring at the metal handle protruding from his forearm. Every breath caused slight movement, shifting tendon and bone around that spike.
Everlasting fire incinerated his back, his ribs, his arm. Dizziness dulled his thoughts. But at the outskirts of his senses, he tracked the clang of Van’s chains and marked the moment Lucia’s weak cries dissolved into wheezing breaths. God willing, she must’ve passed out. He couldn’t imagine what his back looked like and didn’t want her staring at it.
How much blood could a person lose? Was he reaching his limit? It drained from his arm in steady red rivulets, leaving tracks down his bicep and ribs and soaking his jeans. The same wet warmth flowed from his back beneath the relentless slice of the blade. There was so much blood his feet slipped in the sticky pools cooling on the floor.
“How long have you known her?” Badell traced a soft finger through the agony along his spine.
He swallowed, tried to clear his head. Five days? That was when they met. But he’d known her for six years through photos, Camila’s stories, and the depths of his investigations.
“Long time.” He choked on a throat full of phlegm and bile and spat it out.
“And Van? How do you know him?”
Another stroke of that finger down his back, a gentle taunt that fired muscle-flinching pain. But Badell wasn’t cutting. Conversation meant a reprieve from the blade.
Tate tried to make his mouth work, to give an answer that would delay the torment. Words eventually slipped out, but they were strangled and unintelligible.
“I kidnapped him,” Van said from across the room.
“Explain.” Badell shifted, creaking the stool beneath him.
Van outlined the sex trafficking operation, focusing on the training and the network of slave buyers. His words were carefully chosen, avoiding details that might’ve suggested they had friends or family. He also didn’t explain why or how it ended. As far as Badell knew, it had been just Van and Tate and a dozen other faceless slaves.
He wasn’t sure why Van shared any of it. Maybe Van was angling to connect to their captor in a companions-in-kidnapping way.
Badell listened, but he wasn’t distracted from his mutilated canvas. The vicious, incessant cutting continued, shoving Tate into a hazy fog of gasping, retching distress. He vomited everything he’d eaten in days, heaving until blood vessels burst in his eyes. His suffering was so acute he felt every twitch of the blade, every notch, slash, slice, and cleave.
He was cold. So fucking cold he feared he was nearing the dark dismal nothingness Lucia had talked about. His lungs produced weak, shivery sounds, and the breaths trembling from his throat cracked his dry lips.
But he still had his mind, and he let it travel to the quiet woman across the room, absorbing himself in hallucinations—the softness of her hair as he ran it between his fingers, the ferocity of her expression as she argued, and the sweet perfection of her submission as he commanded her to kneel. A man could get lost in a dream like that, and he did, for a time.
Badell and Van continued their conversation while the dissection stretched over the expanse of his back. There wasn’t an inch that hadn’t been carved. He’d been in excruciating pain for so long he’d forgotten what relief felt like. The razor penetrated again and again, and he no longer had the energy to tense or resist. The fight had bled out of him. His life would soon follow.
It must’ve been nearing dawn when the last of his alertness faded. His groaning had become a heavy, hollow drum in his ears, booming in the black cavern of his mind. He was stuck there in that desolate vacuum, unable to escape the throbbing pressure. It was the only thing that existed. One continuous, torturous throb.
Throb.
Throb.
Throb.
Then he was cold again. A suffocating, liquid kind of cold that washed over his face and seeped into his nose. He choked and hacked, fighting for air.
I’m drowning.
It wasn’t real. He wasn’t under water. He just needed to return to that room. To Lucia.
Open your eyes.
Wake up.
More icy water. He coughed, taking the cool liquid into his mouth. His throat filled with shrapnel.
“Open your eyes.” A deep voice breathed at his ear. Badell.
He blinked, moaning against the bright light as he tried to find his bearings.
Pain flared and flamed everywhere, but the pressure on his arms was absent. Nothing cinched or tore at his wrists, and his legs weren’t pulling him down. He was weightless.
I’m on the floor.
Concrete pressed against his cheek and shoulder. He lay on his side, his good arm stretched toward the closed door. The other arm extended from beneath his torso and tucked against his stomach. He refused to glance at it, couldn’t bear to see the ruin from the icepick.
And his back… Fucking God, his back felt skinless and exposed, as if the flesh had been shaved off and the muscle had been torn from bone. Grisly images of a bared spine and vertebrae flooded his mind.
Footsteps circled around his head as he tilted his neck back, aching, needing, searching…
There she is.
Eyes glazed, face blotchy, and frail body shaking violently, Lucia reached for him from a few feet away. Her fingers stretched toward his, too far, and her head lolled on Van’s lap.
She was still alive. He was still alive. They still had a chance.
What time is it?
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He tried to ask, but his vocal chords had been reduced to rock and gravel. “T-t-time?”
“An hour till dawn.” Badell crouched in his line of sight, blocking his view of her.
Then he lifted a bucket and trickled cold water over Tate’s face. When the rest was dumped on his back, the frigid drops felt like razor blades slicing across his skin. He bit down on his tongue, trapping a godawful bellow.
“You are my greatest masterpiece.” Squatting with his sleeves rolled to the elbows, Badell rested scarred forearms on his thighs. “I haven’t decided your fate. Quite frankly, I loathe the idea of destroying such a beautiful creation. If you live, you might one day come to value the artwork.” He ran a hand along the welts covering his own arm. “Took me twenty years to appreciate mine.”
Since he didn’t wear a mask, Tate could identify him. The nutjob had no intention of letting him go.
“You promised,” he ground out. “Meds.” Her medicine. Give her what she needs.
“My promise was,” Badell said, setting the bucket aside. “Once I know how far you’ll go for her, I’ll give her the medicine.” He stood, slid his hands in the pockets of his blood-stained trousers, and paced the room. “I was going to have Van fuck her while you watched, but after hearing the history between you and him, I have a much better idea.”
Profound relief mixed with overwhelming dread, curdling a venomous concoction in his stomach. The darkness in Badell’s expression was sinister. Haunting. Whatever he had in store would threaten to break Tate’s mind. He was certain of it.
He shifted his gaze across the floor and found Lucia staring back. Silent tears spilled from her eyes, and her mouth trembled with heartbreaking fragility. Her arm still lay outstretched toward his, fingers twitching to close the distance.
His chest heaved as he strained toward her, extending useless joints and failing to erase the inches between them. Goddammit, he just needed to touch her. Fury rose above the anguish, hardening his body into stone.
“Make your demands, Badell.” He flexed his jaw, battling the never-ending pain that dotted his vision.
“One more trial.” Shiny, blood-splattered shoes paused inches from his face. Badell lowered to a crouch and rested a hard, cool hand against Tate’s jaw. “Van will take his pleasure in your body. Then you will take pleasure in his. Come inside him, allow him to release in you, then I’ll know how far you will go.”