by Skye Jones
“Better get used to the pain, there’s a whole lot more where that came from.”
This felt too personal, and I focused on calming myself down enough to think. Sienna seemed angry with me. I doubted Jackson could have worked with her for as long as he did and not known if she was a psycho, so why was she so cruel to me?
I wanted to get into her head again, but she’d only know. Something about her behavior toward me went way beyond the coldness of someone retrieving an asset.
One of her thugs pushed me forward the moment she let go of my hair, and I walked down the corridor, determined to survive whatever came next so I could have some time with my family.
“Where are we?”
She gave a soft laugh. “Oh this? We moved our headquarters a few weeks ago. Jackson will find it ironic when he finds out. This is the abandoned medical facility where they worked on him and his men. We’ve taken it over. The Resistance is getting some big funding these days.”
I stared at her. “So you’re basically as corrupt as the people you’re trying to take down. Isn’t it always that way?” I shook my head in disgust, and she pushed me against the wall.
Sienna opened a door with a code, and then shoved me through it into a stark room. Plainly set out, there was little furniture, but there were what seemed to be instruments of torture hanging from the walls, and a cross in one corner.
As I stared at the weird shit all around me, a door at the far end of the room opened and Slim walked in.
My stomach dropped at the sight of his cold, hard face.
What the hell?
“Oh, yes. I forgot to tell Jackson, seeing as he has pussied out and gone all googly eyed over you. I have had to make other plans for your training. You’ll be learning how to control your sixth sense soon enough, but I thought we’d start with the training for your submission first. Get you nice and compliant. Slim here is meant to be very good at this sort of thing, and since I can no longer rely on Jack to put you in your place, I asked Slim to come work with us instead. He was more than happy to help on this occasion.”
My heart plummeted as he grinned at me, all twisted and hungry, ready for my pain.
“It’s time to start our training, little one.”
I tried to stay standing, but I couldn’t. My legs went from under me, and I sank to the floor as I realized the shared dream Jackson and I had from what seemed like a lifetime ago was about to come true.
I was about to be tested to the limit.
Chapter Ten
Jackson: Let’s go get our girl
Jackson paced the length of the corridor as the massive vehicle rumbled down the driveway.
The door remained open, Doc staring out as if he couldn’t believe what was happening.
“I’m going to fetch Ben,” Alex said.
“No need, I’m here. Commotion woke me up. What the fuck is going on?”
Ben came down the stairs wearing jeans and a t-shirt, barefoot and sleep rumpled.
He’d been helping Jackson try to figure out what Sienna had planned for Milly, and for the wider Resistance, which involved a lot of phone calls; calling in favors, and using what little net access they had. Hence them both being exhausted. They’d been talking to sources who had led them to believe Sienna was seriously off message and deep into a side project of her own.
The next part of their plan had been to find out who Sienna ultimately reported to because her superiors needed to know she was not sticking to the Resistance’s main agenda. Once they’d done that, they believed her superiors would deal with her, therefore neutralizing the threat she posed to them and, in particular, Milly.
As a result, neither had been getting much sleep. Jackson had ordered Ben to take a nap a couple of hours ago, and now he had to explain to Ben how he’d failed him, failed them all.
“They’ve taken Milly.” Doc turned to Ben then back to look out the door.
“Taken her? Where? Who?”
Ben looked at them all, and Jackson hated the fear in his eyes. The same fear he knew would be in his own.
“Sienna took her and her family,” Alex explained.
“You didn’t stop her? What the fuck, Jack?”
Jackson whirled on him, snarling as he pushed Ben into the wall. “You weren’t here so you don’t get to blame me. She held a knife to her fucking stomach. Something’s happened. Something beyond Sienna showing up. Milly was… she hates me.” At those last words the fight went out of him and he let Ben go.
“You should have stopped them,” Doc said.
“You saw.” Jackson couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “She had a knife to her own flesh. How could I?”
“She wouldn’t have done it.” Doc began to pace too.
“Know that for a fact, do you? The girl was distraught, something has happened to upset her, and I couldn’t take the risk.”
“You could have read her mind,” Ben said.
“Oh, yeah. She’d have totally lost it then.” Jackson shook his head and raised his arms to the ceiling before dropping them to his side in a gesture of utter despair.
“I meant Alex, dipshit,” Ben retorted.
“I did.”
They all turned to look at Alex.
Ben stared at the man as if he didn’t know him, and Jackson wondered if instead of bringing them all closer together, Milly would be the thing to fracture them. Tear them apart.
“Why didn’t you stop her?” Ben demanded. “Or was she actually gonna do it? Because I don’t believe for a moment she would.”
“I didn’t stop her, or the situation, because Jackson is correct. She’s distraught. And I have a few questions of my own. She saw into your mind, Jack, and didn’t like what she saw, and I don’t blame her. She saw you and Sienna discussing pimping her out and training her. Laughing about it as you fucked.”
Jackson felt the air leave his lungs and found he couldn’t get any fresh back in. He had been thinking that, hadn’t he? A memory of a him from a long time ago. Or not that long really, but it felt like forever. In the library, he’d been reading about the sort of men Milly would have been pimped out to if Sienna had her way. Then he’d flashed back to that moment with Sienna. Oh, God. A stupid flicker of memory, of when he had trusted Sienna, way back. Before he met Milly, shit, before he’d dreamed of her more than a couple of times.
“That was a lifetime ago, before I started to feel things for her.” He shouldn’t have to explain himself, but his men were looking at him as if he’d grown another head. “For fuck’s sake, you all know I sometimes screwed Sienna. You guys did too. So don’t look at me like that.”
“Okay,” Alex kept his voice measured. “But Milly also saw you running through an image, or a scene… It’s hard to describe, of her being tortured. Whipped. Flogged.”
“Yeah, I was imagining the worst, you know? That thing our brains do. We all do it. You think about something and your mind creates a scenario. That’s all it was. I know now Sienna wanted Milly for way worse than simply sleeping with a few well-connected men and getting inside their heads. The people she wanted Milly to mind-fuck are in a deeply secretive and highly depraved sadism club. They don’t do safe, sane, and consensual and prefer their subs to be unwilling. Sienna wanted to train Milly to be one of those victims. Ben and I have been looking into it all.”
He turned to Ben, unable to believe he needed him to corroborate what he was saying to Alex and Doc, men he’d seen as brothers.
“It’s true,” Ben said. “We were still amassing all the info, but it wasn’t looking good.”
“You idiots didn’t think to fill me in on all the details?” Alex demanded, his face an angry stone mask, eyes blazing almost preternaturally.
Alex nearly always wore a civilized expression, but in that moment, it dropped, revealing the powerful, otherworldly, creature lurking beneath his handsome surface.
“I was going to. In fact, I was going to ask for your help this evening because I needed to talk to Milly about i
t too, but I didn’t know how. Now though, we can stand here and keep arguing, or we can go get our girl back.” He shot Alex an imploring look.
Emotions were running high, and Jackson knew if they fought now, at least one of them would end up dead. He had to put Milly front and center in all this and keep calm.
“We could go get her, if we knew where they were taking her, genius,” Ben muttered, giving Jackson a dirty look.
“She has a tracker, genius,” Jackson snapped back before turning his attention to Alex. “Didn’t you happen to dip into Sienna’s mind while all this was going on?”
“Tried, she blocked me after my first little foray. This is partly our fault. We should have trained Milly better. She’d have been able to use her power then; instead, she’s with someone who has no sixth sense herself, but understands it way better than Milly does. Sienna won’t hesitate to use her knowledge against Milly to get what she wants.” Alex sat down heavily on the spindly, Regency-style chair in one corner of the hallway. “I did get one thing as they were leaving. Sienna is rogue. She’s not simply doing this for the Resistance, Jackson. Sienna is in love… with you. She hates Milly. This is way more dangerous for our girl because it’s personal.”
“In love with me?” Jackson shook his head. “Sienna? No fucking way.”
“Yes, she is. She hates Milly because of how you feel about her.”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Ben hit the wall with his fist and then cursed again. “Let’s go and check the tracker, see where they are taking her.”
“I know where she’ll take her,” Jackson said. “There are only two places—either the center where we were experimented on, which Sienna’s part of the Resistance now works out of, or the Ravens’ hole-up.”
“The Ravens? What the hell have they got to do with this?” Alex turned to him.
“Seems Sienna has been playing both sides. That’s another thing I needed your help with this evening. I was going to go over to the Ravens and see if you could get inside some of their heads. They are working with Sienna somehow. Not sure how, but last time I was there, I managed to get into Greg’s brain for a few seconds and saw he’d been chatting with her. You know me, though. Can’t do it without causing the person some pain or discomfort; had to get out of there before he became suspicious.”
“My bet is on the center. They have all the security they need there. It probably still has all the video cameras and security locks in place from when we were held there. They have other people like Milly too. I think Sienna will go there,” Ben said.
Doc raked a hand through his hair. “Which means we’re fucked. The center is highly guarded. No way we can get in there easily.”
“We lived there. We know it inside and out.” Jackson paused and looked at his men. “I say the most important thing is saving Milly from whatever hell she’s going through right now. Personally, I’m prepared to lay my life on the line for her. I don’t care if I get out of there alive, so long as she does.”
“Agreed,” Doc said immediately.
“You should stay, Alex,” Jackson said. “If we get stuck and the sun comes up, you’ve had it. Plus, there should be someone here for Milly if we don’t make it. She’s going to need protecting after this.”
Alex laughed. “Nice try, but no thanks. And Milly isn’t as weak or incapable as you all seem to think. Something you need to work on, moving forward, if you want her to stay!”
Jackson stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, you all need to start respecting how strong she is becoming, how smart she is. She’s finally seeing the world as it is, and you need to stop treating her like some delicate flower who needs kept in a greenhouse away from the real world. You keep that up and you’ll end up losing her anyway. If you’d trusted her enough in the first place to tell her the truth, none of this would have happened.”
“If I’d told her the truth she might have left or not believed me,” Jackson pointed out, holding onto his patience by a thread.
Alex smiled at him. “Yet, here we are.”
Shit, when he put it like that.
“Look, Jack, all I’m saying is, let’s go get our girl. But you’re not shutting me or her out anymore. Going forward, I get as much say as what happens in this group as the rest of you, and so does she. You’ve got to stop treating us differently.”
Jackson’s chest ached, and he realized with shock it was a form of sorrow. He’d never meant to sideline Alex. He loved the guy. As for Milly, he’d die for her; he never meant to hurt her.
“I know all you do comes from a good place.” Alex walked right up to him and laid his hand over the center of Jackson’s chest. “From your heart because you’re a protector. It’s what you do. It’s what you did for all of us in that hell hole, and you’re carrying on doing it now. At some point though, you need to trust others. Let us in. Not doing so can have terrible consequences.”
“Okay. I’ll… try.” He bit out the words. It wouldn’t be easy for him, this was who he was. Hardened. The one who’d always been in charge, but he’d try. For Milly and his brothers.
“Gentlemen, we need to be armed and ready in ten, and that includes you, Alex.”
The vampire grinned at him showing off his impressive porcelain hardware.
Jackson grinned back.
“Let’s go get our girl.”
Chapter Eleven
Milly: Breakthrough
So much pain.
Everything hurt.
My neck hurt from the tension of trying to hold my head up. Letting my head hang down didn’t help on that score either, though.
My arms ached from their position on the cross, and my hips too as my legs were splayed wide. I had been tied to it on my front at first, and Slim had started to hit me on my back with a riding crop and then a flogger of some sort. He hadn’t used a lot of force, and he hadn’t given me that many strokes, but for someone who had never been hurt in such a way before it stung like hell. All I wanted to do was put ice on my back and thighs where he’d also given me some strokes.
Now, he’d tied me facing forward, and I didn’t know what to expect.
I wore only a bra and panties, and thank God I’d put a bra on that morning as I didn’t always wear one.
When Sienna had handed me over to Slim and the two thugs helping him, one of whom was the lovely Greg, he’d ordered me to undress down to my underwear. Then Greg and the other guy had disappeared, leaving me alone with my torturer.
I licked my lips. I was thirsty. I’d lost track of how long I’d been on this damn thing, but it must have been awhile. Every now and then, Slim would take me down, let me rest for a short while, and give me water, before hauling me back up onto the cursed cross. I hated those moments too, but also welcomed them. He’d soothe me, stroke my hair, make me drink. Part of me welcomed it, and that was the last thing I wanted.
In between the torture of the flogger, and crop, Slim would leave the room for long periods with me locked in and curled on the floor trembling. At least my body could rest then, but my mental torture carried on.
This time when he’d left, he not taken me down. There was no sound in the room, no natural light, only a painfully bright strip bulb. Being left for so long with no contact, no idea of when Slim, or anyone else, would return proved to be worse than the physical torture.
I began to want the sick bastard to come back simply for the company, which I presumed was part of the plan and the training they were putting me through.
Every now and again my mind wandered to Jackson and the guys. I knew now he’d not been planning to let me go at all, whether to service one older, vanilla guy, or ten sadistic freaks, but it was irrelevant because I’d fucked up.
As I thought about things though, I came to the conclusion that he had too.
If Jackson had trusted me, stopped treating me like a child and instead given me the information he held about my fertility and Sienna’s plans, I would have already known about the BDSM club. He
should have told me. Yes, I would have been angry, maybe even distrustful of him all over again for a while, but we could have worked it out. This way, his lack of trust left me wide open to Sienna’s manipulations.
Not that I wholly blamed him. We were both responsible. I hadn’t let him know how I felt about him. He’d put it on the line for me. Told me repeatedly I was his, and he would lay down his life for me. I never once told him of my feelings. He probably still thought I’d run away first chance I got. And I hadn’t pushed and asked for the truth; I let him hide it from me, as scared to know it, as he was to say it.
The sad thing was, now that I understood only too well how deep his feelings for me went, I wasn’t sure I could ever go back and build something between us. I had screwed up, big time. In many ways. I hadn’t trusted him. I hadn’t communicated with him. I’d been fixated on him and Doc taking me, and I hadn’t stopped to think about the alternatives. Now they were made crystal clear to me.
Tears filled my eyes, and I tried to blink them back. I couldn’t wipe my face and they trickled down my cheeks, annoying me if I let them fall. It hurt badly to think I might not be able to resolve things with him, because in not resolving them I didn’t only lose him. I lost the others too.
If someone had told me it was possible to fall in love with four different men at the same time, I’d have laughed at them. Well, the joke was on me because I had. I’d fallen for them all in different ways, and now I’d never get to see them again if Sienna had her way.
The door behind me clicked open, and all my senses went on red alert. My nostrils flared as my breathing came hard and fast. I tried to slow it down, to control my responses, but it was difficult with the fear coursing through my veins.
“Oh dear, you look like you’re about to cry, pretty one.” Slim stood in front of me.
He wore black trousers, no top, black heavy boots, and leather gloves. He looked like a walking cliché. A cross between a magician from the eighties and a graphic novel baddy.