“Then he knows where this facility is?” she asked, her entire body warming and lighting up. Yes, Max would save them.
“Case—this is a different location and,” his face paled, “they killed him. When he was missing, I cleared out the club, and then I found him in a puddle of blood in the back office. That’s when I figured out what was going on. I watched the video surveillance at the club and saw them take you. After that, I got their license plate, using some of Max’s software and tracked where they went.”
She cried out in anguish, and this guttural careening sound flew out of her.
“Shhhh . . . sweetheart. I won’t let them touch you. I swear it.” He leaned forward and his eyes filled with utter devastation.
“Then we might be here for years—they may never let me go. If that’s the case, I need to have some sort of a life with you.” She stared deeply into his eyes. “It’s the only thing we have left—each other.”
He dipped his head, dropped his chin to his chest and she watched, helpless, as he wept uncontrollably. His shoulders shook, and his chest caved in on him.
She was right—she’d just spoken his ultimate fear. It was evident in the way this man imploded a foot away from her.
They were trapped indefinitely with no hope of salvation.
Chapter 9
Casey was finally sleeping again. But how long would she nap? She’d already slept like the dead a few hours ago when he’d wrapped her like a mummy with his shirt and those chains.
He watched over her and hung on every slow pulsing breath she took.
His heart sank with each passing minute.
His fault—his and no one else’s that she was here with him, stuck in this hellish prison.
How would she ever forgive him for this? Forget ever letting him touch her again in any kind of sexual manner.
He’d be relegated to begging for scraps of physical contact again from the people that worked here. But only after his willpower broke. He’d hold out as long as he could.
He ran his left hand down his right arm.
Why hadn’t he ever learned to self-soothe?
Tears pricked in his eyes.
Why must he be dependent on touch from others? His life would be more bearable if he didn’t need anyone to do that for him.
His fingers slowed, and though there was no pain from his own touch, it did nothing to quell the fire inside him—the need for contact.
His heart pounded the moment he looked back over at her.
Casey’s touch was better than any he’d ever known.
It hurt the same as everyone else's, but somehow it was different.
He blew across the hairs on his arm, trying to recreate the little things she would try to do to make it less torturous.
Again—it wasn’t the same and didn’t do much for him.
How would he live without her touch?
He blinked.
He had to, dammit. There was no choice now. He’d save her and get her out of here.
The doors behind him opened and closed, but he ignored them.
They’d been flapping around behind him the last few minutes, and it was actually kind of humorous in a way to watch them peck at each other and fly around like nut-jobs.
Something was going on down the hallway.
He heard what sounded unmistakably like a brawl happening.
Someone was upset with someone else, and though there was no yelling and arguing, he could hear a woman’s menacing voice, promising to do all sorts of hideous things to these people.
Eventually the voices stopped filtering their way into this room and calmed.
But then a few moments ago, there was a cracking noise like the foundation itself had just split under some heavy forceful blow.
Who cared?
Max was dead.
Casey was at his side and miserable.
His heart fluttered when he thought about her words.
She couldn’t love him. How could she possibly?
He was dying to touch her and have her touch him back. His nerves were already fried; his hands shaking like crazy. If he could only feel her, it would help tremendously.
One more pass down his arm and a whisper of breath over his hairs.
Nothing.
Not a damn thing.
His eyes twitched, but he refused to cry. No more tears or feeling sorry for himself.
In the next moment, he found himself sitting closer to Casey, wishing he could allow himself one last caress on her soft, pale skin.
He blinked then breathed that urge away.
“Do you have any idea what you mean to me?” he whispered next to her ear. “Do you know what my life was like before you? The only other woman I thought I’d cared about was this woman that’s behind all of this. She’s one of them.”
He took a whiff of Casey’s hair. Always smelled like citrus and sunshine; a warm, happy scent.
And how apropos. She was exactly that to his soul: sweet, warm, happy sunshine.
She gave substance and meaning to his drab existence.
Max had been right. He was wasting his genius. It had been his personal charge to find a way to fix what they’d done to him, but instead he’d squandered his time and his genius, wallowing away with cheap thrills at the club.
He’d grown weary of the constant trial and error of his experiments and exhausted with even summoning the courage to try anymore.
What if he failed? What if he about killed himself trying to a find a cure to something that was incurable?
As Casey continued to doze, he crept over to the edge of the cage and whistled to get Hannah’s attention. Her bright blue eyes lifted but then they went back to whatever she was consumed by on her computer screen.
“Just tell me if anything remains of the club after you set it on fire. I saw the flames start as soon as I was driving away. Is it completely gone?”
“No. The firefighters actually saved it. Only your apartment’s gone and the office.”
He blinked. “Good plan. Destroying evidence. How’d you even lure Max in that direction?”
She chuckled at the back of her throat. “Easy. He was into her friend, Maddie, and she was the one that talked him into sneaking back there into the office for a quick fuck. He went after her, and we were waiting. I figured it was only a matter of time before they’d go that route. She was so obvious with how much she wanted him.”
“So you killed her, too? Where was her body?”
“None of your goddamn business.” Hannah gave him a scathing look.
“Hmm . . .”
“Hmm, what?” She blinked and shifted to her right. Her brow furrowed and she typed something on the keyboard.
Johnathan, her lab assistant, was at her side, chirping about how whatever they were seeing was impossible.
“I was always under the impression Maddie was there for me, not Max.” He clicked his tongue and turned away from them, leaning his back into the bars like he was comfortably waiting for a date to join him soon. His neck bent so he could still watch them from the periphery.
“She couldn’t stand you. I talked to her several times.” Hannah motioned for Johnathan to do something on the computer and then she stepped around the desk and approached Kel.
“All right—what’s this about? You don’t really care about that ridiculous club. I know you—it was a means to fulfill your needs.” She extended her hand, and like an imbecile, he went ahead and turned toward her then placed his palm on top of hers. If he refused, she’d find some other hideous way to make him comply. She ran her other hand across the top of his. “Hurts, doesn’t it?”
“You know it does. What’s the point of this little exercise?” His right brow slanted up.
“I kind of wondered if maybe this little miss here had desensitized you.” She blinked twice like she was mocking him by fluttering her lashes and she wore a smug smile. “Apparently not.” She chuckled with a humorless huff. “You know, I always thought it was odd
you never picked up on the fact that the pain you felt from touch increased when you were with me. All those drugs I gave you . . . The things I said . . .” She shook her head. Was she reliving some particularly funny memory about all this shit?
“Well, you know, when my dick’s inside a woman, I’m pretty good at tuning that shit out.”
She snorted. “Yeah, I noticed. You didn’t even realize I’d pricked your hand and drugged you when you had me up against that tree, fucking me from behind. We were ready to take you back then, before you got away again and disappeared. Since you’d already vomited up your tracking device, scared something had happened to me, we worried it was our last chance. But I had no idea you’d react the way you did after I gave you those drugs; you hallucinated worse than I ever thought you would.”
“My baby died, Hannah. How did you expect me to react?” He pulled his hand back and her face dropped a little, then went back to a nasty smirk.
“What part do you think I’m referring to when I say you were hallucinating?”
“The baby?” His hands fisted and he fought off the urge to bash her skull in.
“Bingo.” She fluttered her lashes with a more exaggerated blink this time. “I fell down because you were being so rough. But then you flipped out, thinking I’d died, along with the baby, and the next thing I knew, you ran off. We tracked you by having a car follow after you, but I kept thinking you’d come back to check on me on your own so we wouldn’t have to possibly harm you. You never did though. We found you passed out five miles away in a parking lot for a convenience store.” She pretended to yawn and strutted away from him.
“What did you do with my baby? Did you kill it?”
“Why would I do that?” She motioned at the doors and they swung open. “Wanna meet him?”
He cried out with a guttural noise, and it sounded like someone had shoved a thick pipe down his larynx. His mouth filled with bile, and it gurgled as he wrenched his body away from the cage, shuffling as far away as he could.
A small blonde boy entered the area with a guard. They handed the kid over to Hannah.
That was the boy.
The boy Casey had picked up two weeks ago.
“Small world, isn’t it?” Hannah clutched the tiny child to her hip.
Kel crashed to the ground, covered his ears and hummed so loud he’d never hear her acidic words.
It wasn’t until several moments later when Casey screeched his name and he felt movement nearby that he opened his eyes and chased after the men, carrying Casey out of the cage. But he was too late. His cage door was shut and locked. They were hauling her through the double doors into the hallway where the little boy had arrived from.
“No! You can’t!” He reached through the bars, banging his head on them, howling at the top of his lungs. “Casey! No! No, no, no! Casey! Don’t take her!”
The little boy had been set down at some point and was standing before him, tears streaking down his cheeks, silently keening with an odd expression on his face.
Kel dropped to his knees and his arms flopped to his sides as his shoulders fell forward.
“Meet your son,” Hannah said, crouching down next to the boy who had her same light colored hair, Kel’s odd colored eyes with the green and gray mixture and the boy’s own unique freckles, dotting his nose. He was skinny and his clothes barely fit him as they sagged on his body.
“What’s his name?” Kel choked out, his tongue heavy and uncooperative. He could recall the name Casey had told him two weeks ago for the boy she’d picked up and moved to another placement home, but Kel refused to believe it. He was blocking it out as much as possible. She couldn’t possibly—Hannah wouldn’t do that to him.
He wanted to turn away, but he couldn’t. His son . . . His baby had lived.
“What do you do with him here?” Kel’s eyes darted to her serene face, unsure if he wanted her to answer the previous question that so far she’d ignored.
“Nothing we haven’t done to you.”
“You fucking bitch! He’s a child! How could you treat him this way? Look at him—he’s starving!”
“He’s stronger than you were at this age. I took him out of here for a while to look for you; we hid out with some junkies. I figured if anyone would be able to find you, they would, since they knew all the prostitutes around. Figured you’d find a way to pay to get your own particular fix. And a few times I thought I’d figured out where you were, but you’d move on to another whore, and you never took them back to your place.” She grinned. “But then I heard of your club and figured it might be you, so I made sure the guy I was staying with at the time OD’ed on heroine the day I left. I came back for my Robbie, but social services took him. I had to take care of that junkie in the hospital anyway since your girl called the cops and they performed CPR on him.” She shook her head and smiled wider. “She really is a sucker for lost causes.”
Sweet Jesus—Robbie? She’d named him that? Why would she do that? The Hannah he knew could never be this cruel.
“Why was Robbie,” he gulped when he said the boy’s name and his heart squeezed so hard, his lungs seized up from it, “screaming and so unhappy that night when Casey went to move him to another house? She said he was freaking out—throwing stuff and scaring the other kids that belonged to that family.”
“He saw me outside the window, and he knew I was trying to get him.” She stroked the boy’s hair and he flinched.
“Why are you doing this? What can you possibly gain from him? His genes are diluted, not like mine, since you’re not diseased like I am.” He reached for the boy without thinking.
The boy came closer but hesitated to extend his hand out to his father he’d never met before.
“You’re not diseased, Kelly. You’re gifted, and I knew that. I was experimenting with my own body, and that’s why I allowed myself to get pregnant. I wanted to see what it would bring. And I was right—he’s so gifted, it’s insane the things he can do. Look at him . . . He’s two-year’s-old, yet he looks, moves and talks like he’s twice his age. And he can figure things out that four-year-olds struggle with.”
Robbie glared at her then willingly walked right up to the bars and stared Kel in the eyes. “Are you my dad?”
“Kelly Daniel Liam—and yes, I’m your father. It’s . . .” he choked back raging tears “. . . nice to meet you. I didn’t know you were here or I would’ve never . . .” He leaned the right side of his face down and swiped at his right eye to remove the tear with his shoulder, unwilling to look away.
“Why don’t you two enjoy some bonding time, hmm?” She stood up, motioned for Johnathan and some other burly dude standing by the door to join them. “If you try to escape, I’ll kill your son.” Hannah pulled out a key and unlocked the cage door.
Kel backed up, his palms up in front of his chest to signal his surrender. “Don’t hurt him or my Casey.”
“What about your mom?” Hannah swung the door open and thrust the kid in, pushing him down in the process.
He lunged at the boy, picked him up and raced to the back of the cage.
Claaaaang!
The door to the cage was closed and locked right away.
Kel’s ears rang and so did his brain. Mother?
“You have my mom?” Kel glared at them and had to set the boy down before he unwittingly crushed him to bits due to his tumultuous anger.
“Of course we do.” Hannah wandered back over to the computer she was always hovering over. She swung the monitor around, and there on the screen was his mother, gagged and chained to a cage similar to his but in another room. She had the same long lean frame, long dark hair and sharp cheek bones he’d remembered.
There was a massive pit in the center of the flooring.
Had she tried to break free and get to him? Did she know he was here?
Jesus—all these years he’d thought she was dead, since he hadn’t heard anything about her or seen her since the time he was probably about ten.
&nbs
p; Robbie whimpered and then crawled under the frame of the cot.
“She really tried to protect Robbie this last time, so I finally had to separate them. She’s such a bitch, that one. Really hate dealing with her.” Hannah turned the screen back around.
“This is sick!” Kel rammed his palms into the bars. “Why on earth do you do this to us?”
“She volunteered years ago, but we had no idea what a lunatic that woman was.” Johnathan sat down at his station and was clicking away at a keyboard.
“Like hell she did.” Kel moved back toward his son, careful to go slow so he wouldn’t frighten him. He knelt down and motioned for him to come back out, but like a cornered animal, the boy all but welded himself into the bars behind him.
Tears seemed to congregate at the back of Kel’s throat and he choked on his breath as he thought about how monstrous Hannah was and what she had done to their son.
Was she beyond all feeling? What kind of a mother would do this to their child?
He almost wondered if the boy was starving himself on purpose so he could slip himself through those bars and get away from her. It wouldn’t take much for him to fit. Another inch or two less of body mass and he’d be able to do it.
Was this his own mother’s idea?
Christ! He couldn’t even remember her name. All he remembered was her deep green eyes, her long dark hair and how she cuddled with him at night after these people had been particularly mean to him when he was really little.
His eyes stung in the back and his vision blurred as they welled up.
He’d be damned if he was going to allow Robbie to live this life, or Casey or his mother for that matter.
“I won’t hurt you—I promise. I’m not like your mother—I’m like you.” Kel’s fingers trembled as he reached for his boy. “They’ve hurt me, too. But I’ll protect you.”
The boy bit the side of his lower lip and his eyes filled with torn emotions: fear, elation, sympathy, maybe even love?
Sleeves Page 14