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I frowned. A thank you seemed odd.
My next words seemed a little patronizing and yet also right. “You were such a brave, good girl. I’m sorry I couldn’t make you come.”
For a few moments, I had made her mine. We’d been outside this place, in our own passionate world. I toyed with a curl of her hair, winding it around her ear.
Her reply was even quieter than before, like she only wanted the floor to hear. “It was...good. I think I did come, a little...and I never come...with a man.”
I drew back, staring. “What?”
“It was good.” She smiled shakily, a small but definite smile.
Were we both crazy? Pride flared and I almost smiled too. Then nausea kicked in. The contrast between us here on the floor, and what was out there, watching us, tore at me.
The speaker crackled to life. “Pieter. You did a terrible mess of that. You made her happy! I think we must sack you.”
Crap. My heart stuttered. I shut my eyes for a second then searched for her hands and squeezed them. “I’m so sorry.”
Her nails dug into my fingers.
“Wait. Wait. The client speaks and tells me it was okay. Next time you will do better.”
The bastard. I couldn’t stop looking into her eyes.
I came to a sudden, yet flawless conclusion, as startling as a man finding the moon in his backyard. The danger we were in had burned away all the stupid nonsense that normally clouded men’s decisions. I wanted her. Truly wanted her.
Given a clear conscience and a day without this insanity in which we were trapped, I’d have dragged her away by the hair and screwed her until she never wanted to leave my arms. Well, I guess I’d have talked to her as well. Small detail.
But I didn’t have that day.
When they demanded I stand still to be restrained again, I let the man come over and do it, though I glowered at him – my arms were again bound behind my back at elbow and wrist.
I believed what Gregor had said. Stupid of me.
After more men entered and held me to the wall, they made me watch while Gregor strung her up from the ceiling and caned her to the count of seven. The thrum of the cane in the air and the thwack as it hit her ass and back, the red and blue marks...damn him to hell. Killing him shot to number one on my list of things to do.
“That was for not making her yell.” He waggled the cane at me as his men let down her limp body. “See what you did to her? Tsk. Tsk.”
Her screams still echoed inside my head.
Chapter 5
What he’d done to my back...I couldn’t look. When they brought me to my room, I couldn’t look in the mirror. Not that I could stand anyway. I’d been mostly carried back. The pain from those few strikes with the cane had shocked me, and that someone could so callously strike me. I’d been lucky before. Scrim had concentrated on Zoe.
I’d never been hit like that. Did a human mean nothing to Gregor?
I lay on my stomach for hours, feeling the mixture of bite and throb. Every time I shut my eyes, the pain drew me back into the world of the awake. After inching my dress up my back and shakily feeling for the welts, I wept quiet tears. Then I lay there, just listening to the night. I had no light, only a faint, second-hand moonlight that came in the square window near the ceiling. The jungle sounds soothed me for some odd reason. The flap of wing. The cry of bird or bat. The distant crash of a branch falling from a tree.
It was life. Proof there was an existence without torture. I fastened onto that idea like a leech. I wasn’t losing hope that I could have some of that again. I wanted freedom. I wanted normal, gray dull reality, not this insanity.
I wanted fucking boredom so hard that I wrenched my pillow into a ball as if by crushing it I could be like Dorothy clicking her shoes.
Take me back. Now.
But it didn’t happen. I was stuck here. I could’ve put myself in one of my exposé articles and had it featured by every news service in the country.
Human traffickers enslave, rape, and torture freelance female journalist. Read all about the depravities she was subjected to.
I bit the pillow until my jaw ached and I rocked into it. I want to go home.
