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He was a bad man. He was going to do whatever it took to get her out of here, and when the Wild Mustang boys arrived, finally—finally—she would be taken somewhere she would be safe. He didn’t care about prison. He didn’t care if they hanged him. Bad men deserved bad endings, but not Aliya. She’d been through enough. Finn wouldn’t care. He was her brother, and she would ensure Aliya’s safety.
He edged slightly out from the wall to pass a decorative table and was just feet from the top of the stairs when the floor creaked. He looked down, but that sound had not come out from under his foot.
Shit.
Snapping his head around to look toward the doorway of the dark room, he’d been too stupidly distracted to check out, he had just enough time to make out the shadowy figures of two men and the butt of a rifle coming right at him before it hit him in the face.
Chapter
Sixteen
Aliya cut her face, first with her own scrabbling fingernails and again with the hard edge of the leather collar. Unable to get through the lock on the buckle, she was reduced to pulling, heaving, stretching—anything to pry the collar off over her head. She was small, and Fariq had been both overconfident of her inabilities and preoccupied with getting Christian secured. Of the two of them, Christian was the bigger threat. She was milk toast in comparison—weak, mewling, ineffective. She was also small, and when he’d buckled the collar on her, he’d used the smallest pre-drilled hole instead of taking the time to poke another to tighten the leather down around her neck. It wasn’t exactly loose, but it wasn’t snug, either.
She pried, hooking her fingers into it as she strained to get it up over her lower jaw. It hurt. The collar was stiff, and the edge of it cuttingly sharp. It scratched her chin, she scratched her cheeks, and she had no idea which cut her lip, but she got the collar into her mouth, turning it into a gag.
Christian screamed through tightly clenched teeth, every muscle in his body jerking and spasming as the electricity from the wands coursed through him as her brother tortured him, stroking him ribs to hip. The sound cut her worse than any ofher other wounds. Closing her eyes, unable to bear the sight, she pushed and strained, letting the collar cut into the corners of her mouth and her cheeks as she pried for every nuance of give the leather had to get it over her ears. The edges cut beneath each earlobe before she got them through, and the collar became both a gag and an earmuff, muffling his bellows of agony before they abruptly stopped.
“Did you fuck my sister?” she heard Fariq ask him.
She burst into tears. This was her fault. She loved him, and he was being tortured because of it.
“I loved every minute of it,” Christian rasped in reply.
His screams and her determination renewed with the next burning sizzle as the wands made contact with his flesh.
Grabbing the back of the buckle, she pried with all her might, straining to pull the collar over the back of her head. Every breath was tainted by the smell of Christian’s flesh as Fariq etched a burning lover’s path up the inside of his thigh toward his crotch.
She clawed. The buckle cut into her fingertips and tore her nails, but the collar was moving, millimeter by millimeter, ripping out strands of hair as it went. With a pop of swift movement, it came off. A cut on her cheek was its parting gift, then she was free.
The knot of the rope that bound her ankles was easy in comparison. She pried with raw, cut fingertips, working the rough rope loose, then she was up. Her legs didn’t want to hold her, so she crawled, grabbing onto the back of her brother’s abandoned stool to help heave herself to her shaky feet.
She wasn’t strong. She was pathetic, and her brother knew it. That was why when she slapped the machine off and grabbed the gun out of the halter on Fariq’s hip as he jerked around, the first thing he did when he saw her was laugh.
Aliya’s hand shook every bit as badly as her legs. The morphine the doctor had sacrificed his life to give her had worn off. She was feverish and could feel it ravaging in her back and in her head. Her vision kept swimming. It was everything she could do to keep Fariq and the gun pointed at his head in focus.
Was it loaded? Would it even fire if she pulled the trigger? She had no idea. She didn’t know a damn thing about guns, except everyone around her had always had them. She’d never fired one before, had never even held one before now.
Pathetic.
Fariq’s smile broadened, his face softening with the old familiar affection. The one she had always strived to win from her big brother by constantly striving for the level of obedience he required.
She’d loved him once.
She’d feared him for far, far longer.
“Do you remember all the times I was there to save you?” he asked. “From the beatings, from our father.”
“Yes,” she whispered, breaking down in a brief flurry of tears that just as quickly devolved into anger. “I remember your punishments, too. I remember your belt. I remember the men you killed right in front of me, and I’ll remember that you did this—all of this—until the day I die.”
“As it should be. You’re mine to?—”
She shot him.
The recoil knocked her over, and they hit the ground at the same time. Only one of them was alive to feel it or to feel the tidal wave of regret that swept through her, crushing her under the storm of emotions no sane person would have felt after all he’d done.
Loss.
It was blinding, crippling, but it only lasted until she heard the heavy whump of something hitting the wall just outside the room.
