Page 4 of Ballistic

The need and craving slithered through my belly and under my skin like venomous snakes frantically trying to escape. Any moment, they’d chew through my skin, and I’d be left twitching in pain, sobbing for my long-time friend, who probably lay begging for death.

Tesarik’s cruel and mocking chuckle bounced off the walls of the small storage unit where I’d been kept for I didn’t even know how long. Maybe a month already. There were others who came and went, too, because I’d heard them sometimes, screaming. Begging. All of us enslaved to the pills the guards liked to withhold for fun.

“Okay. I’ll gift you what you need. But only because, in spite of everything, your betrayal, your lies, your manipulation, I cannot bring myself to hate you.” He rubbed his hand over my thigh, and as much as I wanted to feel sick because of it, I surrendered for the sake of my pills. “What is it you Americans say? I’m pussy-whipped! Ha!” His fingers dug harder, bruising the inner part of my thigh.

He did hate me, because giving me another dose meant more torment. More craving. More sleepless nights and needing. Yet, without the pills, I faced the kind of withdrawals that made me beg for my own death.

I was in a cycle of needing the pills to survive and surviving for the pills. Somewhere in between, I’d lost my purpose, the very reason I’d ended up on Tesarik’s radar.

“I’ll have Vinco bring another dose.”

My muscles shrank under the weight of his words. Vinco, the bastard guard who patrolled the facility, enjoyed the torment of feeding me the pills. Would often taunt me to perform favors in exchange for them. Things that filled my head with the kind of shame powerful enough to leave me weeping facedown into the mattress as he carried out his twisted amusements.

I couldn’t let those nightmarish images invade my headspace. Not now.

“Please.” The tight clench of my jaw tamped down the plea burning inside my chest.

With a tsk, he shook his head and reached inside his pocket. The sight of the small, blue bottle set my heart alight with some disgusting measure of joy I couldn’t bear to think about too much.

“This will be your last, which is a shame. Perhaps it’s only coincidence there’ve been no incidents in our operations since I’ve taken you in.” He dumped one of the pills into his palm and set it on my anxiously awaiting tongue. “Tonight you’ll be transported to a new location. One I think you’ll find most unsettling.”

The moment it began to dissolve on my tongue, the room softened, the fluorescent light above dulling to an ambient glow. White fuzz settled over my brain, sabotaging the thoughts from just moments before. My muscles warmed, like sitting by a cozy fireplace, and everything felt safe, numb. Blissfully numb.

What is your purpose? The familiar voice of a girl I couldn’t bear to think about right then chimed inside my head, too distant to sober me. One whose tone stirred a somber note in my chest, but failed to pull me out of the clouds. Please remember.

The room flipped to blackness for two seconds, before the door lifted to reveal floodlights outside, nothing but bright orbs whose radiant beams blurred behind the two men standing guard—Tesarik’s personal bodyguards—and, behind them, Vinco.

Remember.

Tesarik sidled up alongside the bed, staring down at me, blocking out most of the light. “My clients don’t pay good money to watch you smile. They pay to hear your screams. Enjoy, Nicoleta. Tonight you will know true suffering. And you can thank your father for that.”

I focused on the skinny ray of light slicing across the shadows of his face, tears tickling my temples as they slid from my eyes. Through a slow blink, I watched his form fade into the blackness, like falling deeper into the ocean while the surface got farther away. And I remembered the time my mother told me that if I ever felt like I was drowning, to learn how to breathe underwater.

So I did.

And I swore I’d never resurface again.

3

Dax

Two hours later …

I ducked low into the row of prickly bushes that made up a shallow forest, across from the dilapidated storage facility whose lack of floodlights and cracked pavement, overgrown with weeds, gave it an abandoned appearance. To any passerby, it probably looked to be a long-forgotten business, like most of the deserted buildings scattered throughout the city. I knew better.

The place happened to be Tesarik’s main hub for storing and moving cargo. Human cargo. And one of those storage units might’ve housed the girl I’d spent months searching for—the one with amber eyes and blonde hair who’d haunted my dreams damn near every night since I’d first laid eyes on her. The one I’d watched drive off with Tesarik without a prayer of ever being found again.

As I understood it, the girls didn’t stay long in the storage units, maybe a month, max, so it was possible we were too late, but I’d be damned if I’d let another opportunity pass. Even if the shithole was crawling with Tesarik’s men, it’d be worth ridding my head of the guilt and frustration that gnawed me every time I thought about how close I’d come to saving her that day.

While I’d hoped to track down the weasely piece of shit, Tesarik, too, the singular panel van parked out front seemed a bit anemic for the entourage he typically traveled with.

“Why don’t we call the cops again?” The voice arrived from my left, where Evander, a friend of mine who’d grown up with me on the streets, sat casually smoking his cigarette. Chatty bastard, but he was built like a freight train and fought like a pit bull. Good guy to have around when shit went down.

“Last time the cops showed up, they got away. I’m not taking any chances.” I’d waited too long to track down Tesarik’s operations, to find the girl who’d slipped right through my hands. A victim, auctioned off like cattle, to be used and abused by the men who made up a tight ring known as Seventh Circle. An underground society of perverts who got off on some pretty depraved shit.

Not just criminals, either. It was a whole network that operated off the grid, comprised of corrupt cops, politicians, counselors, hell, even schoolteachers and religious figures. They were known to have ties to cartels, which made them virtually untouchable.

Until I’d gotten a tip on their temporary holding spot, where they kept the girls stored away.