“I’ll get a flight out tomorrow.”
“Thanks, Gabe.”
“Luke?”
“Yeah?”
“We’ll find her.”
He nodded to himself then pressed End.
Chapter Thirteen
Knight
Hunger.
Jillian awoke with her stomach churning. Time vanished, leaving her lost for any sense of how long she’d been in the dungeon—for sure longer than she’d been with Claire. If she made it out alive, the house would be permanently leveled. No one would ever suffer in that basement again.
“I’m going to break your nose with this steel pipe, but not until we have an audience.”
Only part of Jillian’s body had feeling after sitting in the same spot for … days? The parts that still registered life, throbbed with a dull ache: shoulder, head, back. Her groggy eyes shifted to her captor in her chair, black and blue face, nose taped, and a three-foot steel pipe resting in her hands. The maggots multiplied in the bowl of dog food. The stench roiled her stomach even more.
“What’s your name?”
Psycho bitch laughed. “Does it matter?”
Heavy eyelids blinked with lethargy. “No. It doesn’t.”
“So you don’t care who I am and what I know?”
The ugly bitch wasn’t worth the effort for Jillian to open her eyes again, so she rolled her head against the wall from side to side. “You’re a psycho bitch and you don’t know shit. Fucking hell!”
Ice water drenched her body, sending her heart into her throat and making it impossible to breathe.
“Look at me when I’m talking to you.”
She had Jillian’s attention—a death glare to both her wretched face and the empty five-gallon bucket in her hands. Pure rage burned off the chilling effects of psycho bitch’s favorite form of torture.
“So what’s wrong with you? Why can’t you keep your husband from fucking other women? You have to take too many breaks during sex to suck on your inhaler? You don’t give good head? Or is it just that you’re ugly as fuck from the inside out and there’s just no cure for that?”
Taking a seat again, she looked over at her inhaler. Jillian grinned. She’d rattled her, but taking a puff of it would make her feel weak. Jillian sensed her conflict. Instead, she twisted the lid off her bottled water and took a long swig, buying time to calm her nerves before sharing what would surely be a revealing comeback.
“When Luke joins us, are you going to give him the play-by-play of how you fucked Sargent Monaghan?” She laughed, delighting in the illusion of the upper hand. “Of course you are … or I’m going to use him as target practice.” She tapped her foot against the bow propped up against the leg of the table.
Luke would always be her Achilles’ heel, and her captor knew it. Knox had his usual hissy fit when Jessica insisted Luke be “guarded.” They were an hour from being married, an hour from Luke earning the right to know everything about G.A.I.L., everything about Jessica. Like most men, Knox couldn’t keep his dick in his pants and the minute he forced it into the ass of his comrade’s daughter, he surrendered to a life of granting Jessica’s every wish or dying at the hands of her father or brother. Knox knew he was lucky to still be alive.
“You won’t hurt Luke.”
She rolled her eyes. “What makes you so sure?”
“Because you shot an arrow in my arm, but you refuse to look at it. I broke your nose and all I get in return is a bucket of cold water. But most disturbing is the claim that I fucked your husband and yet I’m still alive.” Jillian grinned. “Tell me … after I fucked him, what scars did I leave … because I always leave my mark.”
She stood so fast the chair flew backward. Jillian waited for the confession of a pierced lip, clawed back, or bite marks on a shoulder. But she never imagined the words that her captor spoke just seconds before grabbing her inhaler and fleeing for the stairs.
“A broken nose, two missing teeth, three fractured ribs, and a punctured lung.”
Chapter Fourteen
Ryn slept on her stomach, sheets kicked off, bare ass beckoning Jackson back to bed. The piano lesson gig got in the way of him following his compass that morning, which coincidently pointed north and had him adjusting himself several times while getting dressed. He made a mental note to remind her that sleeping naked on her stomach was forbidden … unless she lifted the anal sex ban.
“I have to go,” he whispered in her ear then pressed his lips to the back of her neck.
Her shoulders jerked up. “That tickles,” she said in a groggy voice.
“If you don’t hide this, it will be mine.” He palmed her ass.
Ryn flipped over, blond waves of hair matted to her face, and grabbed the sheet, pulling it up to her chest. “Hot flashes. I get them occasionally. Doesn’t help when I’m in bed with a guy whose body temperature is abnormally high all the time.”