“What the hell?”
Even as Avery turned, pulling his weapon, he knew he was too late. The barrel of a gun was pressed tight against the back of his neck. He couldn’t see Jay, or anyone else for that matter. A hand reached around him and took the gun from his hand.
From out of his sight, Jay yelled once, the sound low and agonized.
“Take him to another room and have your fun there,” Savage said. “We’ve got work to do in here.”
Avery tried to turn, and the barrel pressed tighter against his skin. His heart began to pound. “Just tell me what you want.”
“Take off your clothes. All of them.”
Avery’s hands shook, but his mind was racing. He had another gun. He just had to get to it. It was under his coat and tucked into his waistband at the small of his back. It would be unseen by his attacker even when he took his coat off. He could reach . . . He began to put his plan in motion, shrugging out of his trench coat and allowing it to fall to the floor.
He wished the attacker would say something, but he didn’t. The barrel of the gun was very steady. His own hands were shaking. Had the gun not have been pressed so tightly against his neck, he wouldn’t have known his assailant was there. He couldn’t even hear him breathe.
Unbuttoning his shirt, he went over his movements, acting them out in his mind before he began to shrug off his suit jacket. As his arms went down, lightning fast, he put his hand on the gun—but it wasn’t there. It was gone. He came up empty. His jacket fell to the floor.
“Tell me what you want.”
“I don’t like repeating myself. Get it done or I’ll do it for you, and you won’t like the results.” The voice was implacable.
Avery stripped, feeling more vulnerable than he ever had in his life. He found himself shaking. He went to work every single day in the middle of cops, surrounded by them, and felt superior. He got a secret thrill out of outsmarting them all. He brought his victims here to this mansion out in the middle of nowhere and did whatever he felt like. He was master here. He could force those little brats to do anything he wanted, and there was no one to stop him. No one could shake their finger at him and tell him how wrong he was.
“Get on the bed, right in the middle. You like that mirror so you can admire yourself. Go ahead and look your fill.”
Avery stretched out on the bed, getting his first glimpse of his captor. To his shock, there were two of them. By the door there was a smear of blood, but Jay was gone, as if he’d never been there in the first place.
“No, kneel up facing the headboard,” the scariest-looking of the two instructed him. He had a pair of handcuffs and he snapped them tight around Avery’s wrists and then attached them to the headboard of the bed, just as Avery had done to numerous children. Then the man put something around his wrist, right over his pulse.
His attacker was a big man with plenty of muscle and the deadest pair of eyes he’d ever seen. Avery had been considering taunting his attackers, but he changed his mind. The other one, the blond, was studying the pictures Avery had blown up and put on the walls of his room. He liked to see himself, and he liked to force the little kiddies to see what was coming to them.
“I’m really good at what I do, Avery,” Savage said. “Just so you know, I was taught in a school in Russia. The Russian likes to tell you about that school, doesn’t he? There were four schools, but he was involved with the school the instructors all liked to call the ‘experiment.’”
The tone was casual. Not a hint of emotion. His captor walked into his sight, tall, all muscle, bald head. In his hand he held a short three-foot whip.
“Most people don’t realize the pain inflicted by a whip has nothing whatsoever to do with how long that whip is, but you know, don’t you, Avery?”
Savage walked over to the wall to study a photograph of a young girl, no more than eight, her back torn and bleeding with whip marks crisscrossing her skin. “They call me Savage, but I can see you just might rival me for that name.”
The other one came into his view, and in his hands he held up a rubber plug; it was thick and long, with beads climbing up to the place where the flared end was.
“Savage, we forgot something. He likes this one in particular.”
“Thanks for reminding me, Ice,” Savage said. “I wouldn’t want to miss any of his favorite parts.”