A huff leaves me as the other goon—No-name as he shall now be known—shoves me hard, and pain shoots up my arms and thighs as I land on my hands and knees, breathing hard. Motherfucking cuntfaces.
“Think we can take our turn first?” one of them asks, and I feel warmth behind me, my eyes squeezing shut as if that will stop them. As if that has ever worked before, shutting the nightmares out only means you can’t see them when they come to devour you. Defeat and shame washes over me, leaving me feeling desolate and weak.
An anguished groan leaves my lips as a hand tangles in my hair and pulls me up by it, my eyes flying open and a yelp falling from my lips when a sharp pain lets me know my assailant has torn some of my hair out by the roots. My hand desperately grips over his, trying to lessen the pressure, but it’s no fucking use.
“Leave her alone!” Jude shouts, his voice a promise of violence as the sound of the bars being hit fills my ears. The two goons laugh and turn me to face the other cage, tears stinging my eyes and making the vision of my guys, all gripping the bars of the cell across from mine, waver as if they’re underwater. They may as well be, they’re that unreachable.
“What you gonna do about it, pretty boy?” No-name sneers, palming my breast and squeezing hard enough that I can’t stop the pained hiss from escaping. I know I’ll be bruised as fucktomorrow, and I hate that it’ll be their fingerprints marring my skin.
“I’ll fucking kill you,” Jude answers, his tone as dark as the corners of this desperate space. My eyes close, fresh tears spilling as I’m thrown back to the girl who lived here all her life. To the girl who was abused and couldn’t do a fucking thing about it as men took and took until there was only a hollow shell left. A shell that the men opposite me had started to fill.
Both Soldiers laugh. “Not if we kill you first,” Davis says, pushing his hard-on into my ass.
My eyes snap open and my stomach swirls with nausea. All the old feelings of self-disgust at letting these men touch me like this rear their ugly head and it’s that which makes me angry, yanking me out of my victim state. It’s not my fault, this isnotmy fault, and I’m never going to let them take from me again.
“You think I should be afraid of that,Davis? I wouldn’t even feel it,” I tell him as I school my face into a mask of indifference, my tone disinterested. Jude’s lips twitch up, and a burst of heat radiates through my chest at the slight gesture. Then his lips part and?—
“You fucking bitch!” Davis roars, throwing me away from him and into the bars. My head makes contact with a loud crack, the room spinning as warm liquid rushes down the side of my face and I fall to the floor, just barely catching myself on the cold concrete. My eyelids flutter, the floor feeling like I’m on a boat in a storm, and I have to swallow several times to stop myself from spewing vomit all over the place. There’s a high-pitched whine in my ears that’s making me wince, which in turn hurts my fucking head.
I laugh, a broken, cracked sound that is just my body’s way of dealing with my current shitty situation. After all, I don’t want to start crying, these assholes don’t deserve my tears.
Hearing the growl of outrage from at least one of my guys behind me gives me more confidence as I use the bars to straighten up and turn around, facing the Soldiers.
“That all you got, Pee-wee?” My words are thick and sluggish sounding, and I curse these cunts out in my head for being so fucking rough.
My vision blurs slightly as he springs forward, his face purple with rage, but No-name holds him back, his arms wrapped around Davis.
“She’s not worth it, man. When Rufus gives us the go-ahead, then you can hurt her and make her scream as much as you like, remember? As long as we don’t kill her, anything goes.”
A shiver works its way over my entire body, but I manage to keep the fear off my face as I keep them in my sights, moving along the bars into the corner of the cell furthest away from them. I watch as Davis takes a deep inhale through his busted-up nose, his eyes locked onto me.
“I’m gonna fuck you until you bleed, little bitch. Then I’m gonna keep going and show you exactly what I feel like as I tear up that pussy of yours,” he promises darkly, shrugging off No-name. Nausea swarms in my stomach again as I know he means every fucking word and there’s not a damn thing I can do to stop him.
“You won’t touch her!” Tarl shouts, and I look over to see him and the others, still with their hands wrapped around the bars, knuckles white as they send death glares at the two Soldiers.
“Oh, you’ll be watching as we all take turns,” Davis tells them snidely as he and No-name saunter out of my cage. He doesn’t go too close to my guys though, and I can’t stop the small grin that tugs at my lips to see that he’s clearly still afraid of them, even if they are behind bars. “And there won’t be a fucking thing you can do as we split her in half.”
Jude roars, rattling the bars as Aeron steps up behind him, wrapping his arms around Jude and pulling him into a hug. He whispers something in Jude’s ear which seems to calm him as Jude relaxes a little in Aeron’s hold. It looks like Tarl and Knox are seconds away from exploding too. Knox is baring his teeth in a snarl, his neck so corded that it looks like it might snap, and Tarl is completely still, unmoving as he watches the Soldiers like a snake watches its prey. My heart hurts to watch them all trapped behind bars, like beautiful, fierce tigers pacing and snarling at their keepers. My Tailors are like wild animals, and the thickness in my throat grows knowing that I’m the cause of their incarceration.
The door to my prison clangs, making me jump then wince as it tugs the shallow stab wound in my side, and I step back from the bars, my heart racing and my throat dry as the two Soldiers leer at me once more before heading back down the walkway. The sound of the party beyond the door fills the room when they open it, the noise once again quieting when the door slams shut behind them.
Silence fills the space, although this time it’s heavy and almost suffocating. I slowly look over to the cage opposite mine, the only other cage in this fucking dismal space, to see four pairs of eyes laser-focused on me. Four gorgeous faces stern and so angry that I want to flinch back from the sharp sting of their judgment. I suspect my father put us in separate cages on purpose, we let him see too much when they were taken away, so he now knows that I’m a way to hurt them and vice versa.
“Oh, Nightingale,” Jude says, his voice pained as he takes me in, stepping out of Aeron’s embrace, his face softening as his hands grip the bars. His arm muscles strain, as if bracing himself to pull them apart. “What have you done?”
CHAPTER TWO
“SOUND OF SILENCE” BY DISTURBED
JUDE
“What have you done?”
The words hurt as they leave my lips. I gaze at the woman who has captured my fucking black soul, and the beast roars inside of me at the pain she’s in, at her many wounds. She’s bleeding from more than one place, and I hate that those Soldier cunts hurt her and we can’t even go to her. That they threatened to do worse to her, and they were fucking right. There is nothing I can do about it, not while I’m trapped in here.
Her mouth opens, then closes as she stares back at me with such torment in her beautiful, lapis lazuli eyes that it makes my own soul keen and lament.
“I thought it was obvious,” Knox says from behind me, his voice low and disgust clear in his tone. My hackles rise at his tone. How dare he fucking speak to my Nightingale like that. He comes up next to me, and I look over to see his neck corded andhis jaw clenched. He practically bites out his next words. “The bitch sold us out.”
