Because if I didn’t fight, it gave him no reason to hurt me. If I could control the interaction, then I wasn’t a victim. Even as those thoughts played through my head, there was something deeply, intrinsically wrong with them.
That wasn’t right.
The stroke of his rough thumb over the line of my cheekbone froze my soul in place. One milky eye and one narrowed eye seemed fixed on me. The taut band inside of me snapped and warmth spread along my legs. The stink of urine filled the room as the man dipped his head.
“Grace, status—” Bones’ voice cracked through the comm.
The wrong sound at the wrong time. The dark man’s good eye narrowed abruptly and his grip on my face turned brutal. He jerked my head to the side to see the earpiece. Pain lanced up my jaw where his fingers dug in, a white-hot flare that snapped through the fog. The shock of it pulled a sound out of me—a choked gasp that wasn’t quite a scream.
He yanked my head sideways, the skin at my temple burning under his grip. “Who are you talking to?” His breath was hot against my ear.
Somewhere in the house, a door banged open. Not in my head. No, it was real. The thud reverberated through the floorboards. A muffled scream came from downstairs. A woman. There was a housekeeper. Then another crash, closer, the sharp splinter of wood giving way.
His head jerked toward the noise, and for the first time I saw something like confusion cut across his ruined face.
“Grace!” Bones again, louder now, raw. “We’re in! Hold?—”
The rest of it vanished under the crack of another door giving way downstairs and the echoing bark of Voodoo’s voice.
The man snarled, fingers tightening until spots bloomed behind my eyes. “Who did you bring here?”
My pulse roared. Every sound blurred into one long, rising wave—boots on tile, shouted commands, the dull thud of something heavy hitting the floor below.
Then his hand left my face only to slam against my shoulder, shoving me backward. My head hit the corner of the desk. Pain exploded, bright and electric. The world tilted; the edges of my vision went white, then red.
Instinct finally found me. My body lurched, unsteady, more reflex than reason. I stumbled sideways as he reached for me again, his curse lost in the noise of another crash—another door being kicked in. The sound was unmistakable as wood cracked and shuddered.
The air filled with chaos: footsteps pounding the hall, someone shouting “Clear!” The comm crackled against my ear, a thread of sound in the storm.
My legs wouldn’t cooperate; they were rubber and fire at once. The copper taste of blood spread across my tongue where I’d bitten it. It was almost deja vu all over again. Only then, he’ddragged me out of the bedroom and into the utilitarian hallway with its bare concrete floors and walls.
He’drunlike a rat, fleeing a sinking ship, hauling me with him. But pain. Pain and terror had locked me in place then too. I’d frozen. When the gunshots came—he’d fled.
Then…
He turned toward the door, muscles coiling, and for an instant he looked almost startled, as if he never thought to find himself the prey instead of predator.
Only, he’d been prey before. That reality floated up from the deep morass where it had sunk. When he jerked me upward, I didn’t fight the roll of my stomach this time.
I threw up on him.
Every ounce of food and drink I’d had that day spewed out of me. Not that it had been much. It was mostly bile. It all burned, but he swore as he took it in the face and the chest. When he slapped me, I took the blow and stumbled sideways, but I didn’t go down.
The voices on the comm were constant now. They were coming.
AB was talking to me. He was letting me know they were coming. The world that had slowed down to a painful crawl slammed into fast forward and I grabbed the first thing on the desk my fingers touched.
A hard marble paperweight.
I threw it.
Ignacio. That was his name.
It rushed back into the void along with sound and fury. His name was Ignacio. I threw the paperweight as the door to the office slammed with a hard kick.
One.
Two.
