Made him feel like he wasn't alone, even though he’d never cared about that before.
So long as his team was there, he was never truly alone. They understood what each other felt, they’d all lived through the same thing. Eagle kept a check on them, and they interacted with anyone else on an as-needed basis only.
Yet the little ladybug was messing with his head.
“Stop doing it,” he ordered, though she couldn’t hear his words with four floors between them.
Pulling up the camera feed for the basement cell as soon as he had the tablet in his hands, Steel was surprised to find that Rose was no longer silent. She wasn't sobbing or crying, although tears continued to tumble, seemingly unnoticed, down her pale cheeks.
She was singing.
Softly and sweetly.
Almost unaware she was doing it, if the vacant look in her eyes was anything to go by.
If it were anyone else, he would have thought they were hovering on the edge of a breakdown, almost ready to crack and break.
But this wasn't anyone else.
It was the little ladybug.
A woman who just minutes before she started to weep silent tears had rolled her eyes at the camera and told him that it would take more than hot and cold to break her.
Mr. Bedroom Man.
That’s what she’d called him. Hearing her say it had made him snicker, the small sound surprising him, because Steel couldn’t remember the last time he’d laughed. There hadn't been anything to laugh about when Dr. Gardner trashed his life so he could play at being a god.
Other than her lips moving, and the odd tremor rocking her body as it responded to the freezing air now being pumped into her cell, Rose was still. Her eyes stared at nothing, and her singing was audible only because he had the volume turned up high.
What are you thinking about, little ladybug?
Why are you so confident that we won't be able to break you?
When they’d made the decision to go after Ridge Gardner’s sister, they’d never stopped to consider anything more than the basics. She was a law-abiding citizen, with no criminal history, no drug or alcohol-related charges. She had a job, paid her taxes, and mostly kept to herself. They hadn't thought they needed to know more about her than that.
Now he realized they'd made a possibly critical mistake.
It was more than obvious that Rose was no stranger to torture. Given that there was no boyfriend in her life, and no friends either, although she was active online in book-related communities, she hadn't become acquainted with it in the last couple of years.
Which meant it was more than likely something she’d experienced for a long time.
Possibly most of her life.
According to their research, her parents had died when she was young and she’d been raised by her brother, which was why they thought she would be the best possible bait they could find.
Had her brother abused her?
The two had lived off-grid, as had the family when the siblings’ parents were still alive. A small farm, they grew their own food, and provided for all their own needs, similar in fact to the way Eagle Oswald and his siblings had grown up, before their parents were murdered.
As Steel stood there, clutching the tablet, listening to the little ladybug sing softly to herself, he became more convinced that he and his team had made a mistake going rogue with this one. If they’d spoken with Eagle about their plans to go after Ridge’s sister, he knew the man would have insisted on sending someone to speak with her first.
Maybe the crazy little ladybug would have been willing to help them.
Too late for that now, though.
They’d started down this path, and there was no going back, no do-overs.
So he was going to have to find a way to crush Rose’s spirit, break it down to nothing, and then pray that once he and his team had what they needed, it wouldn't be too late for her to rebuild herself, putting her broken pieces back together.
