“Follow him,” he told Thunder, who nodded and pushed away from the table. “I’ll make the little ladybug some food, lace it with sedatives, and we can get her prepped to return her to her house tonight.”
“Your little ladybug will be okay, she’ll bounce back,” Blade told him, clapping him on the back as he headed for the fridge.
Steel prayed that his friend was right, but the problem was that no matter how strong you were, the weight of the world on your shoulders eventually broke your back. Look at them, when their DNA had been altered, their brain chemistry changed so they could be molded into Ridge Gardner’s perfect killing machines. They’d vowed to never use their skills to harm an innocent, yet they had one they’d tortured locked in their basement.
December 27th
12:00 P.M.
It was time.
Rose kept her body still, her expression impassive, but inside she was hyper-focused, taking in every single minute detail, because she was going to find a way out of this room.
Even if it killed her.
She was all too aware that she was a whole lot less worried about that possibility than she should be. But after you’d lived your entire life as a series of torturous events one after the other in a never-ending stream, the end didn't seem as terrifying a prospect.
Only she’d found her end. At least it was supposed to be.
Years of enduring punishments as she pretended that her brain just couldn’t comprehend the chemistry and biological lessons her brother wanted to teach her were all to convince him that she was useless for whatever plans he had. It had worked, she’d told him she was leaving the day of her eighteenth birthday, and because he believed she was of no use to him, he’d let her go.
Editing romance books wasn't her dream job, but she did enjoy it. She was used to her own company, so she rarely got lonely, but she did worry that she’d lost the ability to interact with other people in any sort of meaningful way. Or maybe she’d never developed the ability at all.
Five years of peace and quiet had all come crashing down around her, and it was all because of her brother. Even if she managed to escape, she was going to have to pack up her entire life and disappear, because these men would keep coming after her.
There was no way she was allowing them to lull her into any sort of false sense of security. None.
Patching her up, rehydrating her body, bringing her food, they were just trying to mess with her head, and it wasn't going to work. Rose had not a single doubt that their little whipping game had done nothing to lure in her brother, which meant next time they would have to up their game, making whatever they did to her that much worse.
While she could endure whatever these men did to her, she didn't want to.
Finally, she knew what she wanted out of her life.
Freedom. True freedom.
For five years, she’d just been surviving, trying to learn to accept the peace she’d created for herself, trying to believe that her life was her own. It was only now, as she sat on the cold, hard concrete floor of a prison cell, using the pain from the welts the whip had left behind, that she realized all she’d really been doing was hiding.
If she made it out of there, she was done with the hiding. She was going to figure out what her dream job actually was, then keep editing to pay her bills while she went back to school. Then she was going to make an effort to make real-world friends, and build herself a community, so that if she ever went missing again, someone would actually notice.
And care.
As it stood right now, nobody truly cared if these men killed her and disposed of her body, and that left her feeling horribly empty inside. She was a human being, and she deserved to have people in her life who cared about her.
Maybe even loved her.
Allowing her fear of someone using love against her to rule her life kept her trapped just as much as Ridge had done the first eighteen years of her life.
No more.
Since there was nothing else to do there but try to think up ways to escape, Rose thought she might have come up with something. Thankfully, Mr. Bedroom Man—and she really wished she knew his name so she could stop calling him that—had delivered her food, which she guessed was a couple of hours after she woke up back in the cell.
Good food, not broth, or bread and water, but what looked to be the reheated remains of a Christmas dinner. Knowing that while she had been locked up down there, being torturedby smothering heat and then overwhelming cold, Mr. Bedroom Man and his band of merry followers were right upstairs enjoying a home-cooked Christmas meal had enraged her.
Not that she’d let on.
Instead, she’d merely accepted the food with a thank you. She wasn’t too proud to accept any handouts they were willing to give and had eaten it. There had been no more meals, but that along with the fluids she’d been given, was enough to revitalize her body.
Add in the rage she continued to stoke because she knew she would need its power, and Rose was sure she was ready to make her move.
