Welcome to my particular brand of crazy, Mr. Bedroom Man. I hope I ruin every single one of your plans for me.
Chapter
Two
December 24th
8:13 P.M.
“What the hell? Did she just wave at us?” Steel demanded as he and the rest of his team watched the little ladybug explore her new home.
The journey back to their mansion was uneventful. The little ladybug slept peacefully throughout it, and since she was unconscious, he hadn't bothered keeping her bound once they got her on the plane. Instead, he’d buckled her into the seat beside him, put in some earbuds, and gotten some sleep.
Well, that was what he was claiming anyway.
What he would swear to if anyone asked.
But in reality, he was frozen in place because the unconscious woman’s body had listed sideways slightly to rest against him. While he knew it was nothing more than his imagination, he would have sworn she’d sighed contentedly as her head nestled against his shoulder.
When they got back to their remote Gothic estate, he’d quickly taken the young woman down to the cells they had in thebasement. Briefly, he’d considered stripping her of her clothing, but the sudden need to get away from her had him simply setting her down on the hard concrete floor and leaving.
According to the guys who were gathered around the kitchen table watching the feed from the camera in Rose Gardner's cell on a tablet, she regained consciousness as soon as he closed and locked the door behind him.
By the time he made it upstairs to join them, the little ladybug had been pushing to her feet. He’d expected to see hysterics. To hear her sob as terror overwhelmed her, begging and pleading for mercy, to be set free, the word why to be screamed into the empty cell.
Instead, the redhead had done none of that.
She had merely proceeded to make her way around her cell in a manner more methodical than he would have given her credit for if he hadn't seen it with his own two eyes. She hadn't even seemed fazed when one of her feet fell into the hole in the ground that would serve as her toilet.
Craziest thing was, she’d actually giggled a couple of times as though this whole thing amused her in some sick sort of way.
“Looks like she did,” Voodoo replied in an almost amused tone, and Steel threw him a glare.
There was nothing funny about this.
What good was a prisoner if they weren't afraid? How were they supposed to work with that?
“She’ll break soon,” he said confidently, his hands gripping his coffee mug a little too tightly, and he reined it in. The last thing he needed was to crack the mug and have to clean up the mess.
“Yeah?” Thunder asked, somewhat doubtfully as they all watched the woman make her way to one of the corners of the room, carefully sit herself down, cross her ankles, and then foldher hands in her lap as she tilted her head back to rest against the wall.
“Did we kidnap a psychopath?” Blade asked.
“She’s not a psychopath. If she were, our intel would have indicated it. She edits romance novels for a living,” he added as though that were the deciding factor. There was no way the woman could spend her days reading about happy ever afters and couples in love having sex if she were some sort of psychopath.
“You know who her family is,” Dragon reminded them all.
They did know who her family was, and unfortunately for Rose Gardner, it was why she was currently sitting in one of their prison cells, apparently taking a nap.
“So what are we going to do with her now that we have her?” Lion asked.
Of all of them, Lion had been the most against this plan. Or at least the most reluctant, since they all knew this could be their one and only way to get to the person responsible for what had been done to them.
Although he knew that, understood it, Lion was the only one of them who had been forced to leave someone behind after their lives were forever changed. The rest of them had families, sure. But not the kind of families whose hearts would be broken when contact was cut off.
For all intents and purposes, the men of Delta Team were dead.
There were no death certificates lying around, no fake graves sitting empty with their names on the tombstones, but when they joined Prey and moved out to this house, they had dropped off the face of the earth as far as anyone outside of Prey was concerned.
