Chapter Forty
Drew
“Drew,” he shouted. “Drew!”
My body was floating. I was weightless, traveling on a road I had never been down before. The sound of his voice made me want to smile, but it was too much like hard work for my sleepy muscles. So I smiled in my mind instead, hoping he could see it somehow.
“Drew!” Pete’s voice grew louder, more desperate for my attention.
Not even my lips would part.
“You need to wake up. You need to fucking wake up and deal with your shit. You’ve never quit before now, so don’t fucking quit on her or I swear to God, I will come back there and I will kill you myself.”
The anger in his voice hit me the same time a hand curled around my jaw. For a moment, I thought I saw a flash of light, but the twist of my mouth caused so much pain, I sunk back onto the road again, choosing to enjoy the lack of gravity over the agony that I somehow knew was waiting for me on the other side.
Then it all happened quickly. She screamed. Pete roared. I gasped for air in a world that suddenly felt like it held nooxygen.
“Ay—”
It wasn’t even a word, a croak, or a grumble. I tried to push past the grit and the agony that lined my throat. The points of pain didn’t register all at once. That would have been too fucking easy. Instead, they started to poke at me in different places. Lightly at first, teasing me into thinking I had enough strength to even attempt to lift my head. They were soon followed by a jolt of electricity down my spine, before the flames that were burning one side of my face seemed to multiply. Random pinpricks of torture started to spread across my skin like some flesh-eating disease that just grew and grew and fucking grew until all that was left was misery.
I almost gave into it. I almost let my eyes close and my chin drop to my chest again, but when her painful whimper floated across to me one more time, I forced my eyes open and tried to find a way to see through the crippling, blinding light.
Ayda. Ayda. My Ayda. Where is she?
I was blinking and squinting forever into nothing but white and yellow. Each flash of color that tried to disturb it had my head rolling from side to side in an attempt to escape the intensity.
“Drew,” she tried to say through an obvious sob.
Fire burned up my arms and metal chains cut into my wrists as I leaned farther forward in some feeble fucking attempt to get closer to the sound of her.
My feet slid as the low roar of hatred began to bubble away in the pit of my stomach. As I stretched my mouth to try and speak, a wave of water was thrown over my face, followed by a heavy-handed slap across my burning cheek, sending my head snapping back to the side.
Blood pooled in one corner of my mouth and I hung there limply until I could gather it up and spit it out, the effort proving too much as it dripped from my lips. One small cough made my body tense, and the damage to my ribs soon became obvious as I curled in on myself and winced.
“There he is,” a voice sang out beside me. “Our little fighter has returned to the ring once more.”
As soon as Cortez spoke, my eyes closed again.
I was fucked.
He walked full circle around me, the noise his boots created against the floor sounding like a small atomic bomb going off in my mind with every slow, calculated step he took.
“Look at me, Mr. Tucker,” Cortez said calmly.
I kept my pose, eyes down, body hanging, letting all the pain fall forward as small droplets of my own blood fell at his feet.
“I saidlook at me!”
Fuck you.I would have spat if I could have. I would have said it if I had known she wasn’t close by. But instead, I glanced up to the side through narrowed eyes and met his smug little face.
He reached out to grab me, pulling me up in his grip and forcing my body to fall back as the weight of the chains swayed me to and fro in his hands. I was like a fucking puppet to him and this was his finest show.
“So, sheisyour weakness,” he said in a whisper, pulling my face impossibly closer to his. “I thought you weren’t human enough to ever fall into that trap, Tucker. All those fights you won, all those games you played, all those people you killed without thought or feeling or fear, yet here we are, the two of us surrounded by this weird energy again. Just likethe good old days when we stepped into the ring and only one man could survive—the man who was willing to lose the most.”
I tried to register what he was saying, but the side of my head that had taken the hit was drowning him out as the buzz of the aftershocks started to ring around in my mind, causing me to blink slowly. As if the world wasn’t spinning enough.
Cortez’s fingers squeezed me tighter until the small smirk on his face turned into a toothy grin, and the gold trophy in his mouth shone out like some kind of sick, twisted joke. One day, I was going to hang that on my wall, along with the fucker’s balls, whether that was in this life or the next.
