Gunshots cracked, sharp and terrifying. The crowd screamed, scattering in every direction. My pulse thundered in my ears, and white-hot panic erupted in my chest as the world around us was reduced to utter pandemonium.
I caught a flash of Nik—he was shoving one man off, breaking another’s hold with vicious efficiency—but the tide of people shoved me farther away.
“Nik!” I screamed, my voice swallowed by the stampede around me.
Something slammed into the back of my head. Pain exploded, blinding me. My knees buckled, and the world tilted.
The last thing I heard before darkness took me was Nik’s voice, rough and ragged—
“Get your fucking hands off her!”
Chapter forty-three
Cold.
A thousand needles of pure misery pierced my skin, stealing the breath from my lungs. My body screamed in agony. The cold was a living thing, crawling down my back. I trembled violently as ice water streamed from my hair, slid down my spine, and dripped off my toes. I choked on the water that had just flooded my senses.
When my eyes fluttered open, the world tilted. A smeared gray blur slowly sharpened into a concrete floor below me. Metal bit into my wrists, and in panic, I yanked my hands forward. The weight of my body pulled against some kind of bindings. My arms screamed with a savage, white-hot pain as my shoulders stretched so tightly I thought the joints might become dislocated.
The darkness was gone, replaced by an agonizingly painful, terrifying reality. I was awake. And I was in hell.
“She isss awake. Da bucket of aice water did the trick,” a man sneered. His voice was thick with a heavy accent similar to Delgado’s.
My eyes darted around to find the source of the voice as the pounding in my temples intensified. A man with a bucket in his hand was walking away from me, toward a group of greasy thugs gathered around a long stainless steel table at the far end of the room. Laid out before them were various tools that could’ve come straight from some medieval dungeon—long, thin boning knives with curved, gleaming points; cleavers so wide they could split a person’s skull in one blow; a coil of rusted chain; a bone saw with sharp, glinting teeth; and next to it, a heavy steel mallet that could shatter anything in one swing.
None of it had touched me—yet. But the message was clear, torture was in my near future.
No! This wasn’t possible.
Nik had sworn he’d never let anything happen to me. That he would burn the world down before he let me fall into Delgado’s hands. So how the hell had I ended up here, hanging by my wrists?
I searched for the last thing I remembered clearly—the mayor’s voice cutting through the crowd. He’d stretched out his hand to Nik like a man greeting an equal. Then there was a shove of bodies, a surge from all directions. I’d heard Nik’s voice—roaring my name over the crush—followed by gunfire and screaming.
Of course, it had been the mayor himself, security entourage in tow, and who knew how many of Delgado’s men. No one could have anticipated that the mayor of New York City himself would launch such a blatant attack on one of the syndicate’s highest-ranking men. And it could mean only one thing—the mayor was in deep, desperate to appease Delgado. How better to attack Nik than by taking me?
My head throbbed in time with my heartbeat. My entire body felt bruised and battered, like I’d been rolled down a hill and dumped here for the main event.
And the cold…! It pressed in from all sides. My breath fogged the air. My bare legs prickled with gooseflesh, and the involuntary tremors going through me made my body jerk, causing me to sway back and forth.
When I was finally able to lift my gaze again, I realized where I was. Rows of beef carcasses swung from hooks overhead, their pale flesh glistening under harsh fluorescent lights. Blood pooled dark and sticky in shallow drains along the floor; the metallic smell was enough to choke on.
And me? I was just part of the decor—handcuffed to a meat hook, arms stretched above me, wearing only my little black dress.
Stay calm, Lacey.
The voice of Miss Minerva—the old fortune teller from up in the holler—played in my mind, so clear she could’ve been standing right in front of me: “You’ll never be harmed when danger stares you down, long as you never blink first.”
No fucking way was I blinking.
If they’d killed Nik…no. No, I couldn’t think that.
He had to be alive so I could feel his arms around me again.
Like he said, I was scrappy. Somehow, I’d figure out how to escape this butcher’s prison.
Think, Lacey.
I was still alive, which meant they wanted me for something. Maybe they thought I had useful information, but more likely, I was bait—to make Nik come running.
