Even if I have to gag and bind her and lock her in my closet.
29
Quill
Present Day
“Well, go on. Do your worst.”
I’m sitting in the small cell on the sub-sub basement level, right below the one that’s publicly known and has all the fake medieval rumors about it. Spikes, walls that will crush you slowly and fully, a torture machine that pulls your limbs apart, entombment.
None of that’s true, but it’s closer to being the case in the cell below, the one that was designed for soldiers who don’t do what they’re told.
There are leather shackles on the wall, various whips and other torture devices in the corner, and an actual bow and motherfucking arrow, and I’m feeling like Ivanhoe right now, or whatever that book was that I once caught Piper reading, during her occasional mystery novel breaks.
It all makes me snort, because it looks pretty silly. But Tragen gives me a glare.
The thing is, when you don’t give a fuck about taking human life, you usually don’t give a fuck about yours being taken from you either.
At least, that’s the way I always felt about it, until Piper.
And now, in spite of the fact that I’m back to hating her guts like I did before I fell in love with her, I realize maybe the insect was right about the silent protector shit. Because my one regret about being locked in this cell, faced with my potential impending doom, is that I’m helpless to protect her.
Relief at knowing I left her gagged and bound and she can’t get into trouble turns into dread as I realize I left her gagged and bound, and she might just starve to death or something.
Though I also have to begrudgingly admire that she’s not the kind of girl who would let a little detail like duct tape prevent her from getting revenge on her parents’ murderer.
I’m back to feeling relieved about that, until I realize that getting revenge means going back to Devil Tower, and if she does, she’s as good as dead.
Basically, no matter how I look at it, her life will end soon if I don’t get the hell out of here, and that feels like a much worse prospect than the one currently facing me.
A punch to my face makes me focus, at least temporarily, on my current predicament.
I’m not sure why I’m sitting in a chair on the other side of a table, facing Tragen, rather than shackled to the ceiling as he tortures me.
Maybe he wants to talk in a more or less civil manner before he kills me slowly and painfully.
“So?” I mutter, spitting out the blood that’s just filled my mouth at his version of a civil discussion.
I look up at him and am kind of surprised to see the expression on his face. Not anger. Not coldness, the way he looks at others who’ve fucked up. No, if anything, this is… disappointment.
The kind of look he’d give his son, but I’m not his son. And my own father has never looked at me like that. If he looks at me at all, it’s with a sort of cowering rage as he seems to struggle with his desire to beat the shit out of me, without getting killed.
“I warned you about this, soldier,” barks out Tragen, stressing that last word a little too much in his apparent desire tonotname me.
Soldiers are supposed to be anonymous, interchangeable, but I’ve never quite been that to him, and I realize now, probablytoo late, that if anyone’s been a father to me in my life, it’s this bloodthirsty man.
“You’ve risen through the ranks, you’re at the very top, and you’ve gotten sloppy.”
I grit my teeth, but I’m relieved in a way that he thinks of me as sloppy. Even though it would be an insult at any other time. But better he believes that than knows about—
“Sloppy in other areas, too,” he adds, and I swallow, realizing he’s reading right through me. Like a proper father might.
“You’ve let yourself get hung up on a girl, and that’s unpardonable.”
Fuck. Me. He knows.
It feels like my world is crashing in slow motion as he continues, torturing me far more with his words than he could with any torture implement. “Piper Day. Even now that she’s ruined your life, you’re still hung up on her. Getting sloppy because of a tangentially-related contract.”
