When Devina spoke next, her voice was warped, the tone deeper . . . lower and raspy. “I liked being with you before, Jim. Remember that? In your truck . . . but this is going to be so much better. Look at me, Jim. See the real me.”
“I’m good like this. But thanks—”
Nails gouged into his balls, and then his sac was twisted hard. As the driving pain hit the neuron superhighway of his pelvic girdle, its fumes created a curdling nausea in his gut. Which of course had nowhere to go thanks to the collar clamped around his neck.
Yup, dry heaves were all he had to offer, because nothing was going to evac up his throat.
“Look at me.” More with the wrenching.
His gaping mouth took its own sweet time getting his reply out. Then again, it was busy trying to accommodate the gulps of air he was taking. “. . . No . . .”
Something mounted him. He didn’t know who or what it was, because there were suddenly hands all over him, the gates unleashed—
No, not hands. Mouths.
With sharp teeth.
As his cock penetrated something that had all the softness and slickness of a rusted-out sink drain, the first of the cuts were made on his chest. Might have been a blade. Might have been a long fang.
And then something blunt was forced into his mouth. Tasting salt and flesh, he figured it was some kind of cock and he started to choke, air suddenly becoming a scarce commodity.
Riding the crest of suffocation, he had a moment of total, autonomic flip-out. It was, however, a case of mind over body. The faster his heart pounded, the worse the lack of oxygen was and the brighter and hotter the flaring agony inside his rib cage.
Slow down, he told himself. Slow it all down. Just sloooooooooooooow down. . . .
Higher reasoning reigned and got the reins on his body: His pounding blood cooled and his lungs learned to wait for the withdrawals from his mouth to sneak a breath.
Frankly, he wasn’t impressed. Sexual shit was so unimaginative when it came to torture.
This wasn’t going to be a walk in the park, for real. But Devina wasn’t going to break him with this violation bullshit. Or by trying to fillet his fish with the knife work.The thing with pain was, yeah, sure, it lit up your switchboard, but really, it was nothing more than a loud sensation—and like going to a concert and having your eardrums compensate over time, eventually you got used to it.
Besides, he had vast reserves of strength: Matthias had lived another day, his boys were hanging with Grier and Isaac, and while he would have preferred a time-out at Disney World or Club Med instead, the power of doing the right thing and sacrificing himself for another’s well-being was sustenance for every cell in his body.
He was going to make it through this.
And then he was going save Isaac’s soul and laugh in Devina’s face at the end of this round.
The bitch couldn’t kill him and was not going to get the best of him.
Game on.
CHAPTER 29
As Grier stared across her bedroom at the tattoo that covered Isaac’s back, her hands crept up and curled around her neck.
The image in his skin was done in black and gray and was so vividly drawn, the Grim Reaper seemed to be staring right out at her: The great black-robed figure stood in a field of graves that stretched in all directions, skulls and bones littering the ground at its feet. From beneath the hood, two white spots glowed above the hard jut of a fleshless jaw. One skeletal hand was on the scythe handle, and the other reached forward, pointing at her chest.
And yet that wasn’t the most terrifying part.
Underneath the depiction, there was a row of lines grouped in bundles of four with a diagonal line bunching each one. There had to be at least ten of those. . . .
“You’ve killed . . .” She couldn’t get the rest of the sentence out.
“Forty-nine. And before you think I’m glorifying what I’ve done, each of us has this in our skin. It’s not voluntary.”
That was nearly ten a year. One a month. Lives lost at his hands.
With a quick, slashing movement, Isaac pulled his windbreaker and sweatshirt down—and just as well. That tattoo was terrifying.
Turning to face her, he met her squarely in the eye and seemed to be waiting for a response.
All she could think about was Daniel . . . God, Daniel. Her brother was a notch on the back of one or some of those soldiers, a little line drawn by a needle, marked permanently in ink.
She had been tattooed, too, by the death. On the inside. The sight of him dead and gone—and now the stain of the details of that night—were forever on her mind.
And it was the same for what she’d found out about her father’s other life. And Isaac’s.
Grier braced her hands on her knees and shook her head. “I don’t have anything to say.”
“I don’t blame you. I’m going to leave—”
“About your past.”
As she cut him off, she shook her head again. She’d been on a whirlwind since the moment he’d walked into that attorney-client room back at the jail. Caught up in a buzz, she’d spun faster and faster, from the run-in with that man with the eye patch to the sex to the showdown with her father . . . to Isaac hitting the self-destruct button sure as if he’d pulled the pin out of a grenade.
But somehow, as soon as he’d done that, she felt as though the storm was over and done, the tornado having moved on to someone else’s cornfield.
In the aftermath, everything seemed so clear and simple.
She shrugged and kept staring at him. “I really can’t say anything about your past . . . but I do have an opinion on your future.” Her exhale was long and slow and sounded as exhausted as she felt. “I don’t think you should turn yourself in to die. Two wrongs don’t make a right. In fact, nothing can make what you did right, but you don’t need me telling you that. What you’ve done is going to follow you around all the days of your life—it is a ghost that will never leave you.”
And the dark shadows in his eyes told her he knew that better than anyone.
“To be honest, Isaac, I think you’re being a coward.” As his lids popped, she nodded. “It’s so much harder to live with what you’ve done than go out in a blaze of self-righteous glory. You ever hear of suicide by cop? It’s where a cornered gunman will fire once on a police barricade, and effectively force the badges to pump him full of bullets. It’s for people who don’t have the strength to face the reckoning they deserve. That button you pushed? Same thing. Isn’t it.”
She knew she’d hit the target by the way his face closed up, his features becoming a mask.
“The way to be brave,” she continued, “is to be the one who stands up and exposes the organization. That is the right course of action. Shine the light no one else can on the evil you’ve seen and done and been. That is the only way to come close to making amends. God . . . you could stop this whole damn thing—” Her voice cracked as she thought of her brother. “You could stop it and make sure no one else gets sucked into it. You could help find the ones who are involved and hold them accountable. That . . . that would be meaningful and important. Unlike this suicidal bullshit. Which solves nothing, improves nothing . . .”
Grier got to her feet, closed the top of her suitcase, and snapped the brass latches down tight. “I don’t agree with anything you’ve done. But you’ve got enough conscience in you to want to get out. The question is whether that impulse can take you to the next level—and that’s got nothing to do with your past. Or me.”
Sometimes reflections of yourself were exactly what you needed to see, Isaac thought. And he wasn’t talking about the puss-in-the-mirror kind.
More like the eyes-of-others variety.