Chapter 34
Chapter Thirty-Four
They’d drugged her again. That was her first thought on waking chained to the same bed as before. This time by only one wrist. The other…
Well, she assumed it was the same bed anyway. She lay in the darkness, cataloguing her pains, remembering.
She’d refused Viktor’s command for information. But he’d let Boris lay hands on her, and she simply wasn’t strong enough. She’d tried, but the pain…
Ackerman was no help. He’d protested, but Viktor ignored him. So he’d stood by while Boris beat her and he’d done nothing. That had nearly broken her.
She hoped Alex would forgive her, but she’d had to make a choice when the pain was too great to bear. He’d once said she wasn’t trained like him, wasn’t capable of suffering deprivation and surviving hardship.
He’d been right, of course. She might have been ignored as a child, her emotional needs not met the way she’d needed them to be, but she’d never suffered a moment’s deprivation in her life. She was pampered.
She’d worked hard to be an FBI agent. She’d been driven. The things she’d gone through in training—well, that wasn’t real hardship, was it?
Her face was swollen, and her head hurt. Boris had only hit her in the face once before Viktor stopped him.
“Let us keep her pretty face intact. She may yet be useful.”
She didn’t know what that meant, but it’d chilled her to the bone.
“Tell them what they want to know, Diana,” Ackerman had said. “Just tell them and be done with it. Alex Bishop doesn’t care about you. He’s a traitor, a dangerous man. He’s using you.”
“Fuck. You.” She’d spat blood at him. And then Boris jerked her upright and twisted her arm behind her back, shoving it so high something had to break.
And it did. She felt the moment her wrist snapped, and she screamed at the pain. But the beating didn’t stop. It continued until she found herself speaking, telling them what she knew. Not everything, but she hoped it was enough to satisfy Viktor.
Either it had worked or she’d passed out, because she was here in the dark with only the sounds of her own breathing and the throbbing in her head. Tears welled behind her eyes, made everything hurt that much worse. She didn’t want to cry. If she started, she might not stop.
Ackerman had betrayed her. Viktor had stormed into her life again, pretending he’d never hurt her in the first place. That she had seduced him and been vengeful because he hadn’t married her. It infuriated her and made her feel hopeless at the same time.
Why did powerful men get away with such things? Why were they able to hurt others and nobody held them accountable? They lied, changed the story, pretended to be good people, pretended to care about others, and yet all they did was take and take and take.
And nobody ever believed the victims, the ones who said they were hurt by this man.
No, people took his side, believed him because he was rich and powerful and why would he need to rape a woman when he could just pay for sex if he really wanted to?
No way would he engage in human trafficking because that was a criminal offense, and he was such a wonderful guy who gave money to help those less fortunate.
Plus, he was already rich, so where was the incentive?
Those were the things people said, and it sickened her.
Ackerman believing that Viktor Dashevsky was more competent than President Marla Willis simply because he was a man.
Never mind that Viktor was Russian and a friend of Putin’s.
That didn’t stop men like Ackerman or Gannon from thinking the woman was somehow the one who was dangerous.
The woman who’d been elected by the people to lead them was the bad guy in their estimation, and she needed to be stopped.
Even if it meant climbing in bed with a rich foreigner and handing him the keys to the kingdom.
She lay in the dark and felt the tears slip from the corners of her eyes to her temples and into her hair.
Why had she bothered? Why hadn’t she just done what her mother wanted and married somebody rich and connected so she could be a socialite wife and not have to worry her pretty head about these things?
Why had she thought she could make Viktor pay for his crimes?
“No,” she whispered. “No.”
It wasn’t over yet. She was still alive. She still had a shot so long as she was breathing. No matter how hard it was, how impossible it seemed, she wasn’t finished.
She thought of Alex, of the things she’d read in his file. Of what he’d told her about his childhood. She hadn’t heard it all, but she’d heard enough to know he had survived against long odds. And then he’d joined the Army and survived that as well.
If he were the one chained to this bed, he wouldn’t be crying. He wouldn’t be thinking about how awful the world was and how the bad guys always won. He’d be making plans to survive, to take the bad guys down when he escaped or his team arrived to rescue him.
Not one of those One Shot Tactical men would give up the way she felt like doing. They’d been shot, stabbed, beaten, and they’d lived to fight another day.
She had to live too. She’d only just started to feel like she belonged, like she was part of something bigger than herself, and she wasn’t ready to give that up. Not without a fight.
Footsteps sounded in the hallway outside her room. She dragged in a breath, and then another, willing her heartbeat to slow down. She had to survive this. She had to live to fight another day. She had to be strong, and she had to believe rescue was coming.
The door to her room rattled. She held her breath, her heart racing, hoping they’d found her, that she was safe.
It scraped open on hinges that needed oiled. But it wasn’t rescue that stood in the entry.
It was death.