Chapter 1 #2
That one word made rage bloom inside Grover so fast, it was almost scary. He was going to kill every one of the men who’d touched her. They’d die slow, painful deaths.
He wasn’t sure what to say to comfort her before she went on.
“But not for a while. I think I was their first prisoner. They practiced on me. I learned pretty quickly that the sooner I broke, the faster they stopped. I never thought that psychology degree I earned would do me any good out here, but I was wrong.”
She chuckled lightly, but Grover couldn’t hear any humor in it.
“Tears have worked surprisingly well on them. At least for me. They love to see their prisoners helpless and crying. So I’ve learned how to cry on demand pretty quickly.
But the most useful thing to remember—never let them know something’s important to you.
They’ll focus on that, do their best to use it against you.
For instance, if nudity bothers you, don’t complain when they take your clothes.
They’ll never give them back. It amuses them to make their prisoners suffer. ”
Grover wasn’t surprised by any of her intel. It was something the team had been taught early on in their training. “What’d they use against you?” he asked softly.
“When I was first taken, and didn’t know better, I begged them to let me keep a ring given to me by my grandmother.
She died when I was fifteen and I inherited her wedding ring.
I cherished that ring. But when they learned how badly I wanted to keep it, they taunted me with it for months.
Promising to give it back if I gave them information about the base.
At first, I believed them, told them whatever I could—which wasn’t much.
I worked in the damn mess tent. But they had no intention of ever giving me that ring back, of course.
They were just using it as a way to further torture me. ”
“I’m sorry,” Grover told her.
“It’s fine. They can’t take the memories of my mam away, so fuck them.”
Grover contemplated her words in silence. He’d been at least partially incorrect. While Sierra wasn’t broken…the soft, sweet woman he’d once met was gone, possibly for good.
Replaced by a harder, stronger woman who would do anything in order to survive.
Despite abhorring how it had come about, he didn’t hate the change itself.
Ironically, it made the two of them more alike.
He’d seen and experienced things that had made him harder, stronger…
and it’s ultimately what you did with those changes that mattered.
Her captivity had obviously turned her into a survivor; that’s why she wasn’t broken.
She’d taken the worst thing a human could go through and turned it to her advantage in the only way she could…by letting it make her stronger, as well.
The connection he felt with this woman was already strong. Now it seemed to get more intense with every minute that passed.
It was whacked. They were in a precarious situation.
He couldn’t even see her, for God’s sake, but he couldn’t deny he was impressed.
Though, his heart bled for her at the same time.
He couldn’t even begin to fathom the hell she’d been in for the last year.
She’d had to become hard to keep herself from going insane.
“My advice is to give in to what they want. I’m not saying to give them any information that will help them hurt, kidnap, or kill anyone else, but the faster you seem to break, the quicker the torture will end.”
“Okay,” Grover agreed. Nothing she said was a surprise. Putting her mind at ease was his only goal.
“And if they use me to get you to react, you have to remain unaffected,” she said.
Her words seemed to echo off the rocky walls of their prison.
“What?” he asked, not sure he’d heard her correctly.
“They’ll haul me out in front of your cell and beat on me to try to get a rise out of you. If you show any kind of reaction, they’ll only do it longer. The best thing you can do is ignore it.”
“Motherfucker!” Grover swore. It was a common enough tactic by captors, using one prisoner against another. But the thought of her being tortured right in front of him, and Grover not being able to do a damn thing about it, brought out his rage all over again.
“I mean it,” Sierra said. “The more you protest, the more they’ll hurt me. And if I don’t react when they’re hurting you, please don’t take it personally. It’s for the best. They’ll get bored and quit as long as I don’t say or do anything to try to make them stop.”
“Listen to me, Sierra. Are you listening?”
Grover waited for her response before continuing. It took a while, but she finally said, “Yes,” very softly.
“I can take whatever they dish out. What I can’t handle is you getting hurt because of something I did. I promise not to do anything to make your situation here worse.”
“Don’t promise something you can’t deliver,” she said without emotion.
“I never go back on my promises,” he told her firmly.
He heard her sigh. “That’s what the others said, too, but in the end, they couldn’t understand why I wasn’t trying to help. Why I was ‘letting’ those assholes beat on them.”
“I’m not them,” Grover said simply. He got it.
He really did. The other contractors who’d been taken were men who didn’t have Grover’s background and training.
And since Sierra had majored in psychology, she also understood their captors better than the average person.
She’d obviously learned how to act in order to keep herself alive for the last year.
She was smart, resilient, determined…and his admiration rose another notch.
Grover moved so he was lying by the side of his cell nearest her own.
It made him feel closer to the woman. He had so many questions, but now wasn’t the time or place.
He hoped he’d have the chance to get to know her, once they were out of here.
For now, he needed to rest. He had no doubt his jailors would be back soon to continue their beatings.
“You okay?” Sierra asked.
The fact that she was asking about him, when she’d been the one held captive for so damn long, told him everything he needed to know about Sierra Clarkson.
And he was going to do whatever it took to get her out of here.