Chapter 2
Chapter
Two
“What the hell? Did she just wave at us?” Steel demanded as he and the rest of his team watched the little ladybug explore her new home.
The journey back to their mansion was uneventful. The little ladybug slept peacefully throughout it, and since she was unconscious, he hadn't bothered keeping her bound once they got her on the plane. Instead, he’d buckled her into the seat beside him, put in some earbuds, and gotten some sleep.
Well, that was what he was claiming anyway.
What he would swear to if anyone asked.
But in reality, he was frozen in place because the unconscious woman’s body had listed sideways slightly to rest against him. While he knew it was nothing more than his imagination, he would have sworn she’d sighed contentedly as her head nestled against his shoulder.
When they got back to their remote Gothic estate, he’d quickly taken the young woman down to the cells they had in the basement. Briefly, he’d considered stripping her of her clothing, but the sudden need to get away from her had him simply setting her down on the hard concrete floor and leaving.
According to the guys who were gathered around the kitchen table watching the feed from the camera in Rose Gardner's cell on a tablet, she regained consciousness as soon as he closed and locked the door behind him.
By the time he made it upstairs to join them, the little ladybug had been pushing to her feet. He’d expected to see hysterics. To hear her sob as terror overwhelmed her, begging and pleading for mercy, to be set free, the word why to be screamed into the empty cell.
Instead, the redhead had done none of that.
She had merely proceeded to make her way around her cell in a manner more methodical than he would have given her credit for if he hadn't seen it with his own two eyes. She hadn't even seemed fazed when one of her feet fell into the hole in the ground that would serve as her toilet.
Craziest thing was, she’d actually giggled a couple of times as though this whole thing amused her in some sick sort of way.
“Looks like she did,” Voodoo replied in an almost amused tone, and Steel threw him a glare.
There was nothing funny about this.
What good was a prisoner if they weren't afraid? How were they supposed to work with that?
“She’ll break soon,” he said confidently, his hands gripping his coffee mug a little too tightly, and he reined it in. The last thing he needed was to crack the mug and have to clean up the mess.
“Yeah?” Thunder asked, somewhat doubtfully as they all watched the woman make her way to one of the corners of the room, carefully sit herself down, cross her ankles, and then fold her hands in her lap as she tilted her head back to rest against the wall.
“Did we kidnap a psychopath?” Blade asked.
“She’s not a psychopath. If she were, our intel would have indicated it.
She edits romance novels for a living,” he added as though that were the deciding factor.
There was no way the woman could spend her days reading about happy ever afters and couples in love having sex if she were some sort of psychopath.
“You know who her family is,” Dragon reminded them all.
They did know who her family was, and unfortunately for Rose Gardner, it was why she was currently sitting in one of their prison cells, apparently taking a nap.
“So what are we going to do with her now that we have her?” Lion asked.
Of all of them, Lion had been the most against this plan. Or at least the most reluctant, since they all knew this could be their one and only way to get to the person responsible for what had been done to them.
Although he knew that, understood it, Lion was the only one of them who had been forced to leave someone behind after their lives were forever changed. The rest of them had families, sure. But not the kind of families whose hearts would be broken when contact was cut off.
For all intents and purposes, the men of Delta Team were dead.
There were no death certificates lying around, no fake graves sitting empty with their names on the tombstones, but when they joined Prey and moved out to this house, they had dropped off the face of the earth as far as anyone outside of Prey was concerned.
It was the way it had to be, and they all accepted that.
All except Lion, who still longed for the impossible, to find a way to claim the life he’d left behind.
A glance at Dragon, whose lips were pulled into a tight line, told him that wasn't exactly true. A favor for a friend, well six of them, the Charleston Holloway brothers of Charlie Team, had changed something in Dragon.
It had also cost him something.
Something the man wasn't likely to get back.
“We’re going to do what we planned to do,” Steel said firmly. As the team leader, it was his job to keep his men focused on their goals. Life might not be fair for Rose Gardner, she was going to pay for sins she’d likely never committed, but if they wanted their revenge, he didn't see another way.
“Even if she looks bored rather than scared right now?” Blade asked.
“Then we figure out what it takes to make her scared,” he answered simply.
They weren't complete monsters. He intended to do whatever it took to make the woman break …
within reason. The little ladybug wasn't who they were after, she was merely a means to an end, a connection they would use to get to the man they wanted.
They were all ninety percent sure Rose had nothing to do with what had been done to them, she was too young for a start, only twenty-three, which would have made her still a minor back when their lives were forever altered.
Treating her like they would any other prisoner was off the table, he wouldn't slice her open, wouldn't cut off body parts, wouldn't send electrical currents flowing through her body until she passed out from the agony.
But he would break her.
Would find a crack and exploit it.
His men were counting on him, and he wasn't going to let them down.
Never again.
“Everyone is afraid of something,” he reminded his men.
The little ladybug wasn't infallible, even if that was the impression she was giving off right now.
Scrutinizing the tablet as closely as he could, he noted that her muscles did actually appear to be relaxed.
She wasn't faking because she knew she was being watched.
What the hell did that mean?
Steel hated that they hadn't been able to dig up more intel on the Gardner family despite all the resources at their fingertips.
Other than a birth certificate telling him Rose was born on October 30th, twenty-three years ago, there were no other records on her until she popped back up on her eighteenth birthday.
Homeschooled, living with her family on a small farm deep in the Appalachian Mountains, there was no way to ascertain what her life had been like for the first eighteen years, and he didn't like that.
When she resurfaced five years ago, she started an editing business, and despite her young age, she had clients lining up to use her services and a stellar five-star reputation.
Tracking her online movements told them she rarely left her house other than to go for her daily runs, she worked, she watched Netflix, she did all her shopping online and never posted anything remotely personal on her social media accounts, they were one hundred percent business-related.
What makes you tick, little ladybug?
“We talked about limits before we did this, but we also assumed she was going to wake up terrified out of her mind,” Thunder said. “What exactly is your plan to find out what she’s afraid of?”
“I need to go in there,” he said slowly. “It’s one thing for her to put on a facade when she’s alone, not scared of what we’re going to do to her. It’ll be another for her to keep up that charade when she’s face-to-face with me.”
At least Steel hoped that was the case.
Because if it wasn't, they wouldn’t get what they wanted out of this, and instead, would have just dragged another person down into their own personal hell.
“We’ll give her a couple of hours to stew, then I’ll flip on the lights and go in.
Chances are, a couple of minutes with her will have her the sobbing, hysterical mess we anticipated picking up.
Don’t worry, the little ladybug will soon be screaming for us, and then we’ll use her exactly the way we intended. ”
Despite his talk of facades and charades, as Steel pushed away from the table and set about cooking some dinner, he couldn’t help but feel like he was the one pretending. What the hell had they gotten themselves into?
December 24th
11:26 P.M.
Because she just might be a little more psycho than she’d ever realized, Rose had actually fallen asleep sitting on the cold concrete, waking only when she heard the snick of the door as it closed.
Years of knowing that being caught asleep left you vulnerable to attack, she slept with a hair-trigger alertness. The slightest sound usually had her snapping awake, which was why it was so irritating that Mr. Bedroom Man had gotten into her room without her waking.
She’d gotten complacent. Felt safe there. Hadn't thought she needed to be on high alert.
Now she knew better.
After spending so many years believing she had escaped her hellish family without being warped by their insanity, well major trust issues aside anyway, it seemed she had been sorely mistaken.
They had managed to paint her with their crazy brush, because along with the icy cold anger, was curiosity, a desire to solve a puzzle that had been presented to her.
Well, there was a small undercurrent of fear too, but it mostly stemmed from the fact that she had no idea what this man wanted from her, if he had targeted her specifically, or if he’d picked a house at random and she had been unlucky enough to be inside it.
Without answers, she didn't know what to expect, but once she understood the ground rules, she would know how best to work with this situation.