Chapter 8
8
NATHAN
N athan Savage could do many things. Hunting, sewing, dressing combat wounds, he could do the damn mamba, cook a mean bowl of spaghetti, and was more than proficient in a wide array of combat styles.
What he could not do was escape by himself. Not from lack of know-how, but from an inability to leave Caden Quinn behind.
It was sun up now. The sun had been in the sky for a good hour and she still wasn’t back.
No—nope. He wasn’t gonna think about the merc and all the horrible things they could be doing to her.
He was gonna think about his escape.
And not about the little bits of fabric littering Quinn’s half of the cell. A dark blue fabric that, Nathan figured, used to make up her shirt. He would not think about the scum-sucking bastard who’d assaulted her. Quinn had protected herself and killed him. Which was maybe why he liked Caden so much. She was no damsel. Still, though, the thought of some ass-hat knocking her around made him feel all pissed and protective and weird. He didn’t like it.
So, instead of dwelling on the weirdness, the ex-special ops soldier focused on the task at hand: finding and utilizing a lock picker. There was not much of anything in the room. Hunks of rock that had been knocked loose from the walls, a rat carcass in the corner with what looked like rat-sized bites out of its middle, the pee bucket, and a puddle of blood that had yet to soak into the stone.
Which meant there was absolutely nothing he could add to his Escape Plan inventory.
An Escape Plan that had yet to actually take a plan-like shape in his head. There was really nothing to it beyond, ‘Open Door’. The next step would be figuring out how to actually pick the lock. He could pilot a helicopter and disable all manner of explosive devices, but apparently, breaking out of a tiny room was beyond his capabilities.
Useless, he was fucking useless!
And frustrated.
And anxious.
Scared—scared shitless that she wasn’t coming back.
That thought set the man to pacing the ten-by-ten-foot cell again and gnawing on his bottom lip.
They’d taken her hours ago.
Escaping. That’s what he needed to concentrate on. He somehow had to get Caden on board with the whole living and escaping thing. She was getting out of this god-forsaken dungeon.
Period.
Nathan would drag her by the ankles, kicking and screaming if he had to.
Maybe he could knock her out and toss her over his shoulder... while he single-handedly took on the guards and all the security measures while simultaneously trying to find an out.
Yeah, that was a solid plan.
No, he needed her awake and functioning if they were ever going to make it out alive. She was the brains, or would be the brains of the escape. Not to mention half the brawn. But that would depend on how she fared this new round of torture. Another thought that gnawed at him. The longer they were imprisoned, the harder it was going to be to escape.
But she would survive. Caden Quinn always survived.
Ava Caden Collins, actually. It made him almost giddy to know it. To have all of her names. It was like Christmas.
And well, that was a nice bit of silver lining to all this torture and kidnapping.
The ex-detective in him had already plugged some pieces into the puzzle that was Caden Quinn, but he hadn’t really gone over what he’d learned yet. So the man went about organizing it over and over in order to ignore the fact that Caden was not yet back and the sun was climbing higher.
Name: Ava Caden Collins. Another excited chill ran down his spine at the fact that he finally had her real name.
Age: late twenties, early thirties, maybe?
Family: all deceased.
He was almost ninety percent sure she was from the States. Possibly spent some time in foster care. High school dropout. Was fluent in at least three languages that he knew of, plus he was pretty sure she was speaking Russian a day ago. So that made four. Notorious and skilled thief. Hyper-intelligent. It wasn’t dumb luck that enabled her to penetrate highly secure facilities and pilfer whatever she wanted.
Now that he had her actual name, he could probably find whatever she thought the government had on her.
At last, heavy footsteps sounded in the stillness. Nathan about jumped out of his skin. It took him two seconds to cross the room, sit against the wall with all his limbs in full display, and splayed his fingers in the air before him. He was the picture of compliance.
Nathan didn’t speak Russian, but it wasn’t hard to decipher, “stay still or die,” what with the guns trained on his head and all. He kept his hands up and tried not to visibly grimace when Quinn’s face caught her fall. The gun-toting duo exited as quickly as they entered.
“Anything fatal, Quinn?” She was on her hands and knees, long dark hair dragging on the concrete as she crawled to the far wall.
She didn’t have pants on, which was odd ‘cause she’d left with a blood-stained pair on her legs. Nathan wouldn’t let that implication take hold until he ascertained her state of health. Then he could go batshit crazy.
She reached the wall and flopped against it like she didn’t have a bone in her body. She wasn’t looking at him. She was mumbling, whispering words he couldn’t piece together to form anything intelligible. He couldn’t understand her. The sound of broken half-whispered sentences crawled into his ears and under his skin. It prickled all the little hairs on his arms and made his vision blurry.
“Quinn, talk to me!” It came out screechy and panicked, like he regressed a couple of decades and was his awkward pubescent teenage self again.
Her head jerked up at the sound of his voice, like she was just realizing he was in the room. Broken nose; blood tracked down her lips and dripped off her chin.
“Caden... you all right?”
The merc didn’t acknowledge that he’d spoken. She kept staring at the wall behind him, dark eyes glazed and unfocused. Fear crept up his spine at the sight of her sprawled, limbs splayed like she wasn’t in control of them, and her whole body shivering.
Kyott had done something horrible to her. He’d never seen her so... so affected by the torture before.
The bright morning sun shining through the tiny window did a pretty good job of highlighting every bruise, wound, and cut on her. And there were many, too many. She was red, drenched in red, her own blood. It took a beat for him to process what he was seeing. Dozens of long red lines cut into her skin, all seeping red. Inner thighs, the backs of her calves, and all up and down her arms.
“Holy Christ.” Maybe it wasn’t as bad as it looked. Maybe they were all surface wounds that would heal easily. “Quinn, are you...”
She was either drugged or so far gone that she was completely out of it. Her eyes were dull and glassy; her breathing was concerningly slow and deep for just getting off the rack. Could be too much blood loss or the effects of some kind of sedative in her system. Nathan was hoping for the latter.
“Ezzy.” Focused past his shoulder and smiling that soft smile he’d only seen on her once. “You shouldn’t be here.”
A slight slur in her words like she was too tired to bother with forming her vowels correctly. Drugged was so much better than bleeding out, not by much, but still it was something to be thankful for. It was a short-lived relief, however.
Drugs plus mercenary add in the torture and a dash of strange surroundings and he had himself a very out-of-it lethal killing machine who wouldn’t think twice about dropping him if he made a wrong move.
“Caden, it’s me... Nathan Savage.” Not even a batted eyelash in his direction. She kept smiling that soft smile at the wall over his shoulder. “I’m gonna try my best to wash out your cuts, all right? We don’t want them to get?—”
“I’m so tired, Ezzy.” She wasn’t whispering anymore. Her usually guarded eyes turned desperate and terribly helpless. “I don’t... I don’t want to... hurt anymore. I can’t.”
He was witnessing an utterly personal and vulnerable moment. She couldn’t defend against him, not with the drugs in control. She couldn’t turn away and pretend, like a normal person, that she had something in her eye. Stripped bare of all her emotional and mental defenses, there she was, Caden Quinn.
The broken and defeated version of her anyhow, pleading for someone, someone important to her, to understand why she had given up. Why she was allowing herself to die?
Nathan didn’t know what to do. Under any other circumstances, he would have quietly left the room and let her deal with her own shit without the feeling of someone watching over her shoulder. He wanted to retreat to the other side of the room and cover his eyes to grant her some kind of privacy, but he couldn’t.
Despite the urge to cover his ears and wait it out, a bigger part of him was furiously engraving all that she was saying into his brain to go over later, burning it into his memory so as not to forget a single syllable. It was a compulsion for him where Caden Quinn was concerned. Any and all information he could get, he would. He was already going to hell, anyway.
Although retreating to his side of the cell and pretending that he wasn’t mentally scribing every second of her unguarded confessions was probably the smartest thing to do, at least until the drugs wore off, it was not an option. He wasn’t putting such an effort into keeping her alive just so she could die of an infection.
“Caden, I’m gonna have to touch you to clean out your cuts.” Oh god, he was going to lose a vital part of his anatomy, he just knew it. “I’m cleaning out your cuts, okay? It’s gonna sting, so please try not to take off my head—or anything else, okay?”
“I... buried you...” Her head lolled to the side, and her sliced arms wrapped around her middle. “... all I got are headstones now...”
He didn’t know where to start. There were so many cuts on the drugged woman—no, mercenary. It was a very important distinction. A drugged and injured civilian woman was about as lethal as a wet cat. A drugged and injured mercenary was a whole other can of worms; ninja worms trained to kill and would do so at the slightest provocation.
She didn’t acknowledge he’d spoken. She was muttering again and staring at the wall like there was someone there. He touched her hand, ready to deflect the inevitable blows, but she didn’t even so much as twitch at the contact.
Not good. Caden Quinn avoided physical contact, save for fighting, at all costs. She either hit or retreated.
Even when the cold water touched her skin, she didn’t react. Only kept muttering to that spot on the wall. The cuts were deep but clean. She needed stitches for a few, but nothing fatal. It was only when he pushed her shoulder to get a better view of her back did she react.
As soon as his hand hit her ribs, she bolted up, shark eyes slammed into place and the edge of her hand connected with his throat. Gasping and sputtering, Nathan reeled back to avoid more hits. She slid out of his hold. Knees bent, soulless eyes now focused on him, the threat in her drugged state, she circled him.
“Caden, it’s me. It’s Nathan.” He stood and watched in resignation as she circled him in the tiny room. “Nathan Savage... I’m not gonna hurt you... Caden.”
She swooped in and landed a quick jab on his stomach and then just as quickly slipped out of range.
The only thing getting through the haze was the pain and that he was the one delivering it. So Caden, being first and foremost a fighter, would annihilate the threat so she could safely get back to convincing the wall to let her die. Nathan wasn’t too keen on getting his ass beat, but he didn’t want to fight her and add to her injuries, either.
“Ava, hold on! It’s me!” Maybe her real name might get through. “Ava!”
It did.
She stilled for a long moment. Nathan watched as she caved in on herself. Shoulders slumped, head bowed, knees stiff.
“Ava.” He’d never seen her look so... so what?
So pathetic and beaten down.
But that only lasted another second before she was snarling, actually snarling, and gnashing her canines like some kind of rabid animal, and charged at him.
“Caden! I’m not gonna hurt you! Stop!” He dodged a cat paw to the chest and a well-aimed kick to his crotch. He forced her back and tried to swerve away from the hand aiming for his throat.
She slid in and jabbed at him again, but Nathan (being less tortured, starved, and not drugged) was, for once, faster. While she was going for his solar plexus, Nathan sidestepped, gripped her wrist, and pulled her flush against his chest.
“No! No! No, no, no, no... no...” The hoarse screams slowly dissolved into whispers.
He tried to be mindful of her back and newly acquired hurts, but it was hard with her working against him.
“Shh, it’s gonna be alright Caden... It’s gonna be all right.” He held tighter as she tried to claw off his back when her elbows and knees proved ineffective against him. “It’s gonna be all right.” He wasn’t lying, just being optimistic. She wasn’t the only one that needed to hear it.
“Don’t! Don’t touch me! No!” She struggled and bit and fought and screamed a silent scream that chilled him to the bone. He continued to talk in a calm, soothing voice and kept his hold firm as she thrashed and bucked to get him off. Eventually, she exhausted all her energy and slumped against him.
Nathan decided against letting her go and instead carefully lowered them both to the hard cement without relinquishing his hold.
A sad thought occurred to him when her bloodshot eyes blinked up at him in confusion—like she hadn’t just tried to kill him. He wondered if anybody had ever tried to hold her before, protect her from the world, or tell her that everything was going to be okay. But he remembered the scars, battle scars that were vivid on her skin, and the slightly faded ones far too old and similar to his own to be anything but childhood nightmares. He knew, with a horrible twisting feeling in his gut, that no one ever had.
“Quinny! Go, baby! Run!” A strangled scream that froze the man’s blood had him adjusting his hold against her renewed fight. “No! No! You run!” It was a terrified command filled with so much anguish Nathan couldn’t begin to imagine what she was seeing in her drugged state.
“No! No!” She started thrashing again and Nathan about lost her, but he kept her between his arms and watched in horror as tears started streaming down the Hitter’s face. “No. No... no no no no... she’s just a baby—please no... no...”
Something inside of him broke at the sound of her terror and desperation.
“No no no no...” She was begging. Caden Quinn was begging. “No, no... I’m sorry...” Tears rained down her cheeks and her body jerked in silent sobs.
He only pulled her closer and tried to find comfort in the feel of her heart thumping against his chest. She was alive, at least. Nathan didn’t know what kind of hell she was living in her head or even the hell she’d already been through. What he did know was that Caden Quinn always survived. She would survive this as well.
Hell, knowing some of the places she’d been and the things she’d done in her life, Nathan couldn’t help but admire the hell out of her. Maybe there was some pity there as well. Pity that he had what she didn’t a family and something to live for, but mostly he marveled at the things he did know about her. They all pretty much added up to form one descriptor.
Badass.
She was a badass.
There was really no other explanation for the sobbing woman in his arms.