Chapter 32
XXXII
Come on you fucker . . .
Natasha shoved her heels into the dirt floor and pushed. Straining away from the bloody anchor, the chain grasped in an awkward fist-over-fist grip because her wrists were still shackled to that bastard collar.
Heaving and hauling.
Toes digging into the baked earth.
Putting all her weight into it.
Legs trembling with the effort.
Sweat trickling down her face, inside the mask.
More on her grubby arms and legs.
. . .
The anchor ground its way towards her – less than an inch, but that was something, right?
Christ knew how long she’d been at it, in the baking heat of this stone oven, but her throat was like a tube of burning sandpaper, her tongue twice the size it should’ve been. Breath howling in the confines of the soggy leather.
And what she wouldn’t do for a drink. For a nice tall tumbler of water, ice cubes clinking, condensation sparkling on the chilled glass . . .
Hell, she’d even take the arch arsehole Adrian back. Two-faced, thieving, cheating bastard that he was.
As she stood there, hunched over and wheezing, bluebottles settled onto her bare skin. Feeding on the salt and scabs.
A glass of water and a shower and a soft, soft bed . . .
Come on: couldn’t build a media empire by lying down and dying. You got there by fighting.
And DS Davis would be back soon enough, with the next instalment of whatever horror he had planned. Fucking police wanker.
Did his cop mates know what he got up to? Did they know he was a dirty, criminal, violent bastard? Or would they all pretend it came as a massive shock when the story broke. One more rotten apple in a barrel full of shits.
She bent her knees and tightened her grip on the chain, growling with the effort, then yelling, snarling, and howling inside the suffocating mask.
The anchor rasped forward another fraction of an inch.
One more go . . .
But the bloody thing wouldn’t move. A chunk of stone poked out of the hard dirt floor – not far, barely the height of a cigarette pack – but it was two or three feet wide, and the galvanised bucket full of concrete was wedged right up against it.
She tugged and yanked and pulled and swore and screamed and wrenched on the bloody chain, but the bastard wouldn’t go any further.
She let go, staggered a couple of paces closer to her anchor, raising her foot to kick the bastard . . .
But what would that achieve? Oh yeah, it’d be great to shatter the bones in her foot, cos that would make life so much easier, wouldn’t it? Being unable to walk on top of everything else . . .
So she whumped down onto the ground instead. Sitting there with her chest against her knees. Breath jagged and catching.
Do not cry.
Do not give the bastard the satisfaction.
But the tears came anyway, because this was gonna be a shitty way to die.