Chapter 22 Neve
Neve
I drifted in and out of consciousness, caught in that sick, weightless space between waking and blacking out.
I didn’t know how long I’d been here. Minutes.
Hours. Maybe longer. Time didn’t mean anything in the place that held you against your will.
Not without light or a window, not without the sun to mark the difference between one heartbeat and the next.
There was only darkness. And the steady drip of a water pipe somewhere above me, falling in uneven intervals that scraped against my nerves. There was only the thunder of my own heartbeat, loud and swollen in my ears.
My jaw throbbed with every pulse. My ribs burned when I shifted. My wrists were torn raw from rope and struggling. But I was still breathing. That had to count for something.
At some point - I wasn’t entirely sure when - someone cut me down. The memory was smeared, as though my brain couldn’t stay awake long enough to register the hands that touched me.
I was sitting on the ground. My back was pressed to a cold concrete wall, legs heavy and useless in front of me.
I forced my eyes open just as the door creaked open. A sliver of light fractured the dark. Footsteps followed as someone entered the room.
It was one of the guards. He walked in alone, closing the door behind him with a slow, deliberate click. There were no other footsteps outside. No voices and no movement. Just him.
My stomach dropped. His smile made my blood go cold.
“Well,” he stepped closer, “looks like you and I finally have some time alone.”
I pushed myself tighter against the wall.
“Don’t,” I warned, voice low.
He laughed under his breath, like my warning had been cute.
“You’re basically already sold,” he muttered. “No one will know what happened before the auction. No one will even care.”
He grabbed my hair and yanked my head back before I could twist away. Pain shot across my scalp. I clawed at his arm, but he was stronger, heavier, and his grin widened.
“You’re a pretty little thing, aren’t you?” he hissed.
He dragged me forward, forcing my jaw open with one rough hand, even as he unbuttoned his jeans and dropped them.
No.
NO.
He reached into his briefs and released his penis.
It was huge and engorged and throbbing menacingly as he shoved it toward my face.
He forced it into my mouth and panic exploded through me violently as I choked on it.
He pressed harder, deeper, forcing me to take his massive, disgusting flesh, but all I could do was gag on it.
The only thought in my head was that I was going to die choking on this disgusting man’s penis.
So I bit down.
It wasn’t a warning bite. I bit him like an animal fighting for its life.
My jaw clamped down so hard that I felt the give of skin tearing under my teeth. He screamed - a raw, broken sound - and tried to rip himself free, but I didn’t let go.
He hit me - once, twice - hard enough to black out the edges of my vision. But pain didn’t matter anymore. Pain was background noise, and I refused to let go of him.
He thrashed, screaming, trying to rip his cock free again - but I clamped down harder, determined to tear out a piece of him.
The door shuddered inward with a violence that made the entire frame shudder. Dust rained from the hinges. The sound ricocheted through the room, punching straight through my skull.
A man stormed in.
He was taller, older, and rage rolled off him in waves so thick I could taste it. In a single, blistering second, he took in the room - me on the ground, helplessly chocking on the other man’s cock yet refusing to let go, while the other man wailed at the top of his lungs.
And his expression darkened like he’d just found the reason he woke up angry this morning.
His face twisted.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he roared.
The man I was biting tried to babble something, but his howling was louder.
“We don’t touch the merchandise, you idiot!”
The man raised a gun.
I barely had time to jerk back before the shot exploded.
The sound was deafening in the small room.
The bullet hit the man - point blank. His body jerked, then collapsed beside me in a dead weight. Blood sprayed across my face, warm and metallic, splattering my cheek, my neck, my shirt.
For a second, the world stopped. I was frozen. Covered in someone else’s blood. Heart slamming so hard I thought it would break free.
The man with the gun looked down at the corpse like he was annoyed, not horrified.
“Fucking amateurs never learn,” he muttered.
He kicked the dead man’s leg out of his way, then looked at me.
“You bite me like that,” he snapped coldly, “and I’ll take more than a finger.”
I swallowed hard, shaking, blood dripping down my chin.
But I stared him dead in the eye. Because fear was useless now.
And he saw it - the defiance, the fire - and his lip curled before he turned and walked out of the room.
Men rushed in to drag the corpse out.
And I sat there, drenched in blood that wasn’t mine, choking on metallic heat, with a severed piece of a dead man’s penis still in my mouth.
The realization hit me like a second injury - almost worse than the first.
My mind rejected it, then circled back, then rejected it again.
I didn’t spit it out right away. I couldn’t. I was too stunned. Too horrified. Too damaged in ways I didn’t even have names for.
My hands shook so violently that they blurred in front of me. My breath came in broken, uneven bursts that scraped my lungs raw. Every instinct in my body screamed for me to cry, gag, collapse, fall apart.
But I didn’t.
Because through the shock - through the shaking, the nausea, the part of me that was slipping toward empty, I felt something cold settle in.
A razor’s edge of clarity.
If I was going to survive this, I had be willing to do anything. Anything. There was nothing I wouldn’t do, and no line I wouldn’t cross.