Chapter 27 #2
“I know. But I have a bad feeling about this, Gabriel. I think we’re underestimating Wells’ obsession.”
“We’re not. On the contrary, I’m counting on it. Believing she’s guilty will utterly destroy him. Trust me. By the time we’re finished here, he’ll be the one plunging the knife into her heart.”
They walk away, closing the door behind them, leaving me enshrouded in darkness.
I close my eyes a moment, reeling from everything I’ve just heard. They want Damien to find me. They want Damien to kill me.
She’s taking the fall.
I don’t have the nanochip and Gabriel and his brother know it. The others don’t, though. Are they planning to fuck over Aaron, Noel and Elias?
Not that it matters to me. What matters is that they’re planning to fuck me over. Torture me, disfigure me… then wait for Damien to finish the job. Somehow, that’s what hurts the most. Damien. Everything else pales in comparison.
I press my arms to my sides. The sharpness of the blade as it slices through more skin keeps my mind focused.
I take a deep breath and do my best to move the rag back in my mouth, sucking on it, folding as much of it into my cheeks as I can manage, while shuddering at the disgusting taste.
After a few minutes of effort, I manage to free my teeth from the rag and then, after some contortion, to snatch the handle of the knife through the cloth that covers my mouth.
Freeing my hands takes a long time. Beads of sweat prick the back of my neck as I hear footsteps outside, but at last, after a lot of accidental cuts that dye my skin bright red, I manage to slice through the zip ties tying my wrists to the pipe.
I pull off the rag pressed against my lips and spit out the one filling my mouth, then take in great big gulps of air.
The zip ties that bind my ankles only take thirty seconds more to cut, but those are the thirty seconds that ruin everything.
Just as I spring up, the door opens again, and I find myself face to face with Noel.
He stares at me for a second in surprise, and I take advantage of his shock to lunge at him, swiping blindly with my knife. I know too well the feel of a blade in human skin to believe I’ve made any real damage, but I don’t look back to check. I keep running as a flow of curse words follows me.
No way am I getting out of here alive.
I know it for a fact even before I come crashing to a halt near the entrance of the warehouse.
Gabriel has just materialized in front of me, and the early morning light that spurred me on, and which was visible through the cracked door, is blotted out by his large frame.
I stare at the memory of that light for a moment, letting my irrational hope die down before tearing my eyes away and forcing them onto my captor.
He’s grinning.
“Well, look at that,” he says. “Our little prisoner is making a run for it.”
I shake my knife threateningly at him, but I already know it’s useless.
He takes a step forward and wraps his hand around the blade of the knife. I stare at it, then up at him.
He presses down, still grinning, and takes another step toward me, before yanking the knife out of my now feeble grasp by the blade, then twirling me around so that my back is pressed to him.
He twists my wrists painfully behind my head, lifts his phone up so that it’s angled right in front of my face, and I can see the photo he took of me. Then he presses Send.
As I exhale, oddly deflated, he kicks my shins hard, making me fall. His hand still around my wrists, he drags me over the rough floor to one corner of the warehouse, where the other Angels have gathered.
Noel is scowling at me, his hand pressed over a long gash on his chest, a cigarette wedged between his teeth.
“Relax,” Aaron is telling him. “Barely a scratch.”
“We’re fucking her up now,” growls Noel.
“We fuck her up when I say so,” corrects Gabriel coldly. He pauses, then adds, “Now.”
He lifts my wrists so that my arms are stretched over my head, and attaches them to a rusty pipe above me with zip ties. I gasp from the stretch, my toes barely touching the ground.
Then he stands in front of me and tilts my head up so gently it almost makes me second guess what awaits me.
“Where is it?” he asks sweetly.
I brace myself for the pain. There’s no way of surviving this situation. All I can do is hope to go swiftly.
A slow death… or a slower one.
The only question now is how to make him give me the quicker version of death. By angering him? Or by playing along?
I roll a die, and decide on the former.
“You know where it is,” I grunt.
His reaction is immediate. In a flash of movement, I see his fist a moment before it crashes into my face, causing me to sway backward, the zip ties around my bleeding wrists the only thing keeping me upright.
Well, if punches are his idea of torture, I can take it. I’ve been taking it my whole life.
“My turn,” says Noel, taking another puff from his cigarette, before twirling it before me. “The nanochip, cunt. Where is it?”
“Ask Gabriel,” I insist, my voice loud and even.
It’s odd what the absence of hope will do to a person. My mind is pervaded by a flat, stale sense of acceptance. Even the old childish refrain that still frequently plays in my mind, it’s not fair, has died down. I can’t really bring myself to care.
Maybe it’s not just hopelessness. Maybe it’s also the knowledge that Damien will be here soon, and he’ll kill me.
Noel takes his cigarette and flits it over me, the ash smoldering on my arm. Then he takes the entire thing and crushes it against my stomach.
I bite back a groan of pain.
“What next?” asks Aaron. “Pull out her teeth or her nails?”
“Let’s fuck her first,” says Lazarus, and I look away, a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach as I notice the bulge in his pants. “I don’t want to fuck an ugly hag.”
He walks around me slowly, and I squeeze my eyes shut, wincing. I was ready to get beaten, disfigured, killed. But raped?
That thought is unbearable, and a tear forms at the corner of my eye.
“Looks like we’re finally getting through to her,” chuckles Gabriel. “So, Seraphina. Or pet, as Damien calls you. Know anything about the nanochip? Otherwise, we’re going to fuck you so hard and so long you’ll bleed out by your holes.”
I shudder, then jerk in shock, my eyes popping back open. Lazarus is palming my breasts, his fingers twisting cruelly against my nipples. I try to edge back, but he merely slides his hands down to cup my ass, his arousal pressed against my stomach.
“Last chance,” breathes Gabriel in a threatening grin, his breath sickly sweet against my skin.
I shake my head furiously, unable to give him what he wants.
And the worst part is he knows it.
He’s already aware that all of this is useless. He’s aware that I won’t talk. I can’t talk. I don’t have the nanochip. I never did.
“Well?” he eggs me on, his voice thick with laughter at the private joke he shares with his brother at my expense.
I take steadying breaths, trying, and utterly failing, to accept my fate.
Gabriel takes a step back as Lazarus trails his fingers around my sides. He nods at him, and his little brother unzips his fly.
“I’ll go first,” says Lazarus.
His pants part to reveal a thick, veiny cock, already dripping at the tip with gobs of sticky pre-cum.
I turn away, sickened, when he draws even closer to me, his rancid breath practically making me hurl.
He grabs my ass again, his dirty fingernails clawing at my flesh, and pulls me toward him, pressing the tip of his cock first on my thigh, then against my folds.
I try to jerk back, but he sinks his fingers more deeply into the flesh of my bottom, keeping me in place as he searches for my opening, stabbing futilely with the head of his cock, before removing one of his hands from my ass to guide it into me.
It’s less than an inch away and I brace myself, my eyes squeezed shut, tears inundating my cheeks.
Then I hear a voice.
“Stop.”
Damien.
I open my eyes again, the tiniest glimmer of hope forming in my chest, even as I remember Gabriel’s cruel words.
He’ll be the one plunging the knife into her heart.
Lazarus pauses uncertainly, his cock still an inch away from me. Gabriel looks mildly annoyed, and I wonder if Damien has found me earlier than expected.
The next second, however, his face is once more an impenetrable mask, and he smiles smoothly.
“Damien,” he welcomes him. “We were expecting you.”
“Step away from the girl,” thunders the voice.
“She has the nanochip, Damien.”
“Step away from the girl,” threatens the voice again.
“Damien,” repeats Gabriel with the air of someone who has to explain basic math to a slow fifth-grader. “She betrayed us all. We’re doing you a favor by killing her. She would have sent you straight to the electric chair. Why don’t you come out from the shadows and…”
A single shot rings out, cleaving through the stillness of the early morning.
Lazarus stares at me, then brings his eyes down to his chest. A few drops of blood trickle out from the side of his mouth, blending with the pink-tinged foam that forms when he tries to speak.
And then he crumples, his dick still out, his eyes unseeing.
Everything seems to happen then in slow-motion.
Gabriel’s gaze follows the fall of his brother’s body, the smugness wiped clean from his face, replaced by utter shock.
The others stare, blinking dumbly. Then, they all come to their senses at once and duck just as a volley of shots ring out.
Some of them must have been directed at the pipe above me, because it crashes down and I fall with it.
At once, a hand closes around my ankle, dragging me backward just as the Angels get out their own guns and begin to shoot.
I feel myself being yanked against someone’s chest while two warm arms enfold me, and I don’t need to look to know who it is. I’d recognize his hands and that cedar-scented perfume anywhere.