Savage Captor Snippet #2
Monster takes a seat in the chair across from me. He folds his arms over his chest and leans back, raking a hostile gaze over me. I swallow hard, trying not to shift under the weight of his stare.
“You’re the daughter of Luther Sharpe,” Monster says. “Yes or no?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” I reply.
His gaze hardens with anger. “Don’t play games. Don’t pretend you’re on the outs with daddy dearest.”
“I am on the outs with my father,” I snap back, my blood starting to heat. “I got the hell away from that asshole years ago.”
“Don’t fucking lie.” Monster’s voice is elevating in pitch. He’s growing agitated. I don’t think that reasoning with him will do me any good, but I have to try.
“I don’t know what you think my relationship with my father is, but if you think I’m on his side, you’re dead wrong,” I say. “Whatever he’s done to you, I guarantee he’s done worse to me. I have no contact with him. I escaped him and never looked back.”
“Is that why you’re living in an apartment he bought you?” Monster snaps. “Is that why he’s paying your tuition?”
“He’s doing no such thing,” I retort. “You think he ever wasted a dime on me, even before I escaped him?” I grew up wearing my brother and mother’s hand-me-down clothes, for fuck’s sake. I never had anything of my own.
“Then who’s providing your living arrangement and funding your college life?” Monster challenges. I open my mouth to say my brother, but hesitate.
Eric flies as low under the radar as I do, even lower because of his line of work.
I don’t know if I can name-drop him. I don’t want to endanger him.
Hell, there’s a good chance that if I mention him, he’ll end up here alongside me.
He has protection, sure, but whatever Monster’s job is, I have a dreadful sense that he might be as powerful and well-connected as Eric.
If my brother’s life could be at stake, then I can’t use him. He needs the element of surprise.
Monster takes my refusal to answer as an admission of guilt. “Right.” He pushes up from his seat, the motion deliberate and measured, a movement that stretches time just long enough for panic to take hold in me. My stomach lurches.
Then, his hand moves. A knife slides free from his belt, wickedly sharp, catching the light as it flashes into view. My pulse stutters. I flinch before I can stop myself, before I can mask the raw terror gripping my chest.
He closes the distance between us in a few short strides, every step a countdown that’ll inevitably end in unspeakable pain. A fine film of sweat slicks my skin, cold with dread. He thinks I’m lying, and he’s going to slit my throat because of it.
This is how I die. I suppose it’s fated, in a way.
It was always meant to go like this. My birth was a sin of its own; I’m the product of a broken, beaten woman and a tyrant of a man.
Of course I was meant to be killed like this, in a cold cell somewhere, at the hands of someone whose wrong assumptions will lead him to take an innocent life.
Monster grabs the back of my chair in one hand and holds the knife to my neck. Tears sting my eyes at the cool press of steel against my skin, but I force them back. Make myself tamp them down. If I’m going to die, then I’ll do it with some dignity.
“Tell me everything you know about your father’s operation,” he rumbles, voice deepening by an octave. “Everything. How many men he has working for him. Where his safehouses are. What his day to day looks like. How you lured my brother to you and handed him over to your father. Tell me everything.”
So, he does think that I played some kind of role in his brother’s death.
More specifically, he thinks that I led his brother to my father.
Which means that Monster is at odds with my father, and that’ll most likely eventually lead him to his death.
Nobody escapes a rivalry with Luther Sharpe intact. Few even live to tell the tale.
“I don’t know anything,” I stress. “I don’t know who your brother is. I told you, I escaped my father years ago, and I didn’t go back. I have no contact with him. Someone else is paying my tuition—I can’t tell you who because I’m protecting them, but I promise it’s not Luther.”
“Lies will only worsen your pain, bitch,” Monster hisses. “You got in touch with my brother. Probably used your body to draw him out—he was always game for a good screw, and your prettiness is the perfect lure. Then, you told your father where he’d be. Admit it.”
“I didn’t,” I stress. “Your intel is wrong, I swear. I would never do that to someone—”
“Admit it!” he roars.
Anger gives me wings. I lean forward, pressing into the knife, until I’m nose to nose with Monster.
“I didn’t—fucking—do it. But if your brother was anything like you are, he probably got himself killed without needing my help—” I cut off with a brutal screech as sharp, biting pain ignites in my right thigh.
It eats through my skin, melds into my muscle and bone, then spreads outwards with every single beat of my heart.
I’ve felt pain like this before, but not in years—fuck, it hurts.
It’s agony. It’s blistering heat that causes an unbearable chill in my core.
It makes me yearn to do anything if only to make it stop.