Chapter Ten
Feralyn
Death isn’t the worst thing.
Funny, that.
I was so dehydrated, my throat burned, my stomach cramped, and my cracked lip dripped blood. My tongue darted out like a lizard’s, catching the drop like it could hydrate me.
Nothing could hydrate me.
Or save me.
The fear, it wasn’t of death anymore. It was of living. I didn’t want to live through this. I didn’t want to remember any of it. I just wanted it all to end.
“Still not talking, little sister?”
I’d stopped bracing for impact days ago. Or had it been hours? Weeks? Months? I didn’t know how long it had been, but forever had a new definition, and this was it.
Naked, ankles and wrists zip-tied, lying on a stained concrete floor in a moldy concrete room, the stench of putrid sewage mixed with low tide was pungent. I didn’t know where I was, how long I had been here, or why I had been violated in every way except one.
My body was so badly beaten and bruised, I couldn’t move and breathe at the same time. So I didn’t move.
I told myself it was a blessing they hadn’t forced themselves on me, but I just wanted to die.
The evil man, the scarred man, he gripped a handful of my greasy hair that still had bits of my own vomit in it from the first time he’d punched me in the stomach. Then he yanked my head up, forcing me into a seated position, and I fought the cry of pain, because that was what I had become.
Somewhere between a college campus I’d been so happy to never have to go back to—one that I’d weep to be at right now—and this punishing concrete floor that smelled like feces, I realized I was only in control of one thing.
Silence.
I was not going to say a word.
I would not weep.
I would not make a single sound.
Because that’s what the scarred man wanted from me.
Words. Sounds. Cries of pain. Answers I didn’t have.
Or maybe he didn’t really want anything, and this was all just a game to him.
“Shall we try this again?” he asked casually. “Your brother. Where is he?”
The first time he’d asked, I’d involuntarily shuddered because he hadn’t asked where my brother was.
He’d asked where Grayson was. Except he hadn’t meant Ares Grayson or Helios Grayson.
He wasn’t talking about my two stepbrothers who’d had their last name legally changed by their mother when she’d married my father all those years ago.
The evil man had meant Grayson “Ghost” Gautier.
My half brother.
My father’s other child. The son he’d had before me and abandoned. The son who had a mother who’d named her illegitimate child after the surname of the man who’d fathered him. The boy I’d met when I was too young to understand that Ghost wasn’t his real name, but a nickname Helios had given him.
I didn’t know where Ghost was.
All I knew was what Helios and Ares had told me, which wasn’t much.
Ghost was a Navy SEAL. Or had been. I didn’t know if he was still serving. I didn’t know where he lived. I didn’t know who his mother was. I didn’t know anything.
But this evil man with a scar was going to kill me over him.
I’d been terrified, then angry. So damn angry. But the pain, it was consuming.
Except I had somehow managed to float above it, and now I was nothing.
Nothing except silence.
Staring up at the ugly, jagged scar that was barely three inches long but grotesquely thick, I wondered how it’d gotten there.
I hoped Ghost had given it to him.
Or Helios.
Or Ares.
They all hunted terrorists. And I didn’t know for sure if this man was a terrorist, but I figured it was a safe bet.
Not that I was betting on anything other than death.
That and the fact that the other men who’d been in and out of this cell, the ones who didn’t speak any English, the assholes who’d leered, hit, kicked, and spit on me, none of them were going to save me from this hell.
But all of that was irrelevant now.
I was tired.
My body had broken parts. I was sure of it. I’d been stripped of all humanity. I didn’t care that Ares and Helios, or even my father when he’d been in the Air Force years ago, had served. This wasn’t freedom. This was what happened when you were related to a Special Operations Forces operator.
Helios had tried to warn me.
Ares had stopped him with a cold look, then told me to always be careful who I gave my name to.
Both had warned me repeatedly to never tell anyone what they did in the military. But that was years ago. I’d been younger, nothing had ever happened, and I’d all but forgotten about the true threat of it…
Until the car accident that wasn’t an accident.
The scarred man slammed my head into the wall, reeling me back to the present, then he let go of my hair. But the evil asshole didn’t follow it up with a slap, punch, or kick.
Tsking with disgust, he pivoted and turned toward the heavy metal door I’d inched to and tried to open days ago, before I was too badly beaten to move. Before I’d given up all hope.
Same as always, right as scar man got close enough to run into the door, it opened as if on its own, swinging out to reveal an equally disgusting, equally moldy cement hallway. My punisher done with me for the minute, hour, day, I started the slow process of exhaling, carefully.
But at the last second, instead of walking out and letting the heavy door slam shut behind him, Scar Face paused at the threshold and glanced back. “Is he worth dying for?”
A question he had never asked for a half brother I didn’t know.
The answer was simple.
No.
But Ares and Helios were, and this terrorist could’ve just as easily been after them, and I wouldn’t have survived childhood without those two brothers who’d taken me under their wings.
Not that I would ever tell a scar-faced terrorist about them.
I wasn’t going to say a damn word.
Instead, I did what I’d been doing since that first slap across my face—I retreated.
I didn’t know how or where I found the strength to not uselessly beg for my life, and I didn’t question it. I just took every good memory I’d ever had and played them on a reel. Except one face, one memory, more than all the rest, was the star.
Dirty-blond hair. Gray-blue eyes. And a deep, rough voice….
The corner of his mouth had tipped up, and he’d held out his arm. “Come here, Haven.”
A metal door slammed shut.
I lay down to die.