8. Kiera
KIERA
“We need a name. Now.” I tried to steady my voice but it came out shaky nonetheless.
By now, Grant’s eyes had fallen to the tweezers in Spencer’s hands. Everything about the tool displayed just what they planned to do with the fucker.
I’d seen the way Leo kept her real tools, just how sanitary and careful she was in tending to my wounds. These weren’t meant for keeping people alive. If anything, they might have been intended to cause sepsis.
Grant shook his head. “We don’t use names. It’s all code.”
Nodding to Leo, Spencer stepped closer. In one swift motion, Leo’s two, massive hands gripped Grant’s forearm and pinned it in place. No matter how hard our prisoner tried, he couldn’t get out from under her grip.
Spencer kneeled down and slipped the sharp edge of the tweezers under Grant’s index finger nail. Clamping down on the top of the nail, Spencer looked up at him with disappointed eyes. “Last chance.”
Squirming, Grant couldn’t believe they’d really do it.
And to be fair, neither could I. This was looking more like a black ops mission than biker gang violence.
After a moment, Spencer drove her elbow back and ripped the nail from the bed.
A shriek rang out from Grant’s chest. Every fiber of his being devoted to expelling the pain that Spencer — my sweet, innocent Spencer — had inflicted.
Spencer sucked her teeth while she waited for Grant to stop bitching. There was a hardness in her dark eyes, something like anger brewing in her body. I hadn’t seen her like this, not ever.
Through his whimpers, Grant nodded. “We call the head guy Boy Prince. That’s all I know.”
Trying to pull Spencer from the darkness, I stepped forward and kept us moving. “Why are you doing this? How could you do this?”
It was the question I’d been asking myself all night. How anyone could do this to another human being, something deep in my bones needing to know the answer. An answer I think I’d been hunting for over a decade.
A sick laugh ripped through his chest, an attempt to quell the bone chilling pain he was feeling. It was clear from the smirk on his face that he didn’t mind answering this one.
Lifting his head, he met my eyes. “It’s easy money. These girls deserve it, they shouldn’t be drunk like that around us.”
It was the truth, at least how he saw it.
Despite the honest answer, Leo stood up and threw a full-bodied punch into his gut, hitting right below his ribcage. The anatomy chart from high school biology flashed in my mind. His solar plexus. Gall bladder, liver, kidney. Most of his vital organs would be vulnerable there.
Something I was certain Doctor Callahan would be aware of.
Spitting on him, Leo seethed. “Piece of shit.”
I felt my chest rising and falling, dramatically sucking in air as a surge of anger rushed through me. Watching Leo hit him wasn’t enough, I wanted to feel his ribs collapse under my foot.
Before I could move closer to him, Spencer took my place. Towering over Grant, whose chin had dropped to his chest as his head hung nearly limp, Spencer lifted his face up into the light. “Why the different bars?”
Despite Spencer’s energetic, goofy attitude, she was shockingly serious. Shockingly composed. She was poised to get what she needed from this asshole. The sooner she did, the sooner they could beat the shit out of him and dump him somewhere.
“You’ve been watching for a while, then.” Grant laughed, blood trickling from the corner of his smarmy face. Shaking his head, he just laughed.
Leo’s anger was growing hard to control. Grabbing his hair, Leo slammed Grant’s head back into the metal pillar that the chair was tied to.
“Fuck!” Grant yelped, his hands flinching against the zip ties as he tried to assess the damage with his fingers. Through rugged breaths, Grant relented. “Safer. Harder to spot a pattern.”
From behind me, Dom’s low voice growled from the darkness of the warehouse. “Not for us. Gonna have to be more creative.”
I couldn’t keep looking at this fucking monster. Moving farther, letting my face become fully illuminated by the blinding overhead light, I peered down at him. “How far in advance do you get your orders?”
Blinking through the blood and the intense headache I was sure that was pounding behind his forehead, Grant’s eyes went wide. “You? It’s really you?” A hollow laugh ripped through his chest, sounding wet like his lungs were filling with blood as we spoke.
Spencer launched forward, hand gripping Grant’s chin. “Who? Who do you think she is?”
“Bosses think there’s a payday for your head.” Grant snorted, getting a kick out of all of this.
Panic flowed through every cell of my being.
He knows me.
Wide-eyed, I couldn’t move as Spencer grabbed the tweezers, shoving them under another nail. Leo launched a kick into Grant’s nuts, forcing his arms to jolt and pulling the nail from its bed.
Leo was yelling now, the veins in her muscular neck popping out from the hilt of her sword tattoo. “When do the orders come down?”
Even through the pain, Grant wasn’t giving in on this.
A clatter came from behind me as Dom chucked his phone onto the metal tray, a rope wrapped around each of her palms as she approached the metal chair. About a foot of slack separated Dom’s hands.
Even in the dim light of the warehouse, I could see the twine digging into her flesh.
Moving behind Grant, Dom wrapped the slack around his throat and pulled back — her biceps and forearms flexing as she pulled with all of her strength.
In seconds, Grant’s face turned red as his airways were cut off. Lowering her mouth just inches from his ears, Dom’s voice was a low, earth-rumbling growl. “When. And where. Or this warehouse will be the last thing you see in your parasitic life.”
He didn’t cave, unwilling to tap out. Dom’s hands shook with the force of strangling him.
I couldn’t look away. And I knew I should want to, should want to hide from this violence. But as his face changed from red, to purple, to blue, I wanted to watch the life fade from his eyes.
He deserved it, didn’t he?
All of them did. Every man like him should have seen a fate like this.
Just as my eyes hungered to watch him die, his fingers twitched with surrender. Like every man, he would’ve hated to see a woman satisfied.
Dom released her grip, leaving the rope wrapped around her fists.
Coughing, Grant tried to get air down his throat. Once he’d gotten enough of his composure back, he spoke through a scratchy throat. “Right before we get sent out. They give us cash. Tell us the bar. Enough cash to entice any dumb bitch.”
Gritting her teeth, Leo asked one last question. “Where did you meet tonight?”
“The park, Valemont Center. No cameras, dark.” The words came out as a hiss. His head drooped as the exhaustion of all we’d done to him started to hit his body.
My head whipped toward Dom as the rope slipped to the ground, a gentle thump as it hit the concrete.
She moved away from the chair, disappearing back into the darkness of the warehouse. Peering after her, all I could see was the swing of the closet doors.
It must be over.
Maybe she was just getting a knife to cut him loose, they’d knock him out and dump him somewhere.
Or maybe they’ll send him to the Gauntlet.
My skin crawled at the thoughts, the brutality. But after seeing what he’d done to that woman, what he must have done to dozens of others, I wouldn’t have minded watching him fight for his life against the Bull.
Some sick part of me didn’t want to see him leave this room, not with a pulse. If he got away, he’d be able to hurt more people.
More selfishly, he could report having seen me and an army of abusive tech bros would be hot on our trail.
But then Dom sauntered back into the light, her jacket gone and a brown, leather knife holster visible. Her sleeve of tattoos glistened with sweat under the intense light, her veins creating mountains along her arms for my eyes to follow.
Dom stopped next to me, standing closer than I knew she wanted to. Her blue eyes flashed down to my green, a fire burning behind them. My gaze moved down to her hands where she’d pulled a knife from her holster and unfolded the blade in one swift motion.
It wasn’t a normal knife. Now, it was a short, curved blade. Like the scythe of the grim reaper. But this was handheld, black from the handle all the way to the tip of the blade. It was pristine, like she’d bought it yesterday.
I knew from the way she handled the weapon that it wasn’t new.
From the chair, Grant started to thrash. “Let me go! I answered your fucking questions!”
Leo and Spencer squared their shoulders, both of them nervous for whatever was coming next. A tension filled the massive warehouse, like it was about to burst brick by brick.
Looking back to Dom’s face, her chiseled jaw tensed and her eyes dark, I swallowed hard. I knew what she was going to demand of me. And I knew that if I complied, I’d be one of them. I could only hope answers awaited on the other side of the warehouse walls.
Holding it out to me, Dom’s furious eyes spoke more than her words did. “Finish him.”