Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
ANORA
M y head felt like it weighed a million and one pounds, and it was hard for me to open my eyes against the blinding light shining in my eyes.
Where the hell am I? And what’s going on?
“Rory?” I whispered. My lips and mouth were so dry that I was surprised the words made their way out.
The last thing I remembered was walking through the mall with Rory and burning time while we waited for the double date we had planned for the night. She had insisted that we both needed new dresses and shoes, as if this was a life-changing evening.
Granted, we had both found good men who actually liked each other and would be stuck with us forever whether they liked it or not. A celebration was necessary and for once I couldn’t turn her down.
Everything after that felt like a blur, and I couldn’t connect the pieces enough to make them make sense.
“Wake up, mi amor .”
A muffled voice broke through the reverie of my jumbled thoughts. I so desperately wished it was Quentin’s voice, but I knew it wasn’t. I had never heard the voice before, and it sent a shiver of fear through my body.
I cried out as my cheek began to tingle from the sting of a slap, causing my eyes to fly open and take in my surroundings.
A dark-haired man with bronze, tattooed skin stood before me, a sneer twisting his face and the promise of death in his dark brown eyes. Rolled-up sleeves revealed more ink on his forearms, barely any skin visible. He hunched over, forcing himself into my direct line of sight, consuming my vision. He was like death reincarnate, ready to take me as his unwilling victim.
My eyes flicked to the landscape behind him as I tried to place where exactly I was. Thick chains hung from mostly bare walls, the floor caked with dirt and what I knew had to be dried blood from the looks of it and the smell of copper that permeated the air. The smell of old blood was accompanied by a musty odor that made me want to gag, bile slowly inching up my throat. Water dripped into a puddle every minute or so, the only way I knew that time was passing at all, and I wasn’t stuck in some sort of nightmare.
It was during my glance around the room that I realized my hands were bound behind me in a chair. A lone lamp shone down on me, everything else shrouded in darkness.
“Eyes here,” the man said, clamping a hand around my face and forcing my eyes back to his. My cheek still stung from where he had smacked me, and I felt like my jaw was moments away from breaking with the pressure of his grip.
“Who are you?” I dared ask through my squished cheeks, not understanding what was happening or what someone could possibly want with me. This had to be a mistake of epic proportions. Wrong person, wrong time kind of thing.
Yet the pain this man was inflicting upon me felt deserved.
No—he had to have the wrong person.
I tried to keep my face blank, fighting for calm so he didn’t know how much he rattled me to my core. I just wished I felt as brave as I was trying to portray.
“My name is Angel,” he drawled, his voice thick with an accent I couldn’t place through the fog covering my brain. I could barely form a single thought.
“What can I do for you, Angel?” I asked, trying desperately to keep the situation somehow light. My words came out less garbled as he had slowly released the pressure on my face, but he still kept his hand there, as if to remind me he could shut me up just as quickly.
Could this have something to do with Quentin? Could the love I have for him be bringing this onto me?
I started to piece it together. I was in love with a man who erased people from the earth. Of course there would be repercussions and I’d be brought into it. Angel had to be connected to Quentin somehow.
It was the consequence of my weak heart.
“You’re already doing plenty,” Angel answered before throwing my head to the side and backhanding me again.
I cried out against my better judgment and tasted blood as it filled my mouth.
“Whatever is happening, or whatever you think I’ve done, you’ve made a mistake. You have the wrong girl,” I whimpered.
So much for making light of the situation.
“No, Anora, you’re exactly who I wanted, and you’re going to be so fun to break,” he replied, and that was the last thing I heard before my world was plunged again into darkness.
* * *
It felt like only minutes had passed before I woke again, but I could tell by the sunlight that filtered through the barred and broken windows close to the ceiling that it had been hours.
When I had lost consciousness before, I had been tied to a chair, my arms flexed so far behind me that they felt close to popping out of their sockets. That was no longer the case now, as I opened my eyes and saw my arms hanging above my head, wrists clasped by rusty, iron chains matching the ones banded around my ankles. I couldn’t move even if I wanted to, and my numbing arms weren’t helping my optimism about adjusting to a more comfortable position, even just an inch.
My face still burned from Angel’s earlier slaps, but thankfully my brain seemed to be clearing of the fog that had been slowing my thoughts. Despite my numb arms and my encasement in the chains, I tried to twist and see if I could move even a little bit.
A frustrated grunt left my lips as I stayed exactly where I was, the metal clanging but denying me movement.
“Stop trying to move,” an ogre of a man from my left said, slinking from the shadows. I hadn’t even noticed he was there and comparing him to an ogre was honestly offensive to mythical ogres everywhere.
He had to be well over six feet tall, and his torso was comparable to the trunk of a large oak tree. He looked like he could wrap his arms around me and squeeze, and my eyeballs would pop out of their sockets.
In short, he was hideously terrifying .
I said nothing to his command, keeping my mouth closed, my movements minimal, and my eyes down. Angel had no problem putting his hands on me—I couldn’t imagine his men had any problems doing the same thing. The more I behaved, the more likely I was to get out of this alive.
I stopped struggling against the chains and pressed my lips together to keep a whimper from leaving my lips at the feel of the metal rubbing my wrists raw. I hadn’t been here for very long, and already I could feel the walls around my emotions beginning to dissolve and my weaknesses starting to leak through. It terrified me just how much and how easily they’d be able to break me.
“Where is the Portland Slasher?” the ogre asked in a growling, menacing tone, cutting to the chase and assuming I knew anything about Quentin and his whereabouts. It made me question exactly how much Angel knew about the man behind the mask—and if it was as little as I thought it was, then how had he possibly found me? What had given my identity away but not Quentin’s?
“What makes you so sure I even know who the Portland Slasher is?” I asked, and the next thing I knew was pain as his fist connected with my cheekbone, hitting me so hard I felt like he had broken a bone.
“Don’t play dumb, you stupid bitch,” he snarled, getting so close to my face I could smell his stale breath. “We know the death of Mark Waverly was because of you. Your boyfriend isn’t the only one capable of digging into people and their backgrounds. He was good about keeping himself in the dark, but left you exposed.”
It was like Mark was coming back from the dead and haunting me one last time. Why this man had to continue to cause me hell was beyond me. We had gone on a singular date, yet he was the reason I had gotten caught by men hunting the man I loved.
Despite the ogre’s explanation, I kept my lips sealed, trying to prevent the wave of pain from rushing over me and drowning me.
“Nothing to say?” he asked, taking several steps backward and giving me a false sense of hope before my eyes landed on the table that had been hidden in the shadows.
My stomach rolled at the sight of the various instruments on the table. These weren’t regular men I was contending with, and by the looks of the devices laid before me, they were good at making people disappear without a trace. I couldn’t even name all of them, nor tell you what they would be used for, and I dreaded finding out.
The henchman picked up a blade that looked like something from a slasher film. When he moved it in the light, its shine was menacing. It looked wickedly sharp and lethal, and I whimpered involuntarily.
“Don’t be scared, beautiful,” he cooed. “It’ll only hurt a lot.”
That was all the warning I got before he began to slowly pull the knife across the exposed skin on my arms, and it wasn’t long before unconsciousness gave me a beautiful reprieve.
* * *
I could barely open my eyes against the swollen flesh that now surrounded them. I had stopped praying for the release of death after the second day of this mess I’d unknowingly gotten myself into.
I only knew it was the third day, maybe even the fourth now, of me being in this abandoned warehouse by the small sliver of sun that peeked through the brick walls. It helped me keep track of when the sun set and rose.
It could easily have been longer. Time blurred, stretching indefinitely as bouts of unconsciousness claimed me more times than I could count.
Angel came every day, multiple times a day, to dole out punishment for crimes that weren’t my own. When he wasn’t here, other men took rotations. They kept a watchful eye on me, making sure I drank water and ate the scraps of bread they gave me. Just enough to keep me alive, but not enough to keep me comfortable.
Every muscle inside my body ached, new bruises blossoming all over my skin, cuts reopening so often that they continued to bleed and never got a chance to heal.
My stomach felt like an empty, endless pit and my throat felt like a desert.
With each passing day, I felt more and more hopeless that anyone would come to my rescue. Quentin said he tracked the scum of the earth. If he wanted to find me, I knew he could. So, what kind of fuckery did Angel have going on that I couldn’t be found?
Quentin had always promised me he would burn the world down for me if he had to.
So why wasn’t the world ash yet?
Not only did I feel hopeless, but I longed for death’s sweet release to free me from the brink of pain to which my captors pushed me multiple times each day. I had never wanted to look death in the eye so much in my life. To take the hand of the reaper and feel numb and happy again.
I had never endured something that pushed me past my breaking point so harshly before. Some days, remembering to breathe felt like too much.
“Ready for more?” Angel said from behind where I was lying in the fetal position on the cold concrete. My body felt so broken; I could barely feel the cool ground against my skin, or the throbbing of my bruises and pain of my broken bones.
From all my teenage years of watching movies and television shows, I had always thought that before you died, you felt no pain. I thought there was a moment that offered the last bit of goodness the world could give you before scrubbing you off its surface.
But even that now felt like a lie.
Even though I wasn’t feeling any pain at this moment and felt so fucking numb, I knew Angel could bring it all back without even trying that hard.
“I miss your voice, mi amor ,” he said in a fake soothing tone. “Why won’t you talk to me anymore?”
I hadn’t spoken to him or used my voice in days. I had my doubts that it would even work with the dryness of my throat and the ache from my screams.
He waited only a moment before growing impatient with my silence and kicking me in my ribs, which already felt shattered into a million pieces.
“You don’t deserve my words,” I croaked, and he leaned close to smile in that signature evil way of his that plagued my nightmares every time I closed my eyes.
I could tell he was growing more restless as the days went on and Quentin didn’t make an appearance. I had learned that Angel Santino was a man who wanted things to happen on his own timeline, but Quentin wasn’t playing his game.
“I’m beginning to believe I overestimated your meaning to the Portland Slasher, mi amor .” He clicked his tongue, and I wanted to spit on him and the stupid nickname he’d given me.
He never used Quentin’s name, which only cemented my theory that he didn’t know his true identity.
But then, how had he found me?
Nothing about it made any sense, and it only angered me more that my brain couldn’t connect the dots.
Maybe he had known who Quentin was all along and was fucking with my head as some kind of psychological torture. Maybe he had been keeping an eye on Quentin for a long time and had seen us together. I had a feeling I would never find out, because even if he didn’t tell me, I suspected soon I wouldn’t be doing much talking since I would be dead.
I wouldn’t put fucking with my mind past him, and frankly, I didn’t care anymore.
I kept Quentin’s name close to my heart, and Angel’s failure to use it made me feel like it was something only I had.
It was the only thing that I had left to hold on to.
“I like you, Anora, so I’m going to give you a gift,” Angel began. I couldn’t bring myself to care about whatever his supposed gift was. Nothing from him would be beneficial to me anyways.
He looked down at his watch before meeting my eyes again. “I will give him twenty-four more hours to show up, and once the sun rises tomorrow, if he isn’t here, then you won’t be either.”
He didn’t have to spell it out for me.
I could read between the lines easily enough.
I had twenty-four hours until I was dead.