Page 18 of Her Mercenary

I dropped my hands from my ears, exhaling in relief, grateful that the kids were no longer awake to feel the fear, see the horror around them.

Leaving the children, the guards stepped to the brunette’s cage. I lowered my head once again.

A moment passed as words were exchanged between the men, but nothing from the man in black. He’d gone silent the moment the children were brought into the room.

I listened to footsteps cross the floor, the clink of the wire cutters being plucked from their rusty hook in the wall.

A tear escaped my eye. No amount of meditation could take away what was going to happen next.

I listened to the sound of the cage being opened. Heard the shuffle as the sedated brunette was pulled to a seated position.

I heard her scream.

Heard the pop of bone as her finger was removed.

Heard the wails, the pleas, and the sobs that followed as she was shoved back into her cage and locked inside.

The guards turned.

Not the children, I prayed, not the children.

Instead, my cage door was opened.

“Venir,” Capitán barked.

I obeyed, slowly crawling forward like a dog, my head down, scanning the floor as far as I could see. A pair of black wingtips next to black combat boots.

When I reached the front of my cage, Capitán crouched before me, painfully gripped my chin, and yanked my face upward. I tensed, expecting a blow from either him or the King.

But nothing came. Instead, the King said something to Capitán, and again my ears perked at his deep Irish brogue.

“Open your eyes,” Capitán demanded of me in broken English.

I didn’t.

My hair was fisted, my head viciously jerked, sending a shot of pain up the back of my neck.

“Open your eyes,” he snapped, jerking my hair again. “Look at him.”

Him—the King.

Squinting, I slowly opened my eyes, still expecting some sort of physical attack. Instead, I was met with a pair of slitted emerald-green irises staring at me so intently, I was jarred by the moment.

My stomach flipped in some sort of immediate visceral reaction to him. His face was hard, sharp lines carved from granite, his hair as black as a raven’s wing, his body as tall and thick as a mountain.

He was absolutely terrifying, but in the most gorgeous, drop-to-your-knees sexy way.

I took all of him in—the designer suit, the expensive gold watch around his wrist, the poise in his squared shoulders, the power in his stance, the unnerving dominance that came as naturally to him as breathing. A man of generational wealth, I would have guessed, if not for the jagged scar above his eyebrow and the tattoo licking up the side of his neck.

The King dipped his chin in some sort of approval of me.

Capitán shoved my face away, releasing my hair.

Like a magnet, my pulse roaring, I locked eyes with the King. Take me, I mentally begged in some sort of completely irrational desperation. Take me away from here.

Surely, this man had a nice home. He wasn’t dirty and gross like the men I’d been enslaved to. I could be his—he didn’t seem that bad.

This is what I was thinking at that moment. This is how the fucked-up mind of a slave works, twisted by imprisonment.