Page 16 of Savage Escape
“Well, I’ll be damned.” He stooped to grip a handful of Caden’s hair and drag her to her feet. “You’re still alive.”
“Walkin’ and talkin’.” Her voice was carefully pain free and mocking, like she was unimpressed with his torturing abilities.
“Well, let’s see if we can’t change that.”
7
CADEN
Caden had been through this same ol’ song and dance many times before. Not just as the torturee but also the one doing the torturing, so it went rather like a checklist in her head.
Display an arsenal of clever little torture devices.
Rid victim, aka the asshole stupid enough to get caught in the first place, of torture-hindering apparel.
Bind said asshole.
Attempt to reason.
Torture.
They’d done spectacularly so far.
She’d gotten a good view of the torture devices (a strategically placed set of knives and, hell, she wasn’t gonna bitch at their lack of creativity) when she’d been pushed into the room.
Number one, check.
She’d been stripped of her jeans and tied to a chair that was bolted to the floor.
Check and check.
He’d asked her politely and in the best way he knew how to be reasonable. All he wanted was a location. That was it. There was no need for this mess. If she only told him, then he’d let her go back to her cell. Didn’t that sound easy?
Check.
And when that hadn’t worked, he’d started cutting into the soft flesh on her inner thighs, always asking the same question.
“Where’s the boy?”
She was grunting and growling and focusing on breathing. On inhaling the cold dank air and letting the exhale be her release. Really, physical pain wasn’t all that torturous. Sure as fuck hurt, but it was just that, hurt. It really only served to fuel the rage in her belly and put names on death lists. As heart-stoppingly painful as torture was, she could handle it.
And really, it served as a frustratingly demoralizing reminder that she had yet to achieve any kind of progress on the whole ‘getting dead’ front.
She was bored. Pissed and hurting, but bored all the same. Or maybeboredwasn’t the correct descriptor. Maybe it was defeated or enraged or couldn’t-be-bothered-to-give-a-flying-fuck. One of those or all of those, it didn’t matter.
That wasn’t to say that getting a knife to the soft flesh of her inner thighs over and over didn’t hurt like fuck, but it was now just... just a stall. And she was so fucking sick of the stall.
Here, Caden was in the hands of the man who’d recently suffered the loss of his firstborn. The killer of that little shit-fuck-weasel was sitting right in front of him. He had a knife. He had a gun and he still wasn’t killing her.
No, instead he found a reason as to why she, the murderer of his son, should still be breathing.
“Just tell me where the safe house is, Quinn, and it’ll stop.”
Fucking—fuck!
Caden was trying her damndest to get dead. How fucking hard was that supposed to actually be? How many times had she dodged a well-aimed bullet or deflected a killing blow? How many times had she been on a gurney flat-lining? How many people had she killed, there and breathing one moment and gone the next? It was simple, right? But somehow, a woman that had killed more times than she wanted to count and had practiced dying (the whole dead for two minutes and some odd seconds thing when she was young), couldn’t even get this fuck-wad to off her.
It seemed as hard as she tried to get dead the Universe or Aliens or Gods (whoever the fuck was pulling the strings) were trying just as hard to keep her breathing.