Page 105 of Savage Roses
“Maybe next time. Orders are orders.”
I was flung back into my cell and left to rot for who knows how long.
I coughed up blood and laid crumpled on the concrete floor, experiencing the full ache of my bruises all over. Too weak and disoriented to move much, yet too prideful to show any real signs of just how deeply pained I was.
Instead… I disappear into my head. Each and every time, I choose stubborn silence. I lay bruised and broken and force myself to retreat into a false reality.
As my physical body lays cold and blue on concrete, I’m warm and clothed in my head. I’m on my bike, racing through the city at sunset with the golden horizon bursting before me. In my ear are the softest, most addictive breathy sounds I’ve ever heard. Around my torso, the trusting squeeze of arms that have latched onto me seeking security.
In my head I’m taking Delphine for an evening ride to Rose Hill.
We’re coming up on the Northam River as sun sets, smiling at the sight, embraced together with a happy calm over us.
If I’m happy in this memory of mine, then it’s still possible… then I can still hold on.
That’s the deluded kind of thinking I descend into. The kind of nonsense I tell myself to keep going.
Hold on. If it’s in your head, it can be real again. You can make it happen.
Hours, days, weeks.
I don’t know how much time passes. Eventually, they feed me food a dog probably wouldn’t eat and let me have some water. That’s as good as it gets—the lows keep coming.
I’m tortured, taken out every so often for questioning.
Apparently, Lucius still hasn’t found the tapes. He thought he had when he sent his men to capture me at Lena’s apartment, but he didn’t count on me hiding the tapes, nor me shooting a cryptic text to my guys about their whereabouts. That’s if any of them are still alive to get their hands on where it’s hidden in Lena’s ceiling.
So, in desperation for some answers, Lucius resorts to the usual Mafia methods.
Waterboarding me. I’m beaten several more times by several more men. Some threats are waged as they take me to the edge of death, pointing a gun to the temple of my head and telling me if I don’t speak in the next sixty seconds, my brains will be blown out.
My right hand’s smashed with a hammer. It’s broken three different ways.
Lucius shows up for some action. He moves me to an interrogation room and proceeds to play a game I’m familiar with from childhood—him and his knives and twenty-one questions where he progressively unravels and grows more and more erratic.
“This could end,” he says, dragging the blade of his knife along my throat. It’s with enough pressure that beads of blood bubble to the surface. “I could put you out of your misery if you tell me now. No more suffering.”
I scowl at him. “Fuck you.”
“You’re only making it worse.”
“I don’t care what you do to me.”
He jerks his knife away from my throat. “No, you don’t, do you? This is what I mean when I say you’ve always been a little smug piece of shit. Right from birth, I wanted to squash it out of you. You always thought you were tough shit.”
My stare meets his beady eyes, mine void of anything. Empty so as not to give him any real satisfaction.
His shrewd eyes only shrink further. He raises the blade of his knife high enough in the air that it glints in the light, and then he brings it down on me.
Straight into my shoulder.
I’m taken by surprise. A grunt of pain grinds out of me. I clamp my mouth shut to stave off any other sound as the blade digs into my upper arm and blood pools to the surface. The sharp, piercing pain throbs and joins the pain in many other parts of me.
Lucius smirks and twists the knife. The blade cuts through my muscle and more sharp pain shoots through my shoulder and bicep. More blood leaks from the wound. I grit my teeth and square my jaw and try to remain as unaffected as possible, but I’m human.
Somebody stabbing you hurts like hell. Even if it’s only in the shoulder.
Lucius plucks the blade free with a throaty laugh. “Where else?”