Voices invade my ears.
I gasp as the door swings open and three men walk in. When they spot me hanging from the skylight like an oversized streamer, the world tilts again.
The man in front is the most severe of the three. A nasty scar cuts a diagonal across his scowling face. After one glimpse at me, he nails the guy on his left with a glare. “Thisis what you brought home from the auction? A fucking spider monkey?”
The insult glances off me, because my attention rivets to the guy he’s addressing.
It’shim.
The kisser. My kidnapper.
Rory.
He’s here, in this room. Standing right in front of me.
Eyes trained on my startled, incredulous face.
“Get down from there.” He barks the command like I’m a dog napping on his priceless duvet.
Sucking down short, strained breaths, I freeze, transformed to stoneby shame and dread.
Seeing him again is jarring.
I couldn’t square how he might be connected to Leo, and now I realize it’s worse than that.
He works for my family’s arch nemesis.
Strike that. He doesn’t just work for my family’s arch nemesis. Heisone.
Rory’s an Irish King.
That means Ikisseda King.
In the light of day, the truth is all too awful.
“Darren, get her down from there.” Scarface nods to the guy on his right, an attractive blond man with unsettling blue eyes who stalks toward me with purpose.
“No!” The octave my voice hits could shatter chandeliers.
The room devolves into chaos.
Me, shifting into fight mode and transforming into a wild, kicking, thrashing thing, desperate to survive.
Them, three men who don’t know what I’m capable of, attempting to yank me down from the ceiling. The harder they come at me, the harder I fight to hold them at bay.
Bending my knee, I pop the lower half of my right leg at the blond. My foot cracks against the side of his face.
Darren curses and pitches left into Scarface with a grunt. He grips his jaw. Blood beads in one corner of his mouth, and an edge enters his voice. “What is she, a striker?”
Pain blooms in my toes, but the adrenaline coursing through my system deadens the intensity. I might even be little high from the rush, because I zero in on the odd, patchy scars on his hands and pause to speculate what might have caused them before snapping back out of it.
“For fuck’s sake,” Scarface growls. “If three of us together can’t subdue one small woman, we may as well give up our jobs now and move to Tibet or something.”
Darren cocks his head. “Why Tibet?”
“Because we’ll need all the spiritual guidance we can get to stop me from murdering you both!”
With more strength and speed than I expect, Scarface’s iron fist clamps around my left ankle.
