The moment her wrists were free, she didn’t collapse, didn’t shrink away. She lunged.
Her hands, raw and bruised, fisted into the front of my shirt, pushing with every ounce of strength she had left. She might as well have been shoving a wall, but I let her try. Let her burn through that surge of adrenaline because I needed to see it, needed to know the Irish bastards hadn’t crushed all of her fight.
The push was weak, her breath ragged, but her eyes blazed up at me, that molten green-gold daring me to be another captor.
I caught her easily, one arm locking around her waist like she belonged there. My lips brushed the shell of her ear, my voice low enough to be felt as much as heard.
“Not hell, sweetheart,” I murmured. “Home.”
She stilled, just a fraction. Enough for me to know she’d heard me, even if she didn’t believe it yet.
Without another word, I swept her off her feet. She was too light in my arms, all bone and bruises beneath the grime, but she fit against me like she’d been made to be carried this way. My men stepped back, parting without a sound as I strode past them.
Past the bodies cooling on the floor. Past the pools of blood soaking into the concrete. Past the stink of sweat, rot, and Irish filth that thought they could keep her from me.
They were all dead now. Every last one of them. And the ones who weren’t? They would be.
Because this woman fighting my every touch belonged to me now, whether she knew it yet or not.
Chapter 2
The dark had teeth. It bit at me every time I closed my eyes, scraping over my skin, sinking into my bones. Down here, there was no sense of day or night, just the hum of the old pipes, the stink of mildew, and the shuffle of chains whenever one of the other girls moved in her sleep.
I stopped counting the days after the first week.
The Irish had taken me fast. One minute I was leaving the store where I worked, the next there was a rag over my face, hands on me, and then the sting of a needle. I woke up in this place with my wrists cuffed and a shackle on my ankle, chained to a rusted iron loop drilled into the floor. The others were already here, their faces pale, eyes hollow. Some cried. Some didn’t speak at all. I refused to do either.
They’d tried to break me, but I refused to let them win. The food was minimal, we were lucky to get a stale roll here, a bottle of water there. Sometimes nothing at all. A guard would come down and run his mouth, hint at what would happen to us when they sold us off, what we’d be worth. I learned quick that answering them only made it worse. I stayed quiet, but I met their stares with all the hate I had left.
And when they hit me, I didn’t cry, but now my body ached in ways I couldn’t catalogue. My wrists were raw, scabbed over from the manacles, my lip split from the last time I’d mouthedoff. But worse than the pain was the stillness. The waiting. The knowing that, at some point, someone would buy me and whatever life I had before would be gone for good.
And I had liked my life, at least, it had been mine.
I’d grown up in a small town on the coast, the kind of place where everyone knew your name and half the town had eaten your mom’s Sunday roast at least once. My father had been a fisherman until the sea took him, and after that, it was just my mom and me. She’d passed a few years back, which left me with an apartment over a bookshop and no one to answer to but myself.
I worked days in that shop, dusting shelves, restocking, sometimes curling up behind the counter with a novel when it was slow. Evenings, I pulled shifts at a bar two streets over, it was not glamorous, but the regulars were mostly harmless, and I could handle the ones who weren’t.
I had friends and I had freedom. I could take a walk at midnight with music in my ears and not think about chains or dark rooms or the value of my body on some sick underground market.
Now, those memories felt like they belonged to another woman entirely.
I didn’t know if anyone was looking for me. I had no siblings, no one close enough to kick up a fuss. That was the real gut punch, the understanding that I could disappear from the world and it wouldn’t stop spinning.
Here, I wasn’t Sorcha Wyatt, stubborn and mouthy and free. Here, I was just merchandise.
It was the sound that broke the monotony.
At first, it was distant muffled thuds, a sharp yell cut short. Then closer and louder. Boots were pounding above us, the echo of a body hitting the floor. In the distance someone swore. A gunshot cracked through the air, deafening in the enclosed space.
Every woman in the room froze, and then there was another shot. Then another. The clang of steel on steel. Something heavy was dragged across the floor upstairs, and then the sound of footsteps, they were steady, purposeful and they were coming down toward us.
The chain at my ankle felt heavier than ever. My pulse slammed against my ribs, my palms damp. Was it rescue or just another shift change of guards?
The door exploded inward. Not literally, but it might as well have as the heavy steel swung wide, and a flood of black-clad men charged in. They moved with precision, weapons up, scanning the room.
The first thing I noticed was that they didn’t look like Irish. No cheap tracksuits or whiskey stink. They were… sharper. They looked like predators in tailored armour.
And then I saw him. He was tall, broad-shouldered, moving like he owned the air around him. His presence hit me harder than the sight of his weapon, harder than the chaos behind him. Dark hair swept back from a face that was too sharp to be pretty, too cold to be gentle. His eyes, Christ, his eyes when they landed on me like a blade point pressing into my skin took my breath away.
