Behind Crane, Lyle plucks something off the table. A wrench, I think. He tosses it at me, bouncing it off my chest. “Fetch, puppy.”
Yep, a wrench.
Crane saunters over to me, grabs my hair, and yanks back my head, forcing me to look him in the eye. “You may have had her for a night, but I have her for the rest of her life.” His voice is low, a furious whisper meant just for me. “You’re going to die here,Atticus. You’ll disappear, and once you’re gone, I’m going to make my wife pay for lying down with a dog. Easy, mongrel,” he says when I fight against my chains. “Iwillkill her, but as I’m sure you’ve learned by now, I enjoy taking my time. I like to hurt a person properly first.”
He walks backward and peels off his suit jacket. Folds it. Places it on the table nice and neatly before rolling up his sleeves.
I pull at the restraints until the cuffs dig so deeply into my wrists, it feels like the metal scrapes against bone. “You’re dead.” I snarl and keep fighting against the restraints. My knees skid in the blood, but I can’t fall given how I’m chained. “Dead, you motherfucker.”
He nods and makes an impatient whirling motion with his index finger. “As you’ve said ad nauseam. Yet here I am, still alive.” He comes to stand directly in front of me and bends at the waist until we’re eye level. “And you are nothing but a rabid dog groveling at my feet.”
I spit a mouthful of blood on his shiny black shoes. “Let me lose, and I’ll show you a rabid dog.”
“No, I don’t think I will.”
“Coward,” I hiss.
“Shrewd,” he counters as he stretches to his full height. “Better to be the captor than the captive.” To Lyle, “Bring me the drill.”
Owen cackles. “You’re screwed now, pal.”
Again, literally.
We’ve played this game before, and shamefully, my bladder clenches. If I were a man given to pissing myself, the call for the tool would have me kneeling in a puddle of urine.
“What happened, Crane?” I taunt. “Jamie finally saw through your bullshit, so she came to me looking for a real man?”
A muscle tics in his jaw as he untucks the gray-and-white-striped button-down shirt from his starched charcoal trousers. Ice-blue eyes narrow on me. “If I didn’t enjoy listening to your screams, I’d cut out your tongue for saying her name. And as for my wife, I’d choose my words wisely if I were you, lest they affect how I treat her during the short time she has left.”
And just like that, Crane put two of us in this room.
I suck in a breath and fight to control my panic as I watch my torturers through a veil of filthy hair. This is about to get nasty—real fucking nasty—as Owen fastens a long, thin bit to the drill. He hands the power tool to Crane, with Lyle off to the side to watch in morbid anticipation.
“Crane, listen to me. Nothing happened. She wanted to see if it was me. We talked. She told me she was your wife. I got pissed and punched the wall. She left. That’s it.”
Crane tsks me like he’s patronizing a child who’s told a whopping lie. He strolls over, power tool in hand, and the yellow Black & Decker is all I can focus on. “What’s done is done, Atticus. Your lies can’t save her. She made her choice, and she’ll face the consequences. But because I’m a benevolent man, I’ll give her a reprieve. As long as you live, I won’t hold her accountable for letting you defile her body. See how generous I am?”
Crane lines up the bit to my right deltoid. I tense and steel myself, but honestly, I can never fully prepare for this level of torture. He hits the trigger. The bit spirals, corkscrewing into meat and muscle, ruining a section of my Grim Reaper tattoo. I hyperventilate as a tidal wave of agony rolls down my arm and across my chest. When I think I can’t take another second, when I swear the bit’s about to come out the other end and I’m going to start screaming, the tool cuts off. Reverses. Spirals out of my arm…
…then blessed quiet when the whirl stops.
Crane steps back, an artist admiring his masterpiece. Oh my fucking God, I can’t stop my stomach from heaving. I vomit all over myself. Crane sidesteps the mess to keep his expensive shoes clean.
Behind him, Owen howls with laugher. “Look at the big, bad Unholy covered in puke.”
“Not tough now, are you, Atticus?” Lyle snickers.
I clench my jaw so tight I think I crack a few molars. “Fuck. You.”
Not the best comeback, but it’s all I’ve got. I hang there, hunched and heaving. Unable to fall forward without tearing my shoulders from their joints. I sway on my knees, my vision spotty. I’m pulled into an icy ocean and drown in an abyss of suffering and humiliation.
“Get the syringe.”
Lyle giggles like a little girl as he darts across the room. He’s the prick who spears the needle into my neck, sending a shitload of ket sizzling through me. I hiss as an influx of pleasure hits me a fraction of a second before the first bite of pain. The drug rushes to every wound, a lover’s caress, stroking each one to a fever pitch. Until I can’t see. Can’t hear. Can’t breathe without wanting to claw away my skin, reach into my veins, and pull the ket out of my blood drop by drop.
Crane comes into view. He moves in closer, his words quiet, but I hear him past the pounding of my heart and the rushing of blood as agony drops me down to a whole other level of existence.
“My wife visited you out of a distorted sense of sympathy and nostalgia.” When my eyes roll back, and I drift toward the edge of blackness, Crane slaps me back into the moment. “I need you here, Atticus. Listen to me. Jamie has a good heart. She believes she’s in love with you.” He gets in so close, his words are a whisper in my ear. “I should kill you for taking what should have been mine. You had no right to her virginity.She’s my fucking wife.” He leans away, and my head’s spinning for all the wrong reasons. The hell? Jamie’s not a virgin. Impossible. But I can’t think about that shit now because Crane’s not done. “This agony? Jamie will experience this, too. I’m going to fill her so full of ketaphrin, I’ll make what her father did to her seem like a daydream.”
