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Ily swallowed hard at Victor’s decoration choice, her shoulders rolling with sorrow.
It fucked me off that I couldn’t protect her. That I’d let her convince me to bring her with me. I should’ve left her in my room. I’d come here knowing I might have to pay a price—but if that price was her…?
Fuck.
My hand went to my knife in my pocket. Perhaps I could stab Victor and dash to his office. I could use his own computer to send a damn email. Q could use the IP address and find us that way.
Enough with this cloak-and-dagger bullshit.
The sooner I murdered Victor and ended this farce, the better.
Footsteps scraped on stone as the door closed with a soft snick behind me.
Looking over my shoulder, the urge to laugh twisted my stomach.
Guards.
Four of them.
Slipping into all four corners of the sick and twisted room as if Victor knew what I planned and ensured I had no way of killing him without being killed myself.
Glancing away as if the guards meant nothing, I grinned at Victor.
He smiled back before looking at Peter. “Go kneel over there, my pets. We’ll begin soon. Rest for a moment. It’s late, after all.”
“Yes, Sir V.” With his head bowed and obedience in every step, Peter took Ily to the only carpet draped over the stone flooring. Decadent ivory puddled like a cloud, glittering with strands of gold from the ostentatious chandelier above. It would’ve been a pretty carpet…if it wasn’t for the lakes of red, splashes of rust, and far, far too many spots of blood.
Real or just part of the design?
Had jewels dripped on it or had the threads been dyed to look that way?
Swallowing hard, I tore my gaze from Ily as Peter made her kneel beside him and bow her chin like a good little slave.
Victor marched toward a wet bar and switched on a row of lights that twinkled like stars, bouncing off cut crystal. Bottles upon bottles of aged, expensive liquor sparkled, ready to be savoured.
“What do you think of my private parlour, Henri?” Unscrewing a bottle of whiskey, he splashed far too much into one glass and barely a snifter into another.
Forcing myself to inspect the large, intimidating room, I hid my true reaction.
I stood in a dead zoo.
Zebras, tigers, lions, gorillas, rhinos, and cheetahs. Every exotic animal had been hunted, shot, stuffed, and preserved, hanging on sweeping high walls. A thousand pairs of glass eyes watched us with judgement. Birds hung in perpetual flight above. Pelicans, flamingos, ibis, and eagles. Their wings mutilated with wire; their feathers dull with dust. The massive chandelier twinkled garishly over their haunted expressions.
Ignoring the twisting in my gut, I turned slowly and focused on the other wall.
An entire world of cabinets, their contents gleaming with a million beetles, spiders, ants, butterflies, moths, and dragonflies. Stabbed with pins and forever trapped under blinding spotlights.
Fuck’s sake, is anything alive in here?
Looking at the final wall, I promptly wanted to turn back around and go hug a fucking zebra because I’d rather play with a dead zoo than with whatever tools waited on the ancient, pockmarked table. Gleaming on a red velvet cloth, a multitude of tools waited. And not just any tools, but things that looked like the head of the Gestapo would use in interrogations.
Pinchers, blades, clamps, some weird corkscrew-looking thing. Every rusty, tarnished device sent my balls seeking refuge deep inside me.
Fucking hell.
And that wasn’t even the worst part.
That title was reserved for the X-shaped cross waiting at the top of the white blood-speckled carpet. A human sized cross with hooks on the arms and throat for already manacled wrists and necks and leather straps on each leg for unfettered ankles.
