Page 82 of Bared

The man jerked up his chin again. But no resignation or remorse about it now. “They helped me,” he spat, full of defensive fire. “They helped to stop my pain. To help me feel bet—”

“They who?”

Brick startled again. The roar wasn’t his. He turned, stunned, in the same second it took for his spirited pixie to become a pissed-off puck, launching herself at her dazed dad.

“Damn it, LaBarre!” she gritted out. “Who have you talked to? We need names! We need to know—”

His mind all but typed in the predictive text that went there.

But his ears never heard it.

All they registered, in the three seconds after the brutal blow across the back of his head, was a string of terrified screams interspersed with some violent Arcadian swearing.

Swearing?

It occurred to him, on his way down to the floor, that he might have gotten that part twisted. It hardly mattered as soon as his skull walloped the floor, and he spewed with his own unthinking obscenities.

Until even those were ripped from him.

As a pair of gunshots tore the air open—

And left only blackness in their wake.

Chapter Twelve

Everything was so black.

So hot and suffocating and black.

But Jayd refused to stop screaming. Not for a second.

Not as her captors cinched the hood tighter over her head, locking her in with the memories of their bullets striking between Louis LaBarre’s eyes.

Not as they zip-tied her wrists after carting her to the pub’s kitchen, with its greasy smells tempting her to throw up into the dirty hood.

Not even as they hoisted her off her feet, and someone jabbed their burly shoulder into her abdomen, and she was certain she would never take a breath of fresh air again.

She cared not.

She would use all the filthy air she could. Would keep screaming as loud and long as she could. Would keep fighting and pushing and kicking until—

“Unnnghhh!”

She was tossed onto a hard, brutal surface, though it definitely was not the ground. They had departed the pub. She knew that much from the change in smells and air temperature. But beyond that, her sense of direction was shot. Terror clawed the edges of her psyche, tempting her to give up and quiver, but it was easier to cling to the fury. A lot more of it.

She hauled in another huge breath. These soldasks had not heard the last of her screams.

“If you even think about that caterwauling again, I shall gag you until simple breaths become your blessings.”

Jayd fell into silence like a cat in the rain. Not because the fear had finally won.

Because the rage had.

As the hood was whisked away, her disgust spiked. “Creator’s tears,” she spat and dropped her head. The padded truck bed beneath her gleamed as salty drops spilled from her own eyes. “I did not want this to be true. I did not want to believe this of you!”

“Believe what?” Trystan Carris’s murmur was like a loose snake in the bed with them. Silken but shaky. She gathered silent hope from that, deducing that he had likely slept less than her over the last few days. “That I would find out about your little stunt at all, Highness? Or that I would take action to save you from your reckless adventure before things got completely out of hand?”

“Out of hand?” She jerked her head back up, igniting her full glower. “You mean like your Pura thugs gunning down my father before my eyes?”