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He just lay there. Like a dead man.
“Cut her out of that chair,” Zhoglo ordered shrilly in Ukrainian. “Get that tape off of her. Get everything off her. I want to get started.”
Nick heldthe hurting at bay, with all the mental muscle he possessed. He had to be ready to use what Becca had given him. Courageous goddess that she was. Chained to a chair and mouthing off to that maniac while he was in one of his rages—the chick had suicidal nerve. But then again, who knew that better than him?
Hold the position, damn it.Cuffed hands tethered to cuffed ankles, while looking limp, unconscious. His hands were still bound, but they were in front of him. And feet were a hell of a lot better than nothing.
It hurt like fire to breathe. His ribs were cracked, maybe broken. Everything hurt.Push it back.He remembered a taunt his father used to throw at him when he was young, when he blubbered after beatings.
Pain can’t hurt you, kid, so shut up.
He repeated it to himself now. Broken bones, ruptured organs, ripped tendons, who gave a fuck. He wasn’t going to be needing his body again after this move, so he did not need any of this sensory information from his peripheral nervous system. Thanks, but no thanks.
The data was irrelevant. Pain can’t hurt you.Push it back.
Through swollen, slitted eyes, he could see that ogre Kristoff, yanking Becca by her dog chain off the chair and slicing off her snug shirt with his knife. Then, the knife snapped beneath her bra cups. The evil bastard licked his lips, chuckling.
“Mikhail. Wake that stinking turd up,” Zhoglo ordered. “I want him to watch. Everything we do to her. Every last instant of it.”
Mikhail stood at his head and bent over him, then flopped him onto his back so he could start slapping Nick’s face.Smack, whack.
Right…now.
He whipped his legs up, clamping the guy’s head between his thighs. A violent twist and jerk, and he scooped his bound hands around the guy’s off-balance body. Flip-twist again, and he yanked with desperate strength. Pure instinct, blind technique, no fucking clue if it would work—thenpop,a wet crunching sound.
A choked shriek from Mikhail, and the sudden smell of shit as the man’s bowels loosened. His spine had been snapped.
Nick panted as he rolled away from the limp body and rolled up onto his feet. Kristoff dove for him, roaring like a bull, and somehow Nick figured out, on the fly, how to counterbalance the frontal kicks with his hands bound, how to parry Kristoff’s slashing blows to the head. He danced back, swung a swift roundhouse kick that connected with Kristoff’s face, and sent that fuckhead gorilla reeling back, blood spurting from his nose. He hauled off to follow it up with a—
Bam.The gunshot rocked him. Zhoglo was brandishing a pistol.
A sensation of fire-edged cold spread in his chest, high on the right. Nick tried to breathe as he staggered back. Blood welled hot from the hole. Air, bubbling, sucking. Shit. The lung. He was gone. Oh, Becca.Becca.
The trees twirled crazily, and then the deck twisted and whirled up, and slammed right into him like a speeding truck.
Becca jerked backas Kristoff practically landed in her lap. Nick took forever to fall. He tipped and teetered, turning, and then crashed to the deck with a slow inevitability. Drops of blood flew off his chest, illuminated by the big light from the house as he hit, bounced and lay still.
Blood began to pool next to his chest. So much blood.
She was pushed beyond herself now. Beyond pain, beyond fear, beyond everything she’d ever believed or known about herself. She was conscious only of a huge, hurricane-force rage at those men for hurting him. For their monstrous, unspeakable cruelty.
She looked at the dog chain in her shaking hands. The rage threw a switch, clicked her brain out of victim mode and into terrible focus. She finally saw the thing for the deadly weapon that it actually was.
Her hands tingled.
Kristoff was taunting Nick in Ukrainian. She couldn’t make out the words, but the tone was unmistakable. Blood bubbled out of Kristoff’s nose as he pulled himself up into a crouch. He didn’t consider her.
She leaped. Her arms shot out, looping the length of chain across the guy’s thick neck.
She jerked him backwards, almost toppling under his weight, but the strength of desperation kept her on her feet. He grunted, gasped, clutching his throat, but he was still scrambling, crablike, trying to get his feet under himself when her back hit the railing. She hooked a foot on the bottom slat, heaved herself up, perched her butt on the rail—
And flung herself over backwards.
Free fall. Into the dark. Until she was brought up short by the chain. She shrieked. Her entire weight hung on her cuffed hands, and the thick lengths of chain she’d wrapped around her hands and wrists. The cuffs cut into her skin, the chain pulled brutally tight, crushing her wrists and fingers like a vise. Oh, God, that hurt, hurt,hurt.
She peered up, blinked the tears out of her eyes, tried to stop making that panicked sobbing sound. She’d had the vague notion of dragging Kristoff with her, making him fall to his death, but the outcome was different. He’d fetched up against the post, throttled.
He made no sound. There was no sound but the rustling trees. She swayed back and forth in the dark like a crazy pendulum, in a haze of pain and dread. Soft pine needles tickled her arms, her legs. Blood trickled down her forearms.
