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Pain in every nerve.
Excruciating pain taking over everything. And she couldn’t fight against it.
Grateful relief surging as the blackness swallowed her whole.
{ Chapter 27 }
Go down.
She fought it.
Fought it when every second was excruciating. Killing him. Flaying him down to the bone.
Go down.
His thumb twisted in her wound.
Go down, dammit. Stop fighting it.
And then, thankfully, Victoria slumped forward, the screams dying at her lips. Darkness overtaking her.
But he could still feel her pulse solid in her wrist under his left palm.
Stay strong.
He’d cut her on the outer part of her thigh—painful, but he avoided most of the muscle and the bleeding would stop with a tight tie around it.
Not that his own pulse would survive this. The look on her face as he dug the blade into her would haunt him till the end of his days.
He wrapped his right arm around her waist and dropped her arms, sliding his left hand under her knees to pick her up.
He turned around to Falsted, his eyes reeking of boredom. “She didn’t last long. Where do you want her?”
“That her only weapon?” Falsted asked, sizing up her body in his arms.
Rafe stepped forward, dropping the bloody dagger onto the table next to Falsted’s liquor. With any luck, droplets of blood splashed into his damned drink. “Just this, if she’s lucky. I’ll search her when I set her down.”
Digging into a pocket in his waistcoat, Falsted turned to his men, then pulled out a ring of keys he held out to them. “Lewy, Freddy,take him down to the undercroft.”
After taking the keys, the larger two brutes turned and left the room. Rafe followed them out, his eyes carefully set ahead, refusing to look down to Victoria’s slack face.
He couldn’t afford the slightest crack.
Following the two cutthroats, he went down a circular stone staircase, the chilly stench of the undercroft wafting up to him before they had fully descended underground. The dank vaulted bricks surrounded them as they walked along the main corridor set deep into the ground and ice seeped into his bones. He was supposed to leave Victoria down in this hovel?
He glanced down at her face. Her eyes were closed, but twitching, like she was still fighting the pain. Her mouth slightly askew, ragged breaths drawing into her body.
The hard rock in his throat remained the only barrier to keeping the rising bile down in his belly.
The betrayal in her eyes when the blade had sliced into her had been more than he could bear, but he knew full well what he had to do and what it would cost him. Falsted or his brutes would have done far, far worse, and once they started, they wouldn’t have stopped.
He’d only managed to keep his hand steady as he tortured her because it needed to be done. It’d been the only way to save her from whatever vile torture Falsted had in his sick imagination.
Shadows sank all around him, cutting away from each pillar that blocked light from the torches on the stone walls every six feet. They passed storage room after storage room until they reached the section where every room jutting off from the main corridor held heavy iron bars across the openings. Six cells, in a quick count.
He exhaled the slightest breath of relief when the one named Freddy stopped in front of a cell and he looked inside.
Eva. Torrie.
