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I thought back to everything I’d seen in and around Albrecht’s castle, as well as the intel already gathered to prepare for my original mission before Brody’s presence changed our plans. We suspected Albrecht’s primary bodyguard, the butler, and one other guard were the only ones who knew what went under the estate grounds. No way did Albrecht want his proclivities to be common knowledge, even if he thought himself untouchable. We didn’t suspect the butler of having anything to do with what Albrecht did other than knowing and not stopping it. So he likely wouldn’t be a threat to me until I made it beyond the room and somehow found my way into the residence.
That left me with two guards and Albrecht to deal with if I wanted to get out of that mess. Hopefully. If I was lucky.
I couldn’t see the door or the rest of the room from my position, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to move enough to reveal I was coming around. I was sure Albrecht had at least one camera in there, if not more, so even though no one was with me at the moment, I couldn’t be sure someone wasn’t watching.
Before I could choose my best course of action, the sound of a heavy door opening out of my field of vision made my decision for me. I stayed limp, letting my eye close completely again. I heard someone step into the room, the heavy tread and slight scraping on the ground telling me it was likely a large male, either overweight or with some sort of slight impairment that caused him not to pick one of his feet up all the way when he walked. It wasn’t much, but in those few steps, I could identify it wasn’t Albrecht or the guard he had with him when he visited our photoshoot.
The door slammed shut with a beep, and I held my breath, forcing myself not to tense as he stopped next to me, touching my wrist as he clumsily felt for a pulse. I couldn’t hide my heartbeat, but instead of being reassured, he cursed and brought his hand up to my neck. However, his fingers were too low to feel my carotid artery properly.Clearly, this one’s not winning any IQ contest, I thought to myself.
His hand pulled away, and a second later, a walky-talky crackled. I couldn’t understand German, but the panic was clear in his voice. Without waiting for a response, he pulled me off the bed, laying me on the ground. It took everything I had to stay limp and lifeless. Apparently, he assumed I wasn’t breathing and was positioning me for CPR.Perfect, I thought, getting ready to take advantage of the situation. My lungs burned from wanting oxygen. I was still holding my breath, not daring to lose my edge against him, but I was running out of time.
I waited for him to shove my still-bound hands out of the way, positioning his on my chest, before making my move. While he was distracted looking down at his hands, I launched, hitting his head with my own, knocking him sideways. I wrapped my legs around his neck, squeezing as tight as I could and cutting off his oxygen even as I took a breath of my own. My thighs burned with the effort, but I held firm as he struggled, his arms waving around, desperate to find purchase. I grabbed his arm, twisting and pulling at the same time to dislocate it. Normally, I wouldn’t damage a person any more than necessary, but I needed to put him down fast and hard, with minimum possibility of him getting the upper hand.
I counted to sixty after he went limp, checking to make sure I’d dispatched him before turning my attention to my feet. I unbuckled my shoes and kicked them off before I started on my bound hands. I’d just barely loosened them when the sound of running feet and the door opening alerted me to my next opponent.
Crouching, I readied myself as much as I could, waiting until the bodyguard rounded the bed to propel myself forward, tackling him to the ground. I rolled as I fell, getting back up to my feet and twisting around to face my opponent. He struggled to rise as quickly as me but was still trying to get up from his hands and knees when I attacked. With my feet bare, I couldn’t count on kicking to do any damage, so I used my knee, grabbing his head in my hands as I inflicted as much momentum into my leg as I could. He swore when I connected but grabbed my legs instead of his face, pulling me down on top of him. I screamed, my battle cry loud and determined as we each fought for the upper hand. My arms were still bound, but I used it to my advantage, circling his neck and using the rope to cut off his airway. He was obviously much more trained than the previous man, and he wiggled out of my hold, getting a glancing punch to my face as he did so. We both struggled to our feet, blood pouring out of his nose from where I’d kneed him in the face and staining his teeth pink as he smiled sinisterly.
“You’re going to regret this, bitch,” he spat, his accent so heavy in his anger I could hardly understand him.
I saved my energy and air, studying every move he made as he tried to circle me. The longer it went on, the less of a chance I would have at beating him, that much I knew. I kept my eyes on him as I continued to wiggle my hands from the rope in subtle movements. The handkerchief or whatever had been used to prevent marks on my wrists—a weird issue when looking at the shoes Albrecht wanted to torture me with—helped slide my hands loose.
The door ripped open a third time, and Albrecht strolled in, stopping short when he saw what was going on. Before he could get a word out, I smiled brightly at him. The guard’s back was to the door, and my cheerful response had him instinctively starting to glance behind him, assuming whoever had arrived was on my side. Taking that distraction, I threw the mess of rope at him. Instinctively, he batted the rope away, but his focus on it was long enough for me to spring toward him.
Albrecht moved behind him, not in our direction, but heading toward the guard I’d already taken down. I ignored him for the moment, all my attention on the threat in front of me. I raised my right hand, palm out, connecting with the guard’s nose, throwing all my weight behind the move. Cartilage and bone bent and broke in a sickening crunch as I relocated parts of his face into his brain. The girly part of me wanted to cringe. I had no issues with blood or even torture, but hearing bone break was something that had always made my stomach clench.
The guard’s eyes widened in surprise—the last voluntary move he would make before his knees gave out. He was dead—his body just hadn’t quite gotten the message yet. As he sank in front of me, I caught a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye. I whirled on my heel, raising my arm to protect my face.
My change in stance saved me from a hell of a hit to the face. Albrecht had grabbed what looked to be a baton from the first guard and had tried to slam it into my head. I leaped away, slipping slightly on the pooled blood of the second guard. The stick slammed into me again, right across my shoulders and upper back that time, knocking me to my knees. I rolled away, springing up as quickly as I could manage, trying to ignore the pain as I collected myself into a fighting stance.
“You’re going to regret this little escape attempt, my dear,” Albrecht said, his voice soft, almost sing-song-like.
I tilted my head. “I really don’t think I am.” My strength was waning, and I could feel my muscles wanting to tremble with a combination of adrenaline overload and fatigue, but I held position and stared him straight in the eyes, not about to let him see weakness.
He smiled; his eyes as cold and remote as ever. “I love the strong ones. They take longer to break, sure, but the reward when they do.” He sighed in remembered pleasure. “It’s the headiest aphrodisiac. Turning something so strong into a shell of a being.” He raised his arm again, but that time, instead of hitting me with the baton, he barely touched it to my skin.
I couldn’t even gasp as electricity raced through my body. I felt like I’d been kicked by a bull and struck by lightning at the same time. My legs gave out, causing me to drop into an undignified heap. I screamed—or would have if my brain could have communicated with my mouth and my jaw hadn’t clenched in reflex. Never in my life had I felt such pain. I didn’t even realize I hadn’t died for what felt like minutes.
Albrecht chuckled softly as my lungs finally re-engaged, forcing labored gasps as I struggled to remember how to move, how to do so much as think, my limbs under me in odd angles. “It’s truly the only thing I find entertaining.” He hit me with another shot of electricity almost absentmindedly as he passed me, turning his attention to his primary guard. I struggled to crawl, to inch myself away from him, though there was nowhere I could go to escape.
He rose from leaning over the dead guard, shaking his head almost sadly. “Do you know how hard it is to find decent employees?” He tutted his tongue, placing his hands on his hips as he continued to look down, studying the prone body. My arms, still tingling, cooperated enough to drag the rest of me a few feet before I had to stop, my muscles trembling, somehow simultaneously screaming in pain and numb at the same time. Lying next to my hand, I saw one of the shoes strapped to my feet when I’d woken up, the nail sticking out of the sole. It had a stiletto heel. I didn’t reach for it, not wanting to show my hand. “I hope you take longer to break than the previous few I’ve possessed. I have high hopes for you. You’re the first one who’s shared my thoughts on beauty and pain—though your opinion is only a shadow of my own.”
“They’re going to find me,” I rasped out, gathering the last bit of strength I possessed.
“Your family,” he misunderstood my threat, and I could hear the amusement in his tone, “will never find you here. You aren’t the first pet to find herself in your position, and you won’t be the last.”
He came up behind me, leaning over to grab my hair, pulling me up and toward him. I lurched forward, grabbing the shoe to my chest as my body hid my movements from him. My scalp burned as he forced me to stand, my legs shaking as they gamely tried to take my weight. Hunched into myself, I was the epitome of a scared, cowed woman. I leaned back against Albrecht, partly to hinder his response to what I was gearing up for and partly to help conserve energy.
I steeled my breath and gripped the shoe tightly, the nail digging into the palm of my hand. I figured I had one shot before he overpowered me and dealt out his version of punishment and torture for killing two of his guards and trying to attack him. As quickly as I could manage, I spun on my heel, my hair still in his fist, blinding me as I faced him. Before he could mount any form of response, I let my fist fly, stiletto first, toward his face. The high-pitched scream told me I had found my mark, but the pain in my hand and the dizziness the effort cost me blurred what little vision I had, and I hoped my strike was enough to incapacitate him because I knew I didn’t have another left in me.
Blinking away the lightheadedness, I realized that the force of my strike had impaled the heel into Albrecht’s eye, as well as the nail into my hand. He sank to his knees, his hands reaching for the shoe, making me bend over as my palm lowered with him. Blocking out the pain, I tried to hold the sides of the shoe as much as possible. Blood—his and mine—made the entire thing slick. With one last burst of energy, I shoved into him again, driving my whole weight behind my attempt, and the heel yielded, dropping Karl Albrecht backward and pulling me with him as my legs gave out.
My chest heaved as I struggled to take in air, trying to focus enough to examine my hand and ignore the fact that I was lying on top of what was likely a dead man. The nail had gone all the way through, the blood-smeared point gleaming at me, surrounded by my own flesh. “Damn it,” I cursed. Normal first aid would have called to leave the nail in until I could reach a medic or at least find a med kit. But the idea of my hand being that close to a dead man’s impaled eye was too much for me to stomach. And it wasn’t like I could or would just sit there, on top of him, until someone came along. “One … two …” Silly as it was, even though I was the only one counting, I still pulled my hand back on two, not waiting for three.
“Sonofabitch,” I ground out, rolling off Albrecht and curling into an involuntary ball as I clutched my hand to my chest. The wad of rope and material loomed at my feet, and I grabbed it, the handkerchief coming free in my palm. Wrapping the material around the wound, I was happy that, despite the blood oozing from it, I could still wiggle my fingers and close my hand.
Satisfied that I’d escaped any permanent damage, I looked around and snatched the lightning-charged baton off the floor before using it to help me lurch to my feet, checking the guards and Albrecht for other weapons once I could get my legs to hold me enough to move. I’d kill for a gun but couldn’t find so much as a knife. Resigned to using the devil stick, I hobbled to the door, which stood shut in front of me. It was then that I realized the door didn’t have a handle. A retinal scanner was on the wall next to it, silent and daunting as I comprehended my dilemma. I looked at Albrecht, the stiletto still sticking out from his face, and then at the two guards. “Well, damn,” I blew out a breath. At the moment, I could barely move my own arms, let alone pick up and hold a full grown-ass man in front of a scanner six feet off the floor. I cursed again at the realization. Unless my backup was still in Texas and I had more than a few hours to recuperate, I would need rescuing after all.
Chapter 24
