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The other guy nearby started to unbuckle his belt, tugging the leather loose and folding it in half. He slapped it against his palm.
Using the wall, Hunter eased onto his feet, staring both Peter and the other man down as they advanced, refusing to allow any of this to happen without a fight.
Still, despite all of his struggles, his earlier assessment of the situation was spot on.
He didn’t stand a chance when the odds were three to one.
Chapter 3:
Everything was numb. He’d passed the point of pain hours ago—or maybe it’d been days? He’d lost track—along with any lingering resistance he’d managed to maintain at the start of the torture.
And it had been torture.
Whatever this thing stolen from Leo Grimes was, clearly, it was important. Or, at the very least, it had been, because Peter hadn’t bothered asking about it since its mention in the beginning, and every time Hunter tried to ask, he was rewarded with a harsher beating.
There were lashes against his arms and all over his bare torso. The blood had already congealed in places, while other wounds still wept onto the grimy ground of the warehouse. Hunter was lying on his side, trying to enjoy the short reprieve he’d been given while Peter and the others had dinner nearby.
This wasn’t their first meal since they’d brought him here and they’d developed a routine. Hunter knew from start to finish he’d have at most twenty minutes to collect himself before whoever finished eating first came back over to “play”.
At least there was only Peter and the redhead this time. The other one, the man usually guarding the door who they’d called Torn at one point, was the worst of the three.
He’d done the most damage to Hunter, which was saying a lot considering Peter had started all of this with a knife.
Hunter was pretty sure at least three ribs were broken, and he’d long since stopped being able to feel the fingers of his right hand. At one point, the redhead had stomped on it so…it wasn’t hard to guess why that was. The other times he’d gotten this break, he’d tried to take stock of his injuries, but he’d been hit on the side of the head with a metal chair recently and the vision in his left eye was blurry. His right eye was swollen and sealed shut and had been for a while now.
If this was how he was going to die, beaten to death in a dirty abandoned building with more holes in him than Swiss cheese…honestly, he wouldn’t be all that surprised. He was kind of mad about it, but, unfortunately in his current state, there wasn’t really anything he could do with that anger.
The sound of approaching footsteps echoing across the concrete floor had him flinching, cursing his dumb luck.
“Torn, just in time,” Peter greeted, his chair scraping against the ground as he stood, the harshness like daggers to Hunter's heart.
He hated himself for the weakness, for how he instinctually curled up in on himself, despite the way it caused the hurt to flash through him and knowing it wouldn’t do him any good. Survival mode was something ingrained into every living thing, however, and he was no exception. Even knowing he was going to die didn’t change the fact that he’d prefer not to.
Especially over some crime he didn’t understand and was positive he didn’t have anything to do with.
“We need to leave,” Torn sounded scared, and that caught Hunter’s attention.
“What are you talking about?” this from the redhead who he’d never gotten the name of.
“It’s the Brumal,” Torn told them, and though he couldn’t make out more than blurry movements, Hunter heard enough to guess he was desperately collecting the group’s meager things. “They’re coming.”
“Brumal?” Peter repeated. “The mafia? You’ve got to be joking. What the hell would the world’s biggest crime syndicate want from us?”
“Him!” Torn tossed an arm out at Hunter accusingly. “They’re showing his picture in the street. And it gets worse. One of the Northern Three is here.”
There was stunned silence and then the redhead’s shaky voice asked, “A Dominus came himself? For that guy?”
“The guy we’ve probably half-killed already?” Torn stated. “Yeah.”
“We’ve got to run before—”
The creaking of the door to the warehouse silenced them.
The large wooden plank slid open, exposing a burst of sunlight that showed brightly behind three towering figures. They entered as one, the two slightly smaller people only a step behind the first. The way they moved was graceful, and steady, as if they had all the time in the world.
Hunter couldn’t make out any of their faces or any details, but his heart had started racing at the mere mention of the Brumal mafia.
A chuckle slipped past his lips, humorless, filled with mocking and grief, because, of course, just when he thought he’d hit rock bottom, a Dominus would arrive to prove him wrong yet again.
