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“Dicky, Dicky, Dicky.” Hayden shakes his head in a show of disappointment. “Cooperation is your best option, my friend. I’ll leave you in my friends’ capable hands while I go chill with my girl.” He pats Dicky’s cheek in a condescending way. All three of the chained men look up at me as Hayden makes his way back over, noticing me for the first time. Their eyes widen, dread clouding their irises as they realise my presence. Hayden’s arm goes straight back round my shoulder, pulling me close to his side.
Lance steps forward, golden arms crossed over his chest. His face a shroud of ice and fury, looking scary as fuck. I’ve only seen that cold stare once before and it was the day Lance broke my heart; I shiver at the memory.
“Why did you attack Eleanor Maxwell, and why did you deliver her to my doorstep?” His voice was low and unnervingly calm.
“Look man,” a different guy says, this one is in the middle of the other two and has black eyes from where Lance had hit him. “We didn’t know she way your boy’s girl, alright?”
Lance smacks him with an open palm right across his face, making me flinch. Hayden traces circles on my arm in a soothing gesture. “She’s not ‘my boy’s girl.’ She’sours, all of ours,Brad. Which means you have fucked up, royally.”
“We were just following orders,” Brad says, hanging his head and shaking it.
“From whom?” Lance demands.
“Come on, man. You know he’ll kill us,” cries the third guy who has a tattoo curving around his temple and onto his cheek, now misshapen from the swelling basically clamping his eye shut is.
“I don’t think you understand what’s going on here. No one is going to kill you but us. You are not leaving this room alive; you will be leaving in pieces. How much information you give us determines whether we chop you up before or after your heart stops beating.” He paces in front of the three of them like some kind of sadistic drill sergeant.
“You can answer all my questions and I’ll put a bullet in your head right here and now. Or you can keep fucking me over and I will push you to the brink of death and bring you back over, andover again. I can make it last for days, weeks even. So, Brad, get your boys in line, tell me everything I need to know, and go out with a little dignity. Or leave this mortal plane in a puddle of your own excrement.”
“Jesus Christ,” I mutter under my breath and Hayden’s hold on me tightens.
“Still our Lance, baby. Remember that.”
“What do you want to know?” the guy in the middle sighs in defeat.
“Let’s start with something easy. Which one of you was the one waiting for Miss Maxwell in her apartment?”
Silence.
“You disappoint me, Brad,” Lance tells the middle guy before nodding to Brent.
My surly protector glances at me briefly before coming round to face his captives and with no further warning, he starts pummelling his fists into Brad’s face. Once he is bloody beyond recognition, he moves on to the one they call Dicky and does the same. When all three of them are dripping a stream of blood onto the floor, Brent steps back again, barely breaking a sweat.
“I’ll ask again, which one of you was waiting in Miss Maxwell’s apartment?”
Silence.
Brent moves forward again but Dicky speaks up. “It was me, I took her.”
His confession does nothing to stop Brent’s rage, it only gives it focus. He drives his knuckles into Dicky’s side, his ribs, his jaw. “You hurt my girl, Dick.”Punch.“Now I’m going to fucking.”Punch.“End.”Punch.“You.”Punch.
Dicky howls in agony and begs Brent to stop. “Please, man. I didn’t…I was just following orders. Please…I didn’t touch her or anything!”
My body freezes, a chill running down my spine as I remember the night I was attacked. That gravelly voice groaning as he sat across my hips and squeezed my breasts like they were stress balls before a Monday morning meeting. I bury my face in Hayden’s side but the frigging clairvoyant knows something is up. He grabs my chin between his thumb and forefinger, pulling my face to meet his eyes.
“Hold up,” he calls to the other two, who stop immediately. “What’s wrong baby? Is he lying? Did that bastard touch you?”
I suddenly feel very stupid. Of all the possible outcomes of a strange man breaking into a young woman’s home and lurking in the shadows, a boob grope is nowhere near the worst. It’s a sorry state of affairs, I’ll admit, but grabbing and groping are so commonplace nowadays that it barely seems like a big deal. It was horrible and degrading but I’ve become so used to men leering, making lewd comments, or trying to cop a feel that I’ve become jaded to it. I doubt the guys would see it that way but still, I say “It’s…it’s nothing, don’t worry.”
“Elle,” he warns, his voice unusually stern.
I try to look to the ground, but he won’t let me. “Honestly, it’s stupid. He just got a little grabby…in the chest area. It’s fine,” my lie tumbles awkwardly from my mouth.
Hayden lays a soft, open-mouthed kiss to my lips and pulls back to say, “No, it’s not.”
He leaves my side, walking over to the guy who beat and drugged me. Pulling a switchblade from his pocket, he opens it up and stops just in front of Dicky. Without discussion or preamble, he takes the knife to the man’s chest and pained cries fill the room. I can’t see what he is doing from this angle but I’m not sure I want to.
“I’m gonna throw up,” the quieter of the three whines just before Brent kicks a bucket in front of him. I turn away as the sound of his vomit hitting the bottom of the bucket mixes with Dicky’s whimpers.
