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My stomach churned, bilious and sour. Groaning, I clutched it, unable to hold back the bile rising in my throat.What had they done to me?I heaved into a small bucket until my stomach was empty. There hadn’t been much in there to start with. I’d been too nervous to eat earlier.
The cobwebs in my mind were starting to fade, and I shook my head a little to clear it. Pushing myself up off the floor, I looked around. Hushed voices and the sound of clinking glasses and moving chairs filtered through the walls. There weren’t any windows in the small room, and I had to take several deliberate breaths to control the fear that threatened to swallow me whole.
I didn’t do well in small spaces.
“Hello?”
Nothing. Fucking shit.Where the hell was I?
That was a stupid question. I was obviously in a basement of some kind, waiting for the auction to start. My father had planned this all along.
No.
Not my father.
The man who had stolen me from my father. The man who had used me as a pawn to control my actual father. The files in his office safe had been more than eye-opening. My entire life since I was three years old had been in those folders.
Now I knew everything.
Mostly everything.
Now that I looked back on everything, it was all coming together in my mind. I couldn’t believe I had been so blind. The woman I’d remembered as my mother had been nothing more than a jealous woman. She’d stolen me and bartered me away, thinking she could fill the empty space in my biological father’s life.
She’d been wrong.
God, was I pathetic. The number of people who had used me for their own gain before throwing me to the wolves was growing more every day. The junkie woman, Richard, the Kavanaughs.
Kiernan…
That bastard had handed me over to my father without a second thought.
Why? Had that been part of the plan the entire time? Use me and then throw me to my father when they’d had their fill?
God, why had I been so stupid? Of course this had been the plan. They’d used me. Gotten what they wanted, then they had gotten rid of me like yesterday’s trash. I couldn’t believe they’d done this. All of them. They’d never made me feel like a captive, and maybe that was the red flag I should have been paying attention to.
Instead, I let myself believe the lie they sold me. That they wanted me. Cherished.Loved me.
They’d been honest about the man who called himself my father. Richard Crowe was a despicable man. Wretched as they come. There had to be a reason they had done it, right? They were going to rescue me. That had to be the plan.
Didn’t it?
Before I could be swallowed by the pity that threatened to overwhelm me, the silence was broken by the sound of several abrupt cries. Heavy footsteps thudded outside my prison, stopping directly in front of my door. The lock twisted and disengaged, and the door swung open on its rusty hinges. My heart raced, and I prepared myself to use whatever tactic necessary to get out of this hellhole. I wouldn’t allow myself to be sold. There was a reason I’d caught on to Seamus’s training so well. The style of fighting was different, specialized, but my father’s men had taken me under their wing growing up. They’d taught me how to defend myself. How to fight dirty.
The heavy wooden door swung open, the light from the hallway outlining the broad frame that filled the doorway. He stepped into the cell, and I didn’t waste any time launching myself at him, hoping to catch him off guard.
I’d managed to catch him by surprise, since he probably hadn’t expected a docile submissive to fight back, and landed a blow to his face, knocking him backward.
“Little bitch,” he sneered. His accent was thick, but I couldn’t place its origin. It wasn’t Russian, that I knew, and it sure as hell wasn’t Italian. I didn’t bother to stay and ask before I darted out the cell door and took off down the hallway without bothering to look back.
Except that it was full.
I ran smack dab into the hard chest of another mountain of a man, and he didn’t look particularly pleased at my escape attempt.
Then my body lit up like the fourth of July.
I hit the floor hard, my body convulsing as shock after shock of electricity coursed through me like hot magma. My muscles were locked tight, and my teeth were clenched together so hard I thought they might shatter. The current pulsed through me again and again until I was begging him to stop.
The man whose nose I had broken cursed at me in another language as he bent down, a cattle prod swinging loosely between his legs. His hand came down across my face. I groaned in pain as he dragged me to my feet by my hair before tossing me to another guard.
