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41
Deimos yelled, “Donot hurt him!” There was a roar in his words like the sound of a forest fire when it rolls toward you and there’s nowhere left to run. I had to shake my head to clear the illusion, if that was what it was, before I heard another male voice that had no fire in it, but plenty of whine. “Then tell him not to hurt me.”
“Demolition Man.” I whispered his name, but sometimes I still forget how good supernatural hearing is.
“I’m coming, Anita, and I hope I get a chance to make you scream my name before we break you.”
Normally I would have had something quippy to say, but I was still chained to the wall. Antagonizing a werewolf that had betrayed us all didn’t seem smart, so I’d wait. When I got free he was going to jail or into the ground. The thought made me feel better. Looking at Nicky still hanging motionless between the four men sucked all the goodness right back out.
“If you keep delaying, Nicky will die,” I said.
Trappolino glanced at me and nodded. He moved them forward into the hallway. I could hear some protests from the other group that I still couldn’t see, but Deimos told them, “Let them through, then you can bring your more lively prize to me.”
A few seconds or a minute passed, and then Demolition Manstepped through. He was dragging someone with the help of another man on the other side of the prisoner, but Demolition Man was so big that I couldn’t see past him from the floor. I stood up so I could get a better view, catching my foot in the carpets again. I might have kicked them in frustration, but I could see the man on the other side of Demolition. It was Kane.
“You son of a bitch!” I said, and pulled at the chains hard enough to make the pipe I was attached to give a metallic groan. Then I saw the long brown hair spilling forward to cover his face, but I didn’t need to see his face to know who it was being dragged unconscious through the door. Nicky was safe, but Richard wasn’t.
42
I wanted to sweepRichard’s hair out of the way so I could see his face and judge how hurt he was, but no one cared what I wanted. They just dragged him into the room like he meant nothing, his hiking boots dragging on the floor. “If your lack of restraint has made the Ulfric useless for torture, I will take it out of your hide,” Deimos said.
“He shouldn’t have tried to fight back,” Demo Man said. He dropped Richard’s arm, only Kane holding him up keeping him from landing face-first on the concrete floor. I could see that Richard’s hands were cuffed behind his back.
Rodrigo hurried to catch the arm that Demo had dropped. “If he hits his head on the floor it won’t help him wake up sooner.”
“Wise Phobos,” Deimos said.
“Put him on the rugs so he doesn’t get injured further,” Rodina said, in that tone of voice that women use when they want the men to know how utterly stupid they’ve been. I was grateful to the traitorous bitch but didn’t understand why she cared.
“I didn’t know you cared so much for the wolf king,” Demo said.
“I don’t, but from this point on all injuries should be purposeful, so that we know how much harm is being done, how much pain he can take. If he’s injured accidentally there’s no way to monitor eitherthe amount of damage or the pain you wish to inflict. Accidents can kill a subject before you have everything you want from them. In this case, our lord Deimos wants to use the Ulfric to elicit Anita’s cooperation, and since he is the only one that Kane managed to bring back we must use him as a precious resource, not something to be thrown around the room without care,” she said.
It would never have occurred to me to save someone so I could torture them better later, but then causing pain wasn’t a hobby of mine.
“You did not tell me your sister was wise as well as beautiful, Phobos.”
“She has always been both,” Rodrigo said, as he started moving Richard toward the rugs.
Kane followed his lead, but said, “I wasn’t the muscle sent to grab someone from Anita’s family. I was just the lookout.”
“What did you just say?” I asked.
He smiled at me, but it was the kind of smile that has nothing to do with humor and everything to do with causing someone else pain. “When Nicky turned out too hurt to use, our new king sent people out to find someone else that you’d be willing to cooperate to save.”
“I just fucking woke up from whatever Trappolino did to me; for all you knew Deimos would roll me like dough, putty in his metaphysical hands.”
“Deimos has been trying to enter your mind for hours. The drugs were supposed to soften your resistance to him, but they didn’t.”
“You’re oversharing,” Rodina said, “but you’ve always been a chatty bitch.”
“She is right, beware that your tongue does not displease me enough to have it removed from your head,” Deimos said.
Kane looked startled then; maybe he hadn’t spent that much time with his new lord and master. That made me wonder, did Asher know what Kane had done? He wouldn’t betray Jean-Claude and melike that, he wouldn’t, but there was the tiniest bit of doubt that I couldn’t shake. I decided to give Asher the benefit of the doubt, but if he wasn’t a traitor, then it meant that he hadn’t realized what Kane was doing. Asher was supposed to be Kane’s master; the werehyena shouldn’t have been able to do anything like this without Asher knowing. So either Asher had betrayed us, or he had no more control over Kane as hismoitié bête, his beast half, than he did over Kane as his lover. I preferred incompetency to outright betrayal, but neither looked good for Asher.
“I apologize for any insult,” Kane said, giving an awkward half bow while he was still holding Richard’s arm. He looked unhappy, as if it had never occurred to him that his new boss might torture him as well as any victims he brought home.
“I’m not complaining, but what stopped you from getting my family? Richard is a lot harder target to take.”
