Darkest Before Dawn (KGI #10)(95)

She looked up at him and then at them all, tears glistening on her eyelashes. “But it could be,” she whispered. “There’s always the chance that I’ll get a phone call like this one and it will be about one of you, and I love you all dearly. I can’t lose any of you, even as I know this is what you have to do. What we have to do. Just promise me you’ll be careful. And promise me you’ll get that poor woman out of the hell she’s enduring. Hancock protected me from that, but he can’t protect her now.”

CHAPTER 33

HONOR came sluggishly to awareness, confusion and alarm vying for equal control of her state of mind. Her head ached vilely and she tried to lift a hand to massage her temple but found herself unable to.

As her vision cleared, horrific pain—a keen sense of betrayal—sliced her into tiny ribbons until there was simply nothing left of her. Just a vague nebulous being that hovered somewhere between life and death in the spirit world. Purgatory.

Hancock had promised her he wouldn’t give her to Maksimov. Hancock had drugged her. Hancock had handed her over to Maksimov in a simple business transaction. Hancock was nowhere near this place, wherever it was.

She wondered just how gullible she’d been. All that crap about being sacrificed for the greater good. That because of her sacrifice, Maksimov—and ANE—would be taken down, no longer a threat to hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. It seemed to her that this was merely a mercenary exchange. For money. Hancock had never denied being a mercenary.

But why be so . . . cruel? So inhuman? Why even pretend kindness and caring when he possessed neither? It wasn’t as though she could have escaped him anyway. So why all the bullshit? Why even make the effort to comfort her at all? She would have preferred brutality, rape even, over what she thought to be something beautiful and . . . genuine.

Maybe it was how he dealt with his conscience, but then he didn’t have one. He didn’t have a heart or a soul. So why? The question reverberated in her mind until she wanted to scream her frustration. Why be kind to her? Why pretend tenderness? Why pretend that she mattered? And for God’s sake, why give her false hope?

That was the cruelest of all. To give her even a moment’s hope that what she’d accepted as her fate wasn’t to be after all.

She looked wildly around her, trying to discern her surroundings, anything to get her mind from its soundless screams of grief and agony. But what she found only added to her terror and sorrow.

She was in a . . . cage. Wrists and ankles manacled like an animal. The space was so small that she was forced into an uncomfortable position, her body contorted like some magician’s feat.

So stupid. So foolish. So naïve.

How Hancock must have laughed at her innocence. How he must have delighted in knowing he’d one-up Maksimov and even Bristow by being the one to have her first. The innocent little virgin. The supposed gift he was so humbled to have received. Sorrow vied with regret. So much regret that there was no room for fear over her fate. She was resigned to it after enjoying a brief respite. A short window of time where she’d allowed hope to bloom. She’d been so very foolish to foster the forbidden. She knew better and yet she’d allowed hope to grow, unchecked within her heart, encompassing her very soul.

Her breath stuttered erratically over her lips as she glanced around her prison. She was in a tiny cage suspended from the ceiling, so even if she did somehow manage to wrest free of the manacles digging into her skin and get the cage open, she was at least a dozen feet above the floor. Not that she’d ever be able to free herself anyway. The restraints had torn her skin, and her hands and feet tingled from the decreased blood circulation forced by the tightness of her bonds.

The height was dizzying, but her fear of enclosed spaces was even more crippling. Having spent an entire night trapped under the rubble of the clinic that lay around her in ruins had given her an intense phobia of tight, enclosed and airless places, even though the cage was well ventilated.

Sudden unexpected pain screamed through her body—but no, the high-pitched shriek came from her, the sound of someone in unspeakable agony. Her skin was on fire. She could feel the horrible licks of the flames consuming her. Was she being burned alive? A vague recollection of something like a cattle prod, an instrument that when touching her skin delivered a shrieking electric shock that set her nerve endings on fire, drifted through her shattered memories. For a moment it was as if she simply short-circuited because she had no idea what had just happened. Only that it hadn’t been the first time it had been done to her.

Then she saw him. The man who must be Maksimov. He held a long rod that he’d pressed to her skin, delivering a devastating electric shock that still had her nerves jumping and quivering. She was in no way in control of her body, her muscles giving involuntary jerks and spasms.

She huddled there, weeping, not just from the shock delivered to her body, but from the ultimate betrayal Hancock had handed her. It was her fault for offering him her forgiveness. For giving him her trust when he’d proven he wasn’t deserving of it.

But it didn’t make the agony any less. He had done what nothing or no one else had been able to do.

Hancock had broken her.

Not the clinic bombing. Not ANE. Not Bristow’s two attempts to rape her. Not even this * standing by her cage, a predatory gleam in his eyes. He enjoyed pain—inflicting pain. He thrived on it. If she could see any lower than his face, she was sure he’d be aroused, just as Bristow had been when he’d hurt her.