Kings of Chaos (Dirty Broken Savages #1)(11)
“I’m just visiting,” I tell her.
“Are you here to interrogate me like the other two?” she asks. “Because I’ll give you the same thing I gave them. Jack shit.”
She’s feisty, and I grin wider. “No, not at the moment. If Gage decides that I should interrogate you, though, you won’t like it very much.”
I glance over to the side of the room where my cabinet and workbench are. The cabinet doors are shut now, but the inside is full of neatly arranged tools of torture. Everyone gives me shit for my bedroom being a mess, but I keep my tools neat and tidy, so that I can use them when I need them.
She follows my gaze and seems to get the point. Smart girl.
I expect there to be more fear, more anger, in her expression. Some kind of reaction I’m familiar with that goes along with how most people react when they realize the situation they’re in.
But instead she grins right back at me, feral around the edges.
“I’ve played this game before,” she tells me in a low voice. “I’ve been hurt before. I know you’re gonna kill me no matter what, so I’m not giving you what you want.”
Huh. Definitely not what I was expecting.
The look in her eyes tells me she’s not lying. She’s no stranger to being hurt, maybe even tortured, and she’s come through it well enough to be sitting here in front of me.
There’s something sexy about that. About her showing no fear. She thinks she’s not going to make it out of here, and she’s still not backing down, not showing her neck.
I use the hold on her chin to tip her head to one side, forcing her to show it to me anyway. It’s not the same, but there’s something satisfying about how much bigger I am than her, how easy she is to move physically, even if she won’t be moved to talk without more force.
“You’d be hard to crack, I bet,” I murmur, leaning in to let my voice drag over her skin like my eyes. “I’d have to use the special tools for you. Maybe make you beg for it first.”
“You could try,” she spits out. “You wouldn’t be the first.”
She throws the words in my face to try to shake my confidence, but I just grin back at her.
“I was wrong about you, little fox,” I say. “You’re tougher than I expected.”
There’s no deer in the headlights here. She’s a predator in her own right, but that still won’t help her here. My brothers and I are at the top of the food chain.
I tighten my fingers on her chin, letting her feel the strength there. “But you’re in the wolves’ den now. And little foxes don’t survive when they go up against wolves.”
5
RIVER
THE BIG MAN with the wild, dark eyes grins one more time and then gets up and strides toward the door. His footsteps echo as he heads back up the stairs to the upper part of the house, leaving me alone in the room in the dark.
I can still smell him on me, and I can remember the heat of his breath on my face. He reeked of smoke and burned flesh, and I spare a second to think about the informant I killed outside their club. He’s probably nothing but ashes now, and I bet the big guy liked it. I probably did him a favor by leaving that body there. Made his fucking night or something. He’s obviously fucking psycho as hell, grinning like a loon while talking about torturing me the same way someone else might talk about sex or having dinner or something. But for some reason, I felt weirdly… drawn to him. To the wildness in his eyes, maybe. He’s not the type to back down from a fight, and I understand that completely.
Then I remember what he said—how foxes don’t survive with wolves.
Annoyance rises up in me, sharp and acrid. I’m prepared to die. I have been since I started this mission of vengeance. Maybe it will end in death for me, or maybe it won’t, but that’s not the thing that makes me mad right now.
What pisses me off in this moment is the fact that I might lose to these assholes.
Whatever their issues are, they have nothing to do with me. I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and pissed them off, but it has nothing to do with them. I have my own stuff to deal with, and being stuck down here in their shitty dungeon is fucking with that.
They don’t even give a shit about the man I killed, or me, just their club.
There has to be a way out of this, without compromising myself and giving them more information than I want them to have.
I jerk on the chains, hearing them rattle against the cold brick of the wall. They’re bolted in there, and I’m definitely not going to be able to yank them out.
The shackles are tight around my wrists, and there’s not even much room to wiggle them free. They definitely know what they’re doing, and I think about the big guy and the pride and excitement in his eyes at the thought of being able to torture me. He’s done it before. He has the tools for it, apparently.
When they grab someone, that person probably doesn’t get out. But I’m not just anyone.
My double joints have come in handy before, and I think they will now, too. I suck in a breath and start compressing my hands, working them so they’re as small and slender as they possibly can be.
I start on the left, yanking my wrist against the hard metal of the cuff. It hurts like a bitch, the metal digging into my skin, slicing it up a little.