24
IRINA
My arm throbbed.
That was the first thing I notice, the first conscious thought that came with the initial flutter of my eyelids. I groaned, curling into the side of me that hurt with a white hot heat I’d never felt before.
My ribs burned as I moved, my spine protesting the movement.
“Good morning, Wildcat,” a male voice said, and something about it tickled at the faint vestiges of a memory I’d rather forget. There was a reason I felt like I’d been hit by a semi-truck.
There was a reason I didn’t want to wake up.
My eyelids sprang open, finding the icy blue stare of the one man in the world that I would gut with my bare hands if life ever gave me the opportunity.
The man who had killed Bryan in cold blood.
“Aw, don’t look at me like that,” Darragh said, squatting down in front of me and grabbing me by my broken arm. I screamed out in pain as he hauled me to my feet, my legs caving beneath me, the drugs in my system still rendering me entirely useless as the room spun around me.
The floor beneath my bare feet was a threadbare carpet, the green and brown coloring of it disguising any of the filth that might have been underfoot.
I scrambled to try to stand as he kept walking forward, using my broken arm to drag me at his side. “She doesn’t look like a threat to me,” another man said as Darragh deposited me in a chair in front of a desk. The man behind it leaned back in his chair, his hands steepled over his knee where he crossed one leg over the other.
“She killed Jack, Murphy,” Darragh said, correcting him harshly. “Bashed his head in with a fire poker…” his voice trailed off into a laugh. I wasn’t interested in rehashing what I’d already done, only wanted to take out as many of them as I could on my descent into Hell, but the Jell-O in my legs and the arm hanging uselessly at my side made all of that impossible.
And there was one thing in his statement that stood out above all the bullshit. One name that even I knew enough to recognize.
Murphy.
Tiernan Murphy was responsible for the deaths of more kids than I could count. His street thugs worked hard to recruit the orphaned children of Chicago, even when they had a sponsorship and a path out of the hardships that came from the kinds of lives they’d been born into.
And when one said no?
They ended up just like Zachariah. Gunned down on those very same streets that wanted to own them, their life and all their potential wiped out in a single moment.
Tiernan Murphy was the scourge of Chicago, undoing all my hard work with weapons and violence that consumed everything they touched. I swore in that moment I would see him dead. If I wasn’t the one to pull the trigger, then I would be the one who spit on his corpse when he was gone.
“Saves me the trouble of shooting him for letting a woman get the best of him,” Murphy said to Darragh, his irritated sigh and raised brow showing how little he thought of men who couldn’t overcome a simple woman. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Miss Ryan. I do apologize for the rough reception you received. Darragh was instructed not to harm you. If you’d only come quietly, all of this could have been avoided, you see.”
“Fuck you,” I said, shaking my head and trying to push off the last vestiges of numbness in my legs.
“Have you ever heard the phrase, ‘don’t bite the hand that feeds you’?” Murphy asked, uncrossing his legs and leaning forward to rest his forearms on the edge of the desk. He stared me down, seeming to try to convey the seriousness of the situation with the evil lurking in those eyes. As if my broken arm and dead security hadn’t already done that. “Until a time arrives where your father chooses to cooperate with my demands, you are in my care. It’s up to me who supervises your stay with us and what conditions you live in.”
“And I’m sure there is a nice, cozy spot waiting for me if I behave?” I asked, leaning forward what little I could to mirror his posture, ignoring the pain the movement caused.
“Of course. I am not in the habit of needlessly harming women, contrary to what my reputation with the Bellandis must insinuate,” he explained, smiling as if he was pleased that we agreed on the nature of my stay with them.
“No, of course not. That kind of treatment only happens after they tell you no,” I said, lifting my good arm to hug my broken one to my side and take some of the pressure from the weight of it off the destroyed remnants of bone.
“Exactly,” Tiernan agreed, his smile broadening. “So surely a woman of your intelligence can understand just how beneficial it would be for you to just say yes.”
My skin crawled with invisible spiders on my flesh, like going down to the basement in my apartment building when it had been untouched for an entire winter. “And what would I be saying yes to, exactly?”
“Well, that nice, cozy spot you spoke of will be in my bed. I would very much enjoy being able to tell your father all the sordid details of what we did while he delayed his choice, after I return you safely to his custody. That is, if you even want to leave after I’m finished with you. I wouldn’t blame you if you chose to stay. I always have room to accommodate one more mistress,” he said, tapping his fingers on the wood of the desk as he chuckled.
The light, coppery strands of his hair shifted in his side-part as he laughed, gray eyes holding my stare as if he dared me to contradict his false claim.
I sincerely doubted that anyone enjoyed their time in his bed.
“And the alternative?” I asked, swallowing past the bile in my throat.
“You’ll join the other women I have locked in the basement awaiting sale. I promise you, their quality of life is not what you’re accustomed to,” he explained.
I leaned forward, pressing my good arm onto the edge of the chair and lifting up onto shaking legs. Stumbling forward, I leaned that good arm on his desk and stared at him. “I’ll take my chances in the basement. My body is not for sale.”
He leaned back, running a hand through his hair as he sighed in disappointment. “That is a shame. To suffer so needlessly…”
“My integrity is not needless. You can break my body. You can even break my spirit, but you will never have the joy of knowing that I went willingly to your bed. That is mine.”
“Take her to the basement,” he ordered Darragh. “Until we see how her father chooses to handle the situation, she is not to be raped. In any of her fucking holes, Darragh. It is your responsibility to make sure that order is not violated; do you understand me?” Tiernan asked.
Darragh nodded, grabbing me around my good arm.
I tore it from his grip, glaring at him and stepping away. I made no move to run, knowing such an endeavor would be entirely useless, but I would walk on my own. I would hold my head high and stride into the pits of depravity in that basement, if it was the last thing I did.
“I am entirely capable of walking on my own,” I snarled.
“You are entirely capable of doing what you’re fucking told,” Darragh growled back, his open palm gliding through the air between us so quickly that I didn’t have time to react before the strike against the side of my face.
The force of it was enough to send me careening over, my weak body toppling until I landed on my good side on the ground. Pain shot through my broken arm from the impact and my mouth throbbed, the coppery taste of blood teasing my tongue as I ran it over my bottom teeth.
Spitting out the blood trickling from my torn lip, I turned a glare back to Darragh. “I’m going to enjoy breaking you,” he said, smirking down at me where I forced myself up onto my good arm.
“I’ll enjoy watching them gut you alive when they find me,” I snarled back, using my good arm to push myself to my feet while they watched.
If I could survive the abuse from my own mind when it turned against me, I could survive whatever they threw at me. I only had to just keep standing. To keep rising to my feet when they delivered the blows meant to beat me into submission.
“It’s cute that you think you matter to the Bellandis, but you are nothing more than a tool to gain your father’s cooperation,” Tiernan said, standing from his seat at the desk. “There will be no vengeance for you. No passionate fury that destroys my men in a violent rage. Just a quiet return to your life of luxury, where nobody really cares if you live or die beyond the insult it would be to Daddy dearest.”
I stood, despite the racing of my heart and the lingering knowledge that every word he said was true. There was no one who loved me. No one who would sacrifice everything to get me back.
But my kids would miss me, and for now that had to be enough.
“Walk,” Darragh instructed, prodding me in the spine until I strode ahead of him. We rounded the corner from the office, heading for the dingy kitchen and the closed door at the back. One of the men loitering in the kitchen pulled the door open, revealing a dark stairwell with no light held within.
Only my hand on the railing kept me steady as we began our descent into the pits of my own personal Hell. Eventually my eyes would adjust.
I would wish they hadn’t.