Born to Be Badger (Honey Badger Chronicles #5)(61)

He didn’t get it, though. He was a strong guy. Six-two and could bench press two hundred and fifty pounds. Women asked him to walk them out of the office at night when they worked late. He was seen as a protector. Not some victim. But the ones who seemed to be controlling this situation were some international scumbags, speaking in a range of languages and willing to slap a girl around if she got too mouthy or cried too much. And there were others working with them. Giants. Massive males who gave one-word commands and growled.

Mark had never been scared before. Not since he was a kid. But he was scared now. Terrified. Because none of this was normal. Guys like him might get mugged. They might get shot. They definitely got challenged in drunken bar fights. But they did not get kidnapped for sex trafficking. It just didn’t happen. Not to guys like him.

It got even worse when he realized they were on some kind of cargo ship, trapped in a massive container, and would be setting sail soon. On the ocean, anything could happen to them. He just didn’t know what he could do. He’d tried to pull the chains from the floor. Tried to communicate with the other victims. Tried to kick their giant captors with his feet when they came into his cage, snarling at him to be quiet. But these massive men had dealt with Mark the way he and his brothers dealt with his five-year-old cousins, one of them holding him down while another chained his feet to the floor. They didn’t even work up a sweat.

He also knew it was a bad thing that none of these scumbags hid their faces. They didn’t wear masks and they didn’t blindfold the captives. He watched a lot of streaming true-crime shows . . . he knew what that meant.

When the cargo ship’s engines revved up, he began to pray. It was a last resort, but he was out of options.

The smaller guys were outside the container doors and the massive guys were coming through the container with clipboards. As if they were making sure they had enough cases of Rice-A-Roni for delivery rather than human beings locked in cages.

One of them stood outside Mark’s cage, looking at each captive before jotting something down with the tiny pencil he had clutched in his massive hand. He glanced at the blond, older woman in the cage across from Mark’s, looked at the clipboard and began to walk away . . . but then abruptly stopped. The giant studied the clipboard again, then—weirdly—lifted his head and sniffed the air. He did it several times, each sniff getting bigger and more dramatic.

He stomped back over to stare at the older woman in the cage. She was standing right by the bars, looking up at him with big blue eyes. Mark had heard her speak before. She had an accent. Russian, he guessed. She seemed to have been talking to herself ever since one of the smaller guys had unceremoniously dumped her in the cage a few hours ago.

The giant leaned in and took another sniff. Mark couldn’t see the man’s face, but he saw his entire body tense before he started to back up. He didn’t get far, though. He was suddenly jerked forward toward the cage bars, a growl turning into a roar before he stumbled away.

He turned toward Mark’s cage, hand over his throat, blood pouring from between his fingers, eyes wide in panic.

Shocked, Mark gawked at the woman. Her expression hadn’t changed. It was still weirdly bored and unafraid, but now her mouth and jaw were covered in blood. Staring Mark in the eyes, she spit out what he could only guess was a thick piece of flesh.

Another one of the giants dropped his clipboard and ran over. He took one look at the bleeding male on the ground and suddenly charged at the woman’s cage, his arm reaching between the bars to grab her.

She took hold of the man’s arm and dug her teeth into his wrist, ignoring the screams of her victim as she tugged and pulled.

Mark couldn’t look away from what he was seeing until he heard feet running over the top of his cage. He lifted his gaze in time to see a small woman launch herself at the back of the man getting his wrist ripped apart. She wrapped something around his neck and began to pull.

The giant tried to yank his arm away from the blonde, but she just went with him, allowing him to slam her, face-first, into the thick metal bars again and again. The other woman continued to pull whatever she held tight. Mark thought maybe it was rope, but when he saw all that blood dripping on the floor . . . piano wire, maybe? Did people still use that as a weapon?

Apparently. And it was doing the trick. The giant was getting weaker and weaker. The other giant was already dead on the floor from blood loss.

He could hear people calling to one another from outside the container. He could also hear gunshots. A lot of them.

The giant stumbled back now that the blonde had released his arm. But Mark soon realized she’d released his arm because she’d chewed off his hand. She tossed it over her shoulder and moved forward as the giant took several steps back. She put her hands on the bars of her cage and pushed, the door swinging open easily. Mark had no idea how she’d got that open. Or how long it had been unlocked.

The giant dropped to his knees, but somehow, despite the blood loss from his neck and wrist, he was still alive.

The blonde motioned to the other woman. “Move. You take too long.”

“Give it a second.”

“We have no seconds. Move!”

The woman did as told, pulling the piano wire from around the giant’s throat and stepping off his back.

“Give me,” the blonde ordered, holding out her hand; a semiauto handgun was slapped into her palm.

She pointed the weapon at the giant’s head and without a wince or even a blink, she pulled the trigger. The man’s brains splattered across the space between cages, hitting Mark in the face and chest.