I swear to God, if she gets off right in front of me, I’m leaving.
I bend down, getting eye level with Mark and hold the knife to his dick. The tool he uses to torture young children will definitely be getting a knife plunged through it tonight while he’s still breathing.
“Who did you speak to about Addie?” I ask.
Mark stutters, his eyes continuously glancing over to his friend’s torture. A bone cracks, followed by Jack’s loud wail of pain.
I dig the knife down further. Mark’s eyes snap back to mine at the clear threat.
“Focus on me, Mark,” I say darkly. “Who did you speak to about Addie?”
Licking his lips, he asks, “In what regard?”
“In any regard that has to do with you kidnapping my girl and selling her, like you were planning to do before I walked in. Did you speak about her to anyone in a position of power involved with these rituals or Savior’s?”
I know the answer before he opens his fucking mouth and says it. The dimming of his eyes as he accepts that he’s about to suffer a great deal more pain.
“Yes,” he whispers.
I lose my composure for just a second, enough to snarl and slice my knife across his chest.
He screams, his face beat red from the agony coursing through him, but I’m not done. Not by a fucking long shot.
“Who?” I bark, losing my control over the beast threatening to rip out of my chest.
When Mark continues to moan in pain, I poise the knife right back over his dick and dig it in sharply. Enough to break skin, but not enough to cause any real damage.
Yet.
“Okay, okay!” Mark yelps, his eyes widening at the pain.
“Who?!” I boom. “I want fucking names, Mark.”
He sniffles but gives me the names I need to know. The names of the people operating the rituals. Names that are more than likely aliases. But it’s a start.
He admits he’s never seen their faces before, and all communication has been through a video feed where they’re shadowed in darkness.
They’re some type of secret underground government, and based on Mark’s ramblings, they have far more control over our government than I thought.
The President is just a puppet, and these people who refer to themselves as the Society—they hold the real power.
“Tell me why you did this, Mark. Why did you insist on going after Addie when you knew she was mine?”
His chin trembles, the waste of flesh the epitome of a pathetic old man.
“She was already marked.”
My heart drops, thudding down my spine like a deflated basketball rolling down a staircase.
“I took a picture of her because she looked familiar. And when she told me her name, I realized that she was a target of the Society’s. It worked out perfectly that they happened to call me, and I told them everything. She… she’s worth a lot of money, man. And the Society wants her. It doesn’t matter to them who you are—it doesn’t even matter who I am. When the Society wants someone, they get them. And if I was the one to bring her in… I would’ve been highly rewarded.”
He sniffles, though it doesn’t prevent the snot from leaking out of his nose.
“Why did they target her?”
Mark sputters out a wet, humorless laugh. “Why do they target anyone? If they’re young and beautiful and happen to be noticed, they’re on the Society’s radar. She brought attention to herself in one way or another. It could’ve been from her books, or you know how women are these days. With the way they dre—” I snatch his hand again and flick off another nail before he can finish such a stupid fucking sentence.
As if showing any amount of skin is a goddamn invitation to be raped and kidnapped.
His answering scream does little to lessen the fury.
“I-I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry. Look, you just don’t ignore the Society’s demands. And they’re going to come after you, Z,” Mark warns, his voice tight with pain but also grave.
I hope they do.
They’ll be saving me the trouble of coming to them.
Knowing that Addie was marked doesn’t only spark anger, it sparks genuine fear for my little mouse.
It never mattered if I came into her life or not—Addie was destined for human trafficking, and the fact that she happens to be the girl I’m absolutely crazy about feels like kismet.
It feels like fucking destiny that the man who haunts her is the same man who dedicated his life to destroying the people set out to take her life.
“I know you don’t care,” Mark forges on, noting the look on my face. “But the second they find out I’m dead, they’ll up and move.”