My eyes blow wide, and panic begins to override my senses.
“Wait, wait, Francesca, I didn’t do it!”
She’s not listening, though.
“This will be the last time you disrespect me. Do you understand me?!” she shouts, finally getting the material down past my ass.
I twist, attempting to roll out of her hold, but her nails are clawing into my hip and forcing me back down. Still, I can’t stop fighting, not when she’s trying to spread my legs.
“Stop!” I yell, vision blackening with panic and a slew of tears.
“Get in here,” she snaps to someone, but I don’t see who. I only feel their weight pressing down on me, and my body truly begins to fight then.
“Wait, wait, please, please, I didn’t do it! I didn’t do it,” I sob, desperate to get away but unable to. The weight is pressing down on my head, preventing me from seeing or moving, but I can feel everything.
Oh god, I can feel everything. The broken heel of her shoe is being shoved inside me, and I scream as it tears me apart.
“Please, please, please,” I cry. I cry and cry and cry, but she’s past listening.
Her hands disappear, along with the weight of the person on top of me being shoved off.
Francesca is yanking my head back, forcing me to stare at her contorted face, nearly spitting with ire. She’s on her knees, eyes wild as she hisses, “Don’t you ever destroy my things again, or you will suffer much worse than this. I swear to fucking God, I will make you wish you were dead. Am I understood?”
Sobs rack my throat, slobber nearly pouring from my mouth as I cry out, “I didn’t do it.”
Rearing back, she slaps me across the face again, my ears ringing as she continues to mindlessly hit me, over and over until I’m breathless from the onslaught of pain.
“You fucking useless bitch!” she screams. She lifts my head again, but I can no longer see her through the rivers pouring from my eyes. Indiscernible pleas fall past my lips, but even I don’t know what I’m saying anymore.
“You know what happens when you become useless? You end up buried in an unmarked grave somewhere no one will ever find you.”
Finally, she releases me, nearly smacking my head off the wood. Immediately, my body curls in on itself, the foreign object still lodged painfully inside me, but I don’t have it in me to take it out.
Whimpers tear through my throat, so powerful that no noise is capable of slipping through, stealing my breath in the process. Francesca storms out of the room, leaving me violently shaking and bawling from the assault.
A mass comes back down on me, and my body uselessly flails, fists flying but making no contact.
“Shhh,” the voice whispers. The moment it registers that it’s Sydney’s, I fight harder, screaming at her to get off, but she’s too strong for me right now.
She’s completely wrapped around my back, her legs circled tightly around my waist and locked on my stomach while her hand pets my hair.
“Shh, it’s okay,” she whispers. “We’ll be together now.”
The little energy I had left dissipates, and the only thing I am able to do is sob.
Grabbing my hot, reddened face, she tilts my chin up. Just barely, I make out her wide brown eyes and a gentle smile. Almost reverently, she pets my hair and down my cheeks, staring at me as if I’m a prized possession.
“Welcome home,” she whispers.
Chapter 13
The Hunter
“They deal in the black market,” Jay tells me. I’m staring at camera footage of the tattooed man from the video—the one that brought a little girl with a gunshot wound into Dr. Garrison’s shoddy hospital. “Organ traffickers, to be specific.”
“Who is ‘they’？” I ask, carefully watching the man carry the injured child out of the hospital, gently set her in the backseat of a red Camaro, and then speed off. Whether he didn’t care to avoid the one camera on the front of the building, or wasn’t aware of it, doesn’t actually matter. I got his license plate number.
Jay pulls up a photo. It’s of the tattooed man with three other men. Based on their body language, they appear very comfortable with each other.
“Them. They call themselves the Basilisk Brotherhood. Widely known in the black market for trading in human organs. Ryker, Daire, Kace, and Slade. No one knows their real last names.”
I close my eyes, reining in my temper. I have little control over it these days.
“Before you get growly and go on a killing spree, Tony the Tiger, there’s been some talk that they are not actually as bad as they’re making themselves out to be.”