Lost Hart, page 20
“Chase Hart, one of the four Harty Boys. Vigilantes for justice. Security and surveillance.” Creed’s nasally voice was just a touch deeper now but still not something Chase would associate with an adult man in his late thirties. “However did you get tangled up in this?”
“You took … a child I love,” Chase said, now back on his ass on the ground, staring up at the figure in the doorway. “You took children. You’re pathetic. A loser.”
Creed clucked his tongue. “And you just cost me a lot of money with your little sting operation.”
Chase spat, though he was reluctant to give up any moisture from inside his body. But he was glad when he watched the wad of saliva land on Creed’s black wingtip.
“I know a lot of people in a lot of places, Mr. Hart. A lot of people with a lot of preferences. And although I don’t generally deal in adults of your”—he wiggled his finger and pointed at Chase—“size, I do have clients who prefer your type.”
“If the children are safe, that’s all that matters.”
“We’ll see if you’re still thinking that after being whipped, flogged and sodomized with a broom handle for days and weeks on end.” He chuckled and stepped forward, bringing his face into the light.
Not that Chase was into any of those vampire movies, but Jesus Christ, did Creed ever look like a fucking vampire. Pasty as fuck, long black hair hanging stringy around his face, dark circles beneath dark eyes and lips so red you’d think he’d just been drinking blood.
Who the fuck knows—maybe he was? The guy seemed to have no limits or scruples. The guy didn’t have a fucking soul.
Creed approached Chase and glared down at him. “You picked the wrong person to mess with, Mr. Hart. I’m going to make sure your life—what little is left of it—is more excruciating and miserable than you can ever imagine.”
Chase swung his legs and knocked Creed in the ankles, sending the vampire to the ground in a grunt and a heap.
Creed growled, surged to his feet, and glaring like he was preparing for murder, he wiped the back of his hand over a cut on his lips.
There wasn’t much Chase could do when Creed started kicking him in the stomach, nothing besides curl up in a ball and protect his cock and balls.
Creed screamed like a wild, murderous beast, the toe of his wingtip making contact over and over again with Chase’s ribs, his gut, his head, his chest. He changed positions and started kicking him in the back, nailing his kidneys with the pointed toe of his shoes. And because Chase’s arms were around his back, Creed eventually did get a couple of good blows between his legs, which only caused Chase to vomit, groan and feel like he was going to pass out again—which eventually, thank God, he did.
When he finally came to, he was still on the ground in the cold, dark room. His hands remained bound, his ankles, too. His entire body ached from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet. He was bleeding more, too. Probably internally, as well. He did a quick survey of his body parts and figured he had at least two, possibly three cracked ribs.
The only upside to any of it was that he was bleeding more and could use the blood around his wrists as a lubricant to help peel off the zip ties.
The pain of the rough plastic digging into his fresh wounds was enough to make him see stars, and he vomited again—though that could have been from his obvious concussion or internal bleeding. It was really anybody’s guess at this point.
The cold had his fingers seizing up as the bonds cut off his circulation the more he got them over his hands. He thought about giving up a few times, when he couldn’t feel his fingers and his dislocated shoulder started to throb and the shakes and shivers got to be too much. But it was either wait in here for Creed or one of his lackeys to come back and cart him off to become some monster’s torture slave, or he did what he could to survive until he did everything.
It was just like back in the Peruvian prison. He would do everything he could to stay alive. That way if he did die, he’d leave the Earth knowing he fought the whole way out, that he hadn’t given up. He was a fighter, and now, more than ever, he had something—someone—to fight to get back to.
He’d lost all feeling in his fingers, and they kept slipping as he worked the zip tie over his left hand with his right. Folding his thumb and pinky inward to the center of his palm, he inched the tie over. He was making headway; it all just hurt like a motherfucker and was taking forever. How much longer before he lost all feeling in his entire right hand and couldn’t do anything?
Folding his ring and index finger beneath the middle finger, he tried to make his hand as narrow as possible to slip the tie over. It budged, but just barely.
With his numb right-hand fingers, he gathered some blood from his left wrist and smothered it on the tie as best he could. It was all awkward as fuck, and his shoulders cried out in agony, but he had to ignore all of that and focus on getting the zip ties off. Then he could worry about a dislocated shoulder or losing a finger.
He was born with ten. If he lost one, it wouldn’t be the end of the world.
He’d popped dislocations back into place on his own before. He could do it again.
But, like everything in life: one thing at a time.
The blood seemed to help, and the zip tie finally, at long last, slipped off his left hand.
“Thank fuck,” he breathed, pulling it off his right hand as well.
He wiggled his fingers and twirled his wrists around to get the circulation flowing again.
Then he went to work on his ankles and removing the zip tie.
It wasn’t easy, but he knew how to get out of them. Using friction from the tie that was around his wrists and after about fifteen minutes of intense struggling and rubbing the ties against each other, he was sweaty and shivering, but the zip tie snapped.
Now that he had his limbs free, he could do a better job of figuring a way out of that hellhole. He couldn’t see much, and the darkness only made the space feel smaller. His fears, along with the intense cold and mounting pain, were seriously starting to fuck with his head.
A skitter of what could only be rodent feet had him whipping around, his fists up and ready in fighting position.
What are you going to do? Punch a rat?
Now his mind was really starting to go.
Something tickled his big toe, and he kicked hard, hearing a squeak and a thwack against the wall, followed by a splat to the ground.
He’d dealt with rats, mice, cockroaches and lice in Peru, but it wasn’t like he was immune to that shit now. They still fucking disturbed the hell out him. He’d been eaten alive for days on end by the baby cockroaches who liked to bite him while he slept. Mosquitoes were bad, too, since the prison they had him in was close to a dried-up creek bed, and when they finally moved him to gen pop, his cell window had no glass pane to protect them from the outside elements and pests. He was lucky he didn’t catch malaria or dengue fever.
Running his hands along the wall, he searched for something—anything—to help him figure out where he was. A crevice in the bricks, a small door. Or something he could use as a weapon. He really didn’t want to resort to throwing a dead rat at whoever opened that door next, but he would if he had to.
His feet, although better now that they were no longer bound, still ached from the intense cold of the floor. If he didn’t know any better, he’d say he was in some kind of cold storage. Perhaps a cellar of some sort for the speakeasy or lounge.
But then the scent of fish had him thinking maybe he was somewhere in a shipyard or a cannery.
He hoped to God the children hadn’t been kept in here. Not for a minute.
He was a grown-ass man. He could take this.
But a kid?
This would fuck up a kid for life.
Noises at the door had him pausing.
He pressed his ear to the crack where the sliver of light was and turned on his military hearing, focusing on the nuances, the lifts and drops of tone, the upward inflections that indicated a question. The different pauses, timbres and lilts. From the sounds of it, at least one of the three people on the other side of the door had a bit of a Southern accent. They spoke softer, slower and emphasized different syllables than the other two people.
It was a thick door, and they were deliberately keeping their voices low, so he couldn’t hear much, but he heard enough to know that they were getting ready to move him. There were only three of them out there. Creed and two others.
He might be able to take them.
He could take Creed no problem. Now that the fight was fair and he wasn’t bound like a hog on the way to slaughter.
But he was weak and injured. So even with Creed being a weakling, the other two men probably had combat training and weight to them. They might prove to be too much.
“Open it,” he heard Creed order, his nasally tone easy to pick out between the other two.
Chase backed up, found the dead rat lying on the ground and picked it up.
When the door opened, using his nondominant arm because the other shoulder was dislocated, he did his best to aim true and tossed the rat at the shadowy figure on the threshold.
Square in the face.
Fuck, yes.
Creed cried out in anger and disgust.
“Fuck,” the vampire man shrieked.
But Chase didn’t have a chance to charge the distracted Creed before he was hit in the chest with something that resembled two bee stingers and was brought to the ground in a heap of agony and convulsions as they used the Taser pulse on him.
Creed came to stand over his trembling body. “You don’t think we have cameras in here, Mr. Hart?”
No, he didn’t think about that. But now he wished he had.
Chapter 21
Time ceased to exist now that he was in total darkness. They’d moved him like he figured they would, stuck something in his neck, too—probably the same shit they gave Stacey. He was bound again, this time tighter, and they had a dirty old rag or something wrapped around his head and lodged in his mouth to act like a gag.
He ran his tongue over the fabric and fought the urge to vomit from how horrible it tasted: moldy, metallic and vaguely of fish.
He was on his side, his arms back behind him, tied much tighter than before, to the point where he couldn’t feel his fingers any longer. His ankles were strapped together, too, the plastic cord digging into the raw, bleeding flesh.
He was still naked. Still freezing.
Groaning, he tried to roll over in an attempt to ease the agony in his shoulders and ribs, but he couldn’t. His hands hit wood, his feet hit wood, and when he lurched up his torso, his head bonked wood.
What the fuck?
Panic engulfed him and not just from the intense cold. He began to shake.
He was in a box.
A coffin.
They had him in a box, in the dark, and by the sounds of things—seagulls and traffic noises—outside.
“Help!” he tried to scream over the gag, but his words came out garbled and his throat hurt from the cold. His heart raced and thoughts began to twist.
He tossed and flailed his body as best he could, to little avail. He was in the fetal position, and stretching out was impossible. The box was shorter than he was. His eyes darted frantically around the small, dark space. Even though the gag smelled horrible, the wood around him did not.
The wood beneath him was rough and unfinished pine, and he was pretty sure he felt a sliver embed itself in his ass cheek as he moved and tried to bang his hands against the side of the box. He kicked, thrashed and smashed his head into the side, but after all that effort, he barely made a noise decent enough to rise above all the other sounds outside.
What time was it?
Where was he?
If he concentrated hard and blocked out everything else, including the pounding pulse in his ears and his ragged breaths, he could hear the faint sound of water lapping and boat motors.
Had they knocked him out for so long, he was already on some freighter bound for foreign sadists?
A loud, fierce gust of wind carried his cries away as he shivered from the mounting cold.
This was how he died. Either from hypothermia or some heartless bastard torturing him. But either way, this—soon—was how he died.
He kind of hoped it was from hypothermia and when he arrived wherever they were sending him, his would-be new master opened up the box to find Chase dead. That couldn’t bode well for Creed, right?
Eyes closed, eyes open, it didn’t really matter.
He saw nothing.
Whatever box they had him in, although rough and still holding that fresh-cut wood scent, it was sealed up tight. Not tight enough to block out the cold, but tight enough to prevent light from filtering in.
Then again, maybe it was still dark outside. Maybe Creed hadn’t held him for as long as he thought and it was only four in the morning?
Or maybe it was the next night or the following week and Creed had held him for a hell of a lot longer? He had no idea how long he’d been unconscious.
His stomach grumbled, and his mouth was desperate for water. It would also appear that he had pissed himself at some point because the scent of urine in the box was strong and competed with the scent of cut pine.
His body shook like he was still being hit with the Taser, and he felt himself beginning to drift off into a quiet sleep.
Sleep sounded like a good idea.
He could dream of warmer places, like back in bed with Stacey, wrapped up in her arms, with her softness and the little noises she made when he brought her to climax. Her nails on his back, lips on his neck.
She was perfect, and he wanted to be with her.
He wanted to share his life with her and her children.
But it seemed that whenever something good started to happen—like the first time they had sex—his body had this weird security system that started to go off at all the wrong times. His wiring was seriously faulty—he had prison to thank for that. But Stacey, she was light and lovely, all things good, and he was dark and broken, messy.
He’d killed.
Sure, nobody he’d killed hadn’t deserved it plus a thousand more deaths, but he was a damaged man nonetheless.
Was he even a man? He couldn’t have children. Would never have children of his own. Stacey deserved more than what he could give her.
How could he chase away the monsters in the dark for Connor and Thea when he himself was afraid of them? He couldn’t tell them monsters didn’t exist because he knew damn well that they did. They might not be real in the physical sense, but the mind is a powerful tool. He understood what it meant to see and feel things so fully that denying their existence felt more like a lie than claiming that they were real.
His breathing and heart rate were escalating, and he was beginning to hyperventilate through his nose, the noise of his breaths now competing with the thundering pulse in his ears.
And the voice started talking.
He hadn’t heard it in a while.
But it was a voice he would recognize anywhere.
Stacey doesn’t deserve you.
The kids—Connor and Thea—don’t deserve you.
You’re not husband or father material.
You’re sterile for a reason.
You’re not a good man.
You’re not a man at all.
Your family is better off without you.
You should have died in that prison.
Rex belongs with Stacey.
Rex will give her what she needs.
She doesn’t love you.
Nobody loves you.
The voice in his head grew louder, the tone getting more and more nasty. His demon—if that’s what you wanted to call it—had the voice of Gollum from Lord of the Rings, sinister and almost snakelike.
Your death would make everyone’s life easier.
Welcome death.
Embrace death.
Your end is everyone else’s new beginning.
You’re too broken to be a good father and husband.
You’re not fit to be a father.
You’re not fit to be loved.
Nobody is looking for you.
Nobody wants you.
Everything that happens to you is deserved.
You’re not a good person.
You’re a killer.
He was streaming in and out of consciousness now. The voice in his head brought him back just enough to fuck with him before he dropped into another pit of darkness and quiet.
Stacey belongs with Rex.
Rex can give her a family and more children.
Rex isn’t afraid of the dark.
Stacey deserves Rex.
You deserve nothing.
Off in the distance, noises, like men fighting and yelling, gunshots and hand-to-hand combat, filtered around him like a fuzzy din. But he wasn’t sure if all that was his imagination toying with him or real sounds outside.
A big explosion nearby shook his box, and he whimpered in fear.
He tried to grunt, to moan and kick, but his limbs weren’t cooperating in the cold and lack of circulation.
Quiet, the demon hissed.
A long, low groan broke past the gag as he shifted and pain shot through his broken ribs and shoulder. A pain so powerful it felt like fireworks going off inside his head and all over his body. He felt another blackout coming on and welcomed it.
At least in sleep, he wouldn’t feel the cold.
At least in sleep, he wouldn’t feel the pain.
He was on his way out, moving toward the calm, when the noises around him grew louder and his box began to move.
“Gotta get him out,” one male voice said with panic.
“He can’t be in small spaces,” a voice he recognized as Heath’s said.
“Need a fucking crowbar,” Brock said, his voice just as recognizable.
“Here.”
The box started to move again, and he could hear the whinge and groan of the lid being pried open. They’d probably nailed it closed or something, so there was absolutely no way for him to escape.
“Chase, we’re getting you out, bro. Just gotta give us a minute, okay?” Heath said, his voice sounding louder and closer to Chase’s feet.
