Total pages in book: 101
Estimated words: 95187 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 476(@200wpm)___ 381(@250wpm)___ 317(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 95187 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 476(@200wpm)___ 381(@250wpm)___ 317(@300wpm)
Fortunately, I’m likely to die before I ever have to face that reckoning properly. Maybe it’ll even happen today.
The stranger glares. I think he might question me again, but instead he moves too fast for me to brace, punching me in the stomach. The breath rushes from my lungs, and every muscle in my body seizes up as I bend in half with an instinctive need to protect myself from the blow that already happened. One would think I’d have learned to take a punch by now. Apparently not.
He uses the opportunity of my agony to haul me back to the bed and throw me down on my back. I’m still trying to force air into my seizing lungs when he straddles me and shoves my hands over my head. A click of handcuffs registers before the feeling of cold metal against my wrists. The man sits back on his heels, his disgust written all over his face. “It’s pathetic that someone so weak helped orchestrate so much pain. So many deaths of people better than you.”
My first full breath comes out in a rough laugh. It’s painful that everyone from my own father to this stranger have such an accurate read on me, but it’s nothing new. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Okay.” He reaches into his pocket and withdraws a switchblade. “I’m going to cut you, again and again, until you tell me exactly what I need to know. Poseidon might be pissed that you bled out all over his fresh sheets, but the information you give me will make it all worthwhile.”
“Torture.” I make a face. “I would think a big, strong man like you would know that torture doesn’t work. That’s practically Bad Guy 101. Except I suppose you think you’re the good guy? Color me not convinced.”
He presses the tip of the knife to the center of my chest, right at the bottom of my sternum. “Yeah, that’s the thing. Poseidon is the good guy. Not me. I figure if you blubber like a baby, at least something that comes out of your pathetic little mouth will be true. That’s enough for me.”
He might say he’s a bad guy, but it’s not the truth. He’s convinced himself he can make this work. He can make himself strip me apart piece by piece and come out okay on the other end. It’s sad. Somehow, I don’t think he will thank me for saying as much, though.
I take a ragged breath. “I’ll be honest. All it will take is you cutting me once, and I’ll tell you anything you want to know. I’m more a fan of giving pain than taking it. That doesn’t mean my information will be accurate. I don’t have what you’re looking for.”
“We’ll see.” There’s no further warning. He drags the knife down my stomach in a shallow slash. I thought that getting punched was agony. It’s nothing compared to this. It’s no mere scratch that he’s dealt me. It fucking hurts.
“I don’t know anything,” I gasp. I can’t breathe, not even to cry out. Somehow, a part of me didn’t really believe he’d do it.
“I think you do.” He drags the knife in a parallel line to the first. Another searing stroke that has me clamping my jaw shut to contain a scream. “What is Circe planning?”
“Death and destruction to all Olympians, probably. Definitely the Thirteen. She doesn’t seem to like them much.” I hardly sound like myself. Surely that’s not my voice, so rough and thready?
He cuts me a third time.
This time I can’t stop myself from crying out. “I told you what you wanted to know! I answered you. You’re supposed to stop hurting me.”
He grins, but not like anything is funny. His eyes look almost sad. “When did I ever say that I would stop hurting you if you answered me?” He cuts me again before I can find an answer.
And so it goes. My world narrows to each cut, to each new pain that blossoms in the wake of the last. I answer his questions…I think. But I don’t know what I say. There’s no space for intention when all I can experience is agony. At one point, I start screaming and I can’t make myself stop.
That’s when the door slams open and he appears.
Poseidon, looking like an avenging angel, but maybe that’s the haze of pain talking. His fury is written all over his roughly handsome face. It only becomes more pronounced as he takes in the scene: his man straddling me, the mattress soaked with my blood. I half expect him to step back and close the door and let the torture continue.
Instead, he crosses the space in two large steps and hauls my torturer off me, picking him up by the back of his shirt and flinging him away. “What the fuck are you doing?”