Seize me From Darkness (Pierced Hearts Book 4) (21 page)

Who was this woman?

I hated lying, but the more she did it, the more intense my curiosity.

“You might want to stop crossing your legs. You’re flashing me every so often.
”

“Oh.” She
brought her legs together. That bright red blush was part of why I wanted to know who she really was. That she could still blush after all that had happened, it spoke of a naivety around men and that just...appealed. Might be my kinky imagination but I could roll with it.

That night I sat down on the bed, in the faint moonlight
, and attempted to write a message with coffee on a paper plate. If she just threw this away we were fucked. I had no idea where else to go from here.

Gregor ran this place like a clock.
A nasty, malevolent fucked-up clock.

T
here were days I wanted to be so close with Pieter that our skin would merge. He was big, powerful, a rock of serenity in the middle of this mad place. Then there were days I’d look at him and remember what he’d done, how good he was at killing, and I’d recognize my previous foolishness.

He didn’t understand how most every little thing he told me
about himself was reinforcing my fear of him.

I didn’t understand why he could
nevertheless make me catch my breath when he stripped off for a shower. Or like now, when he’d looked at me through those dangling untidy dark locks while doing push-ups. With his...
fucking
shirt off.
Swallow thy tongue
. The little octopus on the back of his shoulder gleamed and writhed as his muscles slid.

Yep.
He affected me
not
at all. Trying not to look hot and flushed, I shifted my legs and stared at the paintwork instead.

Pieter was my own private
tiger and I was locked in the cage with him.

Drooling at men wasn’t new. Having a thrill run through me at the potential
for a man to grab me and do something unexpected
to me – that was new.

Yet e
ven when he told me about his ex-wife my throat closed in. Why? Who the fuck knew. Perhaps because all these details made him real, like someone I could date, and that was terrifying.
Not
in a million years would I ever date him. Silly reaction, though. My mind needed to catch up on the news. I might die tomorrow.

My teensy
window up high was acting all cheerful again, letting in an actual visible shaft of late sun along with golden, whirling particles of dust.

“Wish
I was Tinkerbell so I could fly on a sunbeam.”

He grunted, pausing at the top of a push-up. “Yeah?”

“Must be windy out there.” A breeze was getting in past the seals. The glass rattled. My sunlight faded, vanished.

Despite doing more push-ups, Pieter replied.
“The weather is pretty dirty. A storm might be coming.”

There were places out
there where people were free. “Last night, I heard a woman crying. The poor thing.”

“
Ja.
It was bad. You have a kind heart, Jaz.”

“I do?” Guess I was soft at times.

“You think of others. Even when you are worse off.”

Funny but I’d always thought myself self-centered. Anyone could empathize though. I was bad at really doing anything that changed things. Maybe thoughts counted?

I put my hand on my heart and wished us all home, every single one of us captives.
Zoe.
I remembered her. I prayed she’d escaped.

Even those
many lonely nights when I’d eaten takeaway in my apartment by myself or walked past restaurants and cafés and looked in at loving couples, I’d pay almost anything to have those in my reach. I wanted to be ordinary again.

Please,
please
, if there’s a god up there. One of us deserves to have our lives back.

T
ears filled my eyes and threatened to spill. I wiped them away with my forefinger.

What was there left for Him to do to me? What came after barbed wire?
My mind went straight to the bleeding wreck of a man that Gregor had created with his knife.

If it was that
next, could I kill myself? I had no clue how anyone suicided without drugs or a weapon. I might manage shooting myself in the head but anything else seemed unlikely.

H
ow bad had things become that I contemplated this?

How many people would have done it already?

I dropped my gaze to the bed. The guard had poked these sheets through the hatch and they’d come back with dark spots. Their laundry methods hadn’t washed out my blood.

Yesterday, after three days without seeing her, the cleaning lady had returned. My
opportunity, or so Pieter had whispered. I gave her the plate with an apologetic smile and a
here’s some rubbish you missed.
What were the chances she would read it? She’d looked at the writing, frozen, and then I’d crumpled it again and tossed it into her bag of rubbish.

Please help us. They killed a young boy here. They to
rture me. Go here. Say Pieter sent you. Say where we are.

Below that was Pieter’s signature,
an address, and a note that said to give her a large amount of money – a coffee-flavored message. It was weird. Like hiding a hacksaw in a cake.

She’d gone and now I could only wonder. What if?
I’d had a nightmare last night where Gregor burned us alive. If he found out what we’d done, he would punish me. I’d seen that possibility from the moment Pieter suggested this.

“Are you okay?” Pieter was at my side, panting, looking all sweaty and male.

I shrugged. “Just thinking.”

“I’
ll have a shower then and join you in that thinking.”

“
Mmm.” We shared a bed at night but I’d made clear to him that he wasn’t to touch me sexually anymore. That he obeyed was amazing. I eyed him sideways as if dubious. “I guess thinking with me is fine.”

He shot me one of those inscrutable frowns that had the potential to stop my heart. I’d figured
out I could either act daunted or flippant when he did this. Acting frightened was stupid, like blood on the ground to my tiger. Besides, I found I liked living on the edge and teasing him.

So I grinned.

“
Ja
, it sure is bloody fine. Don’t go away.”

That he now said the
Aussie
bloody
instead of the South African
blêrrie
was cute.

I counted days. Was it
Saturday? “Gregor’s back soon.” Breathing became a forgotten thing.

That I’d said it
aloud registered a second later.

In mid-stride to the shower,
Pieter turned back, his lips compressed. “Yes.”

Even if the cleaning lady
went to his soldier friends, it might be too late. Dread arose from the ashes of my thoughts.

They’d do something awful
to me tomorrow. It was always worse.

The shower came on. I blinked then rearranged myself on the bed and looked the other way so I wouldn’t have to see Pieter’s toned butt or any of his other interesting bits.

A guard banged on the door. “There’s a cyclone coming! Should be here tomorrow. If it doesn’t knock the place down, you should be fine. Don’t expect food for a couple of days. Fill these up with water.”

He shoved a few plastic containers through the hatch, old milk bottles from the looks of them, and then a bag of apples
, a few packets of cheese, and some bread. They thumped and scattered onto the floor.

A cyclone. That was why the high winds.
Fuck.

As if on cue,
rain speckled against my window and a super-big gust shook the glass again.

We might drown or
...or
anything
.

And i
f the building fell over, I didn’t give a shit. Maybe we could escape even. I flopped back onto the bed and grinned at the ceiling.

No Gregor.
Yes!

“This place is concrete above,” I pointed at the ceiling, “and there. Concrete walls, steel door – not a hope it’ll blow down.” At Jaz’s crestfallen expression I rummaged for something heartening. “If a tree fell on us, maybe, just maybe, a wall might crumble.”

But I doubted it. More likely we
’d drown if this place was near a river or the guards would forget to come back and feed us. There were two locking mechanisms on the door and one of them was a bar they lowered on the outside. The hatch was an inch thick, slid to one side, and had some fastening on the outside that I couldn’t get to. I’d looked at shifting that on a few nights.

“I didn’t really think it was likely.” Jaz went to our little collection of bottles and food and picked up two of the bottles.

To pick even the pickable lock I needed metal. The only metal in the room was wiring and it was screwed away behind thick plastic plates. I needed metal to pry off the plates to get the metal. I’d have risked getting electrocuted if it was possible.

I needed a fairy godmother, or a
greedy cleaning lady with a conscience. My friends were true friends. We’d do anything for each other, including coming in guns blazing if they knew I was here. No one fucked with Randall, Glass, Jurgen, or me. Even if Jurgen was only a few years shy of fifty. Except they
were
fucking with me.

I heaved
out a sigh and went to help filling up bottles. Five bottles, so ten liters. If the taps stopped working, we might last a few days before we were desperate enough to drink the toilet water.

I watched her
struggle to press the stiff button to keep the water flowing while still holding the bottle in place.

“Give me that.” I took the bottle from
her and stuck it under the tap.

At least she was healing well. After a week of treatment, I had no
reason to paint her nude body with iodine anymore. Such a pity. Though handling her was torture for my dick and gave me blue balls for ages. Her newborn reluctance to let me kiss her, sit her on my lap, or spank her cute little ass...

An ass
that was partly on display what with her kneeling to get some stray apples off the floor. I wrenched my gaze away. Yeah, not being allowed to touch her seemed a suitable penance as well as a test of willpower.

I wanted to be a good man. This was it. Even if I only lived another day or another week
, it was worth it.

I’d be
convinced of this, until the next time she gave me cheek. Equality just seemed wrong with Jazmine. Whenever she started up the shower, I remembered her behavior when I went all alpha male on her.

But
I didn’t have the right to do that.
Or the right excuse.

The cyclone hit early the next morning. I’d been through two of these big storms before, what the Americans
would call hurricanes, but Jazmine hadn’t. She’d lived too far south in Australia to see them. From her wide eyes and the way she cowered at the far end of the bed when the bigger wind gusts made the building shudder, when the air was filled with so much noise we had to shout, it made me offer to take her in my arms. The relief when she swarmed up the bed to accept was immense.