Page 125 of Bad Enough

TB turned his head to see Waters standing behind him, holding out a key. “I can’t let go of her. You do it.”

Waters gave him a smile, then reached over the couple to unlock the cuffs. Once they opened, Flame’s arms clutched TB’s neck in desperation. “I’ve got you, princess. I’ve got you.”

Finally some part of his brain switched back on. TB wasted no time sweeping Flame off of her feet, hugging her tight to his chest, and moving toward the ramps and to the exit with purpose. He was not letting her spend one more minute in this space.

48

JUNE 23RD-24TH

TB

THUD! THUD! THUD-THUD-THUD! THUD! THUD-THUD!

The sounds of flesh meeting flesh stopped, but it was evident that the pain from the contact did not. Gendry’s head was lolling to the right, his breathing full-on wheezing, his face drawn tight in pain.

“Had enough?” TB asked.

The man’s response whistled through his missing teeth. “Not even close.”

A single naked lightbulb burned in the room that was bare except for a single metal chair. Bound to the chair, Gendry bled out on his Armani suit. His left eye was swollen shut, and the right was on its way to looking the same. His nose was off center, dried rivers of blood caking his top lip, painting over and around his mouth. His upper lip was split, adding blood to his chin and neck. Overall, the flesh of his face was bruised and cut from the punches he’d endured.

In addition to the badly battered face, the man’s left shoulder was clearly out of the socket and had to be excruciatingly painful, being wrenched back behind the chair where his hands were zip-tied. His once crisp, white thousand-dollar dress shirt was showing signs of being saturated with sweat and blood, covering what was surely to be an entire torso of bruised ribs. His kidneys were likely severely damaged. His ankles were bound to the legs of the chair with zip-ties tied too tightly, cutting off circulation to the point where his feet were swelling and turning blue-black.

In the shadows, TB leaned himself against the wall in the upper right corner of the room, his hands behind his back, flat to the wall. His ankles were crossed. His eyes were hooded, gaze straight out at the wall across the room. His demeanor was that of a man who had all the time in the world to wait.

“Where do you send the girls?” The giant’s tone was one of boredom, as if he’d asked this question hundreds of times already.

“Fuck you,” the man snapped.

“Wrong answer. Care to try again?” TB’s response showed no emotion whatsoever.

“Fuck. You.” The man pushed out the sound louder and clearer, as if he thought TB was hard of hearing. Both men knew that not to be true, just as they knew the second command was a taunt.

“I applaud your strategy, but your tactic won’t work.”

The man gave a snort of derision. “And what strategy is that?”

TB stepped away from the wall and sauntered over to stand in front of the bound man. “You’re hoping that you can make me mad. Make me seethe in a red rage, maybe make a mistake, and attack in anger. You’re hoping that will give you an opening to escape. But it won’t happen.”

The bound man’s lips suddenly curled up into a pitiful smile, and a whistling sound escaped as his body shook with laughter. “Everyone has a trigger. Jolie is yours.”

“Jolie is nothing to me. She died the day Sylvan escaped you. And since Sylvan is safe, I can’t be triggered into making a mistake. But I don’t have what I need. The girls were clearly all headed to another place, and they were headed there together. Since that’s the case, that means they go somewhere else before being distributed to their owners. What I need is the next stop on the itinerary for the girls you’ve been selling. So I ask again, where?”

The man’s lips turned up slightly, causing the scab on his lip to split open and begin bleeding again. A gurgling sound began from deep within him. As the sound grew, his shoulders began to shake, eventually revealing laughter. The sound that issued from him resembled something like a mad scientist in a bad science fiction movie. His face became even more gruesome as the smile on it broke into a mouth of teeth stained red. What teeth he had left, anyway.

His smile fell, the laughter clearly painful, as he broke into a fit of coughing, which had to be even more tortuous. Minutes later, when the coughing stopped, blood bubbled at the corner of his mouth. He ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, then spat blood and a tooth to the floor. Three other teeth were already there to greet it.

Another smile formed on the man’s crooked mouth. “I’ll never tell you.”

“We’ll see,” TB replied with a lack of concern.

His step seemed dismissive of his victim as he moved to his right side. Without warning, he delivered a brutal punch to the man’s chin, snapping his head back. That was followed up with a barrage of quick, sharp jabs that pummeled his ribs. There was a distinct snapping sound as another one broke.

The victim muttered, “Mother-fucking asshole,” through a groan of pain. “You better hope I don’t get free of this chair. Because if I do, I’ll kill you.”

“Brave words for a man who’s about to see what’s on the other side.”

“Not brave,” the man gurgled. “True. I will gut you like a pig.”

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