Page 22 of The Captain's Bounty
Wadding excess cloth from her shirt, she grabbed the hot cuffs and yanked until her other hand was out. She dropped the hot metal bonds on the floor, and for a moment, just stood there, her wrists crossed over her chest, holding them protectively close.
The very air in the room made the throbbing so much worse. The pain was surreal. She couldn’t afford to pass out, nor could she continue to stand here, hugging her wrists and rocking, but that was exactly what she did. It took several minutes before shecould make herself overcome the hurt, and she had a feelingitwas responsible for her sudden ability to swallow back the pain until it could be ignored.
Her wrists were purplish-red with burns everywhere the cuffs had touched them. Her hands were shaking too, but she still reached up to untie her gag. She let it fall, the corners of her mouth stinging where she’d chewed into the gag. She licked them, trying to take comfort from easing that small pain while the greater one ate up her arms. Then she got to work.
Crawling through the room, she searched every part of it, ignoring the hurt and breaking every one of her fingernails as she pried and pulled at any and everything that might come apart. She just needed a small piece of metal with a flat edge, something she could use to unscrew the grill plating from the duct on the wall.
She broke the chair, stomping on it repeatedly before she got what she needed—a flat piece of metal from the folding legs. Standing on the bed, she struggled to make her fumbling fingers work. She lost count of how many times she dropped her impromptu tool. It fell off the bed twice and the second time, by the time she retrieved it, her ears were ringing and her knees were shaking.
You’re going into shock. If you pass out, we’ll die.
“We won’t die,” she whispered, cold sweat breaking out across her skin. Tickling drops spilled down her spine into the small of her back. “We’ll just get recaptured.”
Is that better?the entity asked acidly. To die in captivity rather than die in the bowels of this vessel?
“Drama llama.”
She got the grate off, but her fingers refused to hold it any better than they could hold her thin metal tool. Fortunately, it landed on the bed instead of clattering to the floor and alerting her handsy guard.
I think I hurt you more than I intended.
“At least… you sound … ugh… sorry about it.” She grunted as she struggled to use the plumbing pipe to climb up the wall high enough to get into the duct. It made a god-awful noise. Every movement was accompanied by the metal clunk of the duct bending under her weight.
Her wrists were hurting her worse now than before, and to make matters worse, she could barely move. Not just because of the pain, but because the duct was so claustrophobically narrow, and the inside walls were pegged with the pointy end of countless rivets. Her shoulders scraped both sides, her head was already on the ceiling, and she didn’t know how to make herself smaller. There simply wasn’t any room.
Move or we die.
Groaning, she made herself crawl as best she could, but it was progress gained in inches. She could see light up ahead, another room with a grate. So long as it wasn’t her prison, then it was a way out.
She crawled toward it. Every movement, every brush of pressure that touched her hands and wrists hurt like hell, but she didn’t have a choice. She could go forward or backward, and when she reached a grate, then she could go out. That was it. Her options in a nutshell.
Forward was a whole lot easier than back. But even so, everything she moved, her knee or elbow or back or butt—something hit some part of the duct, buckling the thin metal. She winced at how much noise she made. This was not a quiet escape.
And because it wasn’t,it also wasn’t exactly a surprise when, as she neared the next grate, she heard the soft whir of a screwdriver. The front of the grate came off and someone who wasn’t Bruwes stuck his head up into the vent and looked at her.
Good,the entity said softly.This was a mistake. Let him take you.You need healing and I need to think.
“Fuck you,” she said, too wounded and tired even to duck away when he reached in and grabbed her. She might need healing, but this was also one of the men who wanted to sell her into slavery, she wasn’t about to make it easy for him.
Bruwes washed his face.The cold water wasn’t helping. The repeated washing wasn’t helping either. He could still smell her scent and the constant ache in his blood, the pulse in his cock, it was maddening. The smell wouldn’t leave his hands, no matter how many times he soaped them. He couldn’t stop thinking about how she felt—soft, hot, silky with the slick of arousal that smelled so fantastic.
All he wanted to do was go back down the hall to his room and crawl up on top of her again, finishing what he’d started.
How incredibly unprofessional of him.
Shutting off the water, he dropped to the floor for another useless round of push-ups. Fast and hard, he forced himself to count out as many as he could do. One hundred… two hundred… it didn’t help. If anything, his cock got harder as he imagined Lissa on the floor underneath him again. He could almost feel her there, the softness of her limbs wrapping around him, pulling him down to rest on top of her instead of the floor. He could feel again the lingering heat of her groin, grinding against him with all that seductive, intoxicating softness. Meeting his fingers thrust for thrust.
Why was he doing this to himself?
Sweat rolled off him. He hated the Reflection Chamber, with its billows of hot steam meant to increase the penitent’sdiscomfort. He didn’t believe the rhetoric spouted by the Reformers, that they were diseased, deadly, beyond all salvation. Which didn’t necessarily mean he believed Demin, either, when the doctor said Rage was a product of genetics, a long dormant but natural aspect of their DNA now inexplicably switched back on within their society. All he did know was forced sterilization had done more harm than good, reducing their once noble society to nothing more than criminals, forcibly kidnapping mates from other races in a last-ditch effort to keep themselves from extinction.
Ragers were chosen to do the deed, those so consumed by their ‘disease’ to have committed the most unforgivable crime of all—the taking of a fellow citizen’s life. Those, like himself, deemed so far beyond redemption as to be convenient scapegoats should they ever get caught were put on raiding ships and sent out to do the dirty work.
And Bruwes had captained them, compounding his ‘sin’ of murder with enslaving… how many people? He couldn’t even begin to count the number of ships they’d captured at his direction. On his order. And when the Doc unwittingly uncovered the dark, ugly truth, it was on his order that they had stopped, turned their backs on home, and became worldless wanderers.
Pirates.
But at least they no longer trafficked in people.
