Page 136 of Unorthodox
Somewhere in the chaos, I hear a woman scream my name.
Evora.
I debate half a second, the double doors to the front of Luca’s house in sight.
Half a second, and I’ve made my decision.
I walk out, shooting two guards in the back as I do, and I get in my car and leave.
The rope is bitinginto my wrists, my mouth, the feel of it against my teeth rough and straw-like. My head is aching, and I feel blood trickling down the side of my face.
Across from me, tied to a chair just like I am, Mamie has tears rolling down her eyes.
There are dead men in the foyer, lying face down in pools of blood.
And squatting down in front of me is a man with a mask, only his dark eyes and his mouth visible.
He has a gun resting against my knee, one hand on my bare thigh.
I heard the glass shatter when I came out of my bathroom. Heard the high-pitch whine of the alarm. Gunshots. Screams.
And before I could step back into the bathroom to hide, my door swung open, crashing against the wall, and there was a gun in my face.
“Are you scared?” the man now asks me, the first time he’s said a word. He has a Southern accent, and I wonder who he works for. My father? I wouldn’t put it past him to punish me for getting myself kidnapped.
“Are you in pain?” There’s humor in those words. This man is the one that dragged me down the hall by my hair, that pushed me into this chair. When I kicked and fought him and screamed, he hit me with his gun.
I can’t speak, and even if I could have, there’s nothing I want to say.
“Not so mouthy now, huh? Not such a bitch when you’re gagged?” His hand slides up my thigh, his fingers under my sleep shorts. I tense, trying to move my hands from behind my back, but the twine cuts deeper into my wrists.
My chest heaves against the rope biting into my flesh, wrapped around my torso. My ankles are tied to the legs of the chair, and apart from turning my neck, I can’t move anything but my fingers.
“I heard you’re a virgin,” the man says.
You heard fucking wrong.Maybe he’s not from my father after all.
I hear Mamie whimper beneath her own rope, a man standing behind her chair with a gun to her head.
“We could fix that for you.”
I say nothing as the other man laughs.
I stare at the front door, trying not to see Max’s men slain like toppled dominoes.
There’s another man in the shadows with a gun, waiting for Max to return.
He’s going to die right in front of me.
I’m going to watch his head explode, just like I watched Ben’s. Zeke’s.
But neither of them mattered.
Max, though…watching him die is going to hurt.
My captor’s fingers brush against the edge of my underwear. I refuse to look at him. Instead, I stare straight ahead.
When I was a child, and Cade got me and Danik alone in a room that summer, at first, it was torture. Even though it wasn’t painful, until the pine bath, I knew it was wrong. And every second spent in that stuffy room was agonizing.
