————- —————-
Some time later . . .
————- —————-
Shamira’s mouth felt like cotton and bile when she woke up. Her vision was blurred, and the intensely bright light hanging somewhere overhead was not helping matters at all. Her hands were secured, with what felt like leather-lined metal, and her restraints were secured to a chain attached to the ceiling. She hung freely, her feet cuffed together with similar devices, and she was at least two feet off of the ground. She was also naked as the day she was born.
“Wuh . . . what –”
“You should have left when I warned you,” came a masculine but now no-longer-tempting voice from behind her. “I was nice to you because I disrespected you about your car, so I gave you a way out.” Daniel the elf walked into her view. He still looked like a Greek god, with a chiseled and smooth chest exposed to the world, tight leather pants and his beautiful hair flowing unrestrained by a headband. But his eyes were anything but friendly now. They were just . . . dark.
“Why . . . what –” Shamira babbled, trying to get her eyes to focus. Slowly, things began to clear up, and she saw chains . . . chains lining every wall in her field of view. Those walls, those chains, and the floors beneath were splattered with rust covered splotches . . . blood.
“You aren’t who you claimed to be,” Daniel continued calmly, then slugged her hard in the ribs. Shamira growled in pain and yanked on her bindings, but they didn’t give. This elf apparently knew how to restrain people. He sighed, then continued talking. “You lied to me. Who are you?” He slugged her again on the other side.
Shamira stopped trying to pull on her chains, realizing that she was just wasting her strength. She blocked out the pain she felt from where she had been shot and more recently punched. She felt so weak. “What . . . I was just passing through and those guys . . . Augh!” She yelped when another blow landed solidly in her midsection.
“Stop . . . lying. You killed eleven well armed and trained men, and wounded the twelfth. You carried substantial firepower. You’ve been shot several times, and yet you kept fighting. And you cost us so much blood,” he whispered, gripping her arm in a place a silver bullet had passed through, digging his thump in until it ruptured the scar. Shamira bit back her scream this time, though the pain rampaging through her system was worse than anything she had ever imagined before.
“You fucker!” she hissed at last. “You’re a bleeder?! You . . . you son of a bitch!” He was one of them. She had been looking for those involved in the morning star trade, and she had stared one of the worst of them in the face and did not even know it. She looked up and saw a couple of grates nearby and she knew . . . she was underneath the garage. Damn it, she had stood not more than twenty yards from where she was now. How could she have been so foolish? She had completely and utterly failed, and now she was going to die for it.
“Luckily, weres are a dime a dozen,” Daniel said softly, pulling his had away and wiping Shamira’s own blood on her exposed abdomen. “We still have one left over,” he added glancing behind her. Shamira heard chains rattle, and she realized that she wasn’t alone in her captivity. “He’s too scrawny though. I doubt he’ll give us even a sixth of what we need for another batch. And faeries have gotten damn hard to catch around here.”
Daniel hauled off and punched Shamira in the kidneys. She may not officially need them anymore, but it still hurt like hell. Then he spun her around so that she could see the other captive, and her heart broke. Were or not, the kid couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen years old, and he was a scrawny as Daniel had claimed. He did not look starved, but he did look . . . empty.
“You couldn’t just stay gone,” she heard Daniel say from behind her, “so now . . . now I make you less of a problem and more part of the solution.” His voice dropped to a thin whisper. “I may not be able to bleed you dry yet, but I can do so many things with a body like this without spilling a drop.”
Shamira thought about those words, especially “a body like this.” When Clara said those words, it made her feel like the most beautiful woman in the world, even if the feeling only lasted for the utterance. The way her friends at the house had looked at her had made her feel so amazing. Hell, she even admitted to herself that the first time Shane had said something similar had been one of the first times she’d genuinely felt desirable.
When Daniel said them, she felt a void inside her, and that void was growing. Suddenly, she felt a sharp and searing pain in her back and she heard the familiar sound of a whip cracking. A silver-tipped whip . . . Shamira’s own whip. She screamed into her teeth, but trapped the sound there.
“It will be a while until my partner is able to round up more men,” Daniel said, running his hand over the scar he had just created. A normal whip would have opened her up and caused her to bleed, but the silver caused the wound to instantly cauterize and form a nasty scab. “When he does, they’ll go hunting, and then you’ll be nothing more than a blood cow. But until then, I’m going to practice my art on you. You might as well let the scream out,” he added, letting the whip fall on her left shoulder-blade. “They all do.”
Shamira didn’t know how long it took before she started to scream . . . then sob . . . then whimper. The elf landed lash after lash on her skin until she the scars covered almost a fourth of her exposed skin. When he broke both of her knees with a sledgehammer, she let out a shrill whine that she could not even recognized as herself.
Daniel had to magically revive her after a shot to her jaw dislocated it, leaving her jawbone only attached on one side and otherwise hanging limply in the skin. Shamira though she had no screams left in her. Her face was covered with sweat and tears, her body with sweat and scars. The were looked at her with terror and revulsion.
The only weeping Shamira could do was in her own mind. She prayed for death. She had never been particularly religious, but she prayed as hard as she could. Daniel had won. Lacroix or whoever this partner is could have her. She’d sell her soul for just a second without pain. But Daniel was not quite done. She saw him approach with some kind of high powered dremel saw that sported a blade that shone like silver. He started it up and let the blade roar into her back.
Shamira screamed as her captor dug into her spine. She screamed and moaned like the broken soul she had become. She screamed until she could no longer feel anything. She screamed until the world finally and thankfully went black.
————— —————-