was trained to switch off from feeling anything at all.
Right now that training was failing.
Don’t feel sorry for her, I told myself. She’s a Georgian suka. This suka stands between you and your kill. This suka, alive and surviving, sends 152 away to Master. No one else matters but 152. Nothing else matters but setting her free.
Clinging to that thought, I bent down, wrapping my hand around her arm. She tensed under my hold, but I picked her up and held her against the slab. Stowing the picana to the side, I shackled her wrists and ankles to the attached metal cuffs. Standing back, I stared down at her strapped to the slab. Her thick long hair was still covering her face and chest. Moving forward, I brushed the wet hair back until all of her body was exposed. As her chest was revealed up close for the first time, I let my eyes roam.
When they abruptly stopped.
Three wide scars, looking like patched-up holes, stood proud on her skin—one under her shoulder, one on her left waist, and one just above her left hip. The female’s stomach was quickly rising and falling, drops of water turning to ice on her skin. When I looked up to her face, the skin was pale and her lips were turning blue, with the skin beginning to crack.
But those eyes, those fucking dark eyes of hers, were still watching me. Only this time there was no water filling them. They were staring straight through me, glazed.
Knowing she was at the brink of collapse, I moved to the opposite side of the bed and took hold of the fan and heater, positioning them at the front of her wet naked body. Flexing my wrist, as I held my hand over the cold air fan’s switch, I asked, “Tell me your name.”
She stared at me blankly. She didn’t react. After several seconds, her mouth dropped open and with her eyes still glazed she managed to whisper, “Elene Melua. Kazreti, Georgia.”
Closing my eyes, and with that traitorous sympathetic ache flaring back in my chest, I switched on the fan and smothered her smooth wet skin with the coldest of air.
6
ZOYA
I didn’t think it was possible to feel any more pain. My skin had gone from feeling on fire, to as if it were being ripped apart by razor blades, to nothing but numbness with the deliberately changed temperatures I’d endured over the last couple of hours—torturous heat, swiftly followed by unbearable cold. I tried to wrench my arms and legs free as the pain ripped through me, but the cuffs wrapped around them made that impossible.
I gritted my teeth, suppressing the scream in my throat from slipping out of my lips. My back arched. My fingers and toes became rigid. But my eyes never moved from the man who stood before me. The monster who had returned today with piercing crystal blue eyes. Gone were dilated black eyes, and in their place were intense blue pools. A deceivingly beautiful feature on a man so cruel.
He watched me now as the heat caused my skin to sweat, and I could see in his blank stare that my pain and my suffering made no impact on his heart. He was huge, severely scarred and muscled, and the most frightening thing I had ever seen.
My body continued to jerk and jump as the effects of the changing temperatures. But I watched my captor. I never removed my arms, suddenly confused when, on occasion, his eyes would tighten in the corners as though he felt discomfort in causing me pain. His hands would ball at his sides, as though they were fighting the urge to turn off the heater or cold air fan.
As the hours rolled on, I wondered if I was simply imagining it, but it was there: an element of empathy or remorse.
Maybe this heavily scarred monster had feelings after all.
Since I had arrived in this chamber of hell, since this man had made me strip, I felt my innocence tearing to shreds. I had never been with a man. But he had bared me. He had touched my naked skin, he had run his nose along my neck, and he had pressed himself against my naked flesh.
Yet something was different between this man and the one from last night. Last night, his blue eyes were dilated and blown. His body was taut, as if filled with anger and rage. Last night, the man was coldly cruel and violent.