Page 17 of Stay Little Fighter

Not until he tells me where my woman is.

Sebastian hisses out a breath of pain, his muscles locking up as he forces himself to appear unbothered.

I work in silence, cutting into his flesh over and over until his blood drips onto the wooden floors.

To his credit, he does a decent job of controlling his pain, but that’s about to change.

“Ronan,” I call over my shoulder and he appears beside me a moment later.

“How can I help?”

“Can you boil the kettle for me?”

“Feel like a cup of tea?” He smirks.

“Not quite.”

He disappears to the other side of the room, where a stove and a tiny basin sit in the corner.

“Do you know what happens when you pour boiling water onto fresh cuts, Vega?” I ask conversationally. “It destroys the healthy skin cells around the cuts and makes healing almost impossible. So if you happen to walk out of here alive, you’ll probably lose your legs once the infection sets in. Is that something you’re willing to risk?”

“You’re bluffing,” he spits.

“Am I?” I raise a brow, tugging my phone out of my pocket. “It’s been a little while but let me see if I can find the photos.”

Scrolling through my camera roll, I ignore the photos of Chloe I’ve taken over the last few months, candid moments I couldn’t let myself forget. The jump from her smiling face to gory wounds and bloody bodies is swift and I make a mental note to myself to move these photos onto a different phone. I don’t want her to accidentally stumble across them and I’ll never be the kind of guy to hide my phone from my woman.

Chloe will never have any doubts about my devotion to her.

I find the photos I’m looking for and turn the device around for Sebastian to see my handiwork. Earl Branding was a sick son of a bitch that deserved every second of agony I inflicted on him, and I kept the motherfucker alive as long as I could while inflicting as much pain on him as possible.

Sebastian’s eyes widen slightly before looking away from the grotesque image.

“Is that what you want, Sebby? Do you want to feel unimaginable pain that lasts for days on end and has no chance of healing? Just for fun I’d probably reapply the boiling water every twelve hours or so, just to destroy as much of that good tissue as I can, as well as any other places my knives have cut up in that time.”

“I’m not a snitch,” he growls.

“I don’t really care what you want to call yourself so you can sleep at night, Vega. What I do care about is you telling me where my woman is. All of this stops if you give me what I need to know.”

“You’re saying I’ll walk out of here alive if I tell you?”

“Free and clear,” I lie. This asshole has been on our radar for a long time and definitely fits into the kinds of people we rid the world of, but I’m not going to tell him that if he’s thinking about giving me the truth.

I might even find it in my heart to give him a quick death if he’s helpful enough.

Ronan appears beside me with a stovetop kettle in his hand, steam billowing from the spout and I can’t help but chuckle as Sebastian’s eyes widen.

“What’s it going to be, Vega?”

He’s about to fold like a house of goddamn cards.

Whoever he’s working with should have thought twice about trusting a weasel like him, because if given half the chance, he was always going to cross them.

That’s how scum like him survive.

“There’s a farmhouse twenty miles north from the motel. I’ll give you the coordinates. There are five guards there at all times, but she’s staying an hour away from here in some fancy hotel.”

“She?” Ronan and I ask at the same time.