Page 40 of Fearless

“Please, have a seat, Serena,” Smith said.

Hating every moment of it, she sat in the chair and waited for the clamps to snap into place around her ankles and wrists. Once she was secured, she thought they would be on their way, but instead, Smith walked around the chair and pulled something from his pocket. “Mr. Kingsley has requested you wear this.”

“A hood? Why?”

“I don’t question his instructions, Serena.”

She knew it was useless, but she couldn’t help but ask, “Why, Smith? You have a humanity about you that the others don’t. Why do you⁠—”

He held up a hand to stop her. “Don’t ask for something I can’t give.”

Arguing would do no good, but she hoped she had planted a seed for a later conversation. For now, she needed to focus on what lay ahead.

As he prepared to put the hood over her head, she saw something in his expression she had never seen—it looked remarkably like compassion. Then the hood made everything dark.

As the chair began to move, Serena braced herself for a continuation of Colton Kingsley’s manipulations. This carrot-and-stick type of punishment was disconcerting. And while she knew that was the point, not knowing what to expect kept her on edge. Would today bring the pain she had expected yesterday?

She counted the seconds it took to get to their location, which wasn’t the same as yesterday. When the wheelchair stopped, she waited to hear a door open, but nothing happened. She was about to ask what was going on when she heard heavy footsteps behind her. She’d know that walk anywhere.

“Good morning, Serena. I trust you slept well,” Kingsley said.

“What’s going on, Kingsley? Why the hood?”

“We’ll get to that soon. I just wanted to give you a little pep talk before the fun begins.”

She drew in a breath, wanting nothing more than to rise from this chair and smack the man’s obnoxious mouth. An inner voice chastised her for wasting her energy on such a pointless desire. Not only was she unable to move, but angering Kingsley would get her nowhere. Manipulating this man by pretending to cooperate with him was her only way forward.

“Now, here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to be given a difficult decision today, one I don’t think you will have anticipated. Yesterday was physically uncomfortable for you. But today? Well, let’s just say tears will likely be shed.”

Before she could decipher the meaning of his words, she heard a door open. She was wheeled a few feet, and then a door closed behind her.

Since she couldn’t see, she relied on her other senses. Every cell in her body went on high alert. Terror as she’d never known was building inside her. Someone else was in the room with her. Not Kingsley or Smith. Someone she cared about. Someone precious to her.

Sean.

Her husband was in this room.

She didn’t question her intuition. What she needed to do now was prepare because, without a doubt, horror awaited her.

When the bag was ripped from her head, she swallowed a sobbing gasp. A few feet away, Sean lay on the floor, his face so swollen, he was almost unrecognizable. His clothes were in tatters, bloodstained and filthy. Every exposed part of his body was bruised.

Duct tape covered his mouth, but she could see the glittering emotions in his eyes, a mixture of fury and horror. The exact ones she was feeling.

How had this happened? How had they gotten to him? How long had he been here? Just by her initial assessment, he had been held and tortured for at least a month, if not more.

And now, more importantly, how was she going to get him out of here?

Controlling her expression wasn’t possible, and she wasn’t even going to try. Kingsley already knew what Sean meant to her. Pretending she didn’t care that the love of her life was lying a few feet away from her, beaten and bloody, wasn’t going to happen. If the monster got a charge out of seeing her pain, so be it.

Her heartbreak blended with anger at her own naïveté. She had believed that she had protected everyone who was at risk. She had been able to warn her family in Wisconsin and at OZ. She had stupidly assumed that Sean had burrowed so deeply into his hideout that he couldn’t be found. Looking at him now, she realized her husband had likely been Kingsley’s first target.

Sean was a seasoned black ops operator with more than a dozen years of dangerous and deadly missions under his belt. How could they have found him when she hadn’t even known where he was?

That was a worry for another day. Her focus right now needed to be on Sean. After what she’d seen Kingsley do to Jenson Mosley, she knew without a doubt that he would have no qualms about torturing or killing Sean to try to get what he wanted from her. She had to figure out how she was going to save her husband, and she had to do it fast.

Reminding herself that this was the long game, she took a silent breath and allowed all of her sorrow and fear show. Kingsley’s biggest flaw might be her best avenue. His ego was tightly knitted into his ability to manipulate and play with his victims. He took great pride in getting the best of people. She would see how far that would take her.

“How long have you had him?” Letting herself sound traumatized and broken wasn’t difficult in the least.