Chapter Seventeen

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“ARE YOU QUITE DONE?” Drake snapped as my rage petered out thanks to fever, agony, and nausea.

Eleanor!

Stay the fuck away from here!

I couldn’t catch a proper breath. My leg drained me of every awareness and energy. My mind fixated on Jinx. On the horror that I couldn’t fucking protect her. That I’d failed her. I’d failed fucking everyone!

Drake snapped his fingers, summoning two mercenaries as the ringing of my handcuffs fell silent. “Let’s get started. Don’t have all fucking night.”

My hate reached critical levels, blistering through me and feeding me false power.

I glowered as a man dressed all in black brought over a foldable table, and another man deposited a box on top. The weak glow of the light above created shadows and sinister promises.

I stopped fighting.

My eyes locked onto the box and the contents that I was highly intimate with.

Fresh agony swamped me. My back arched as metal bars bit into me. Blood trickled once again down my thigh. If I kept struggling, would I eventually get free or would I fail Eleanor faster than I already was?

Breathing hard, covered in pain-sweat, I growled, “Crawling over my island and helping yourself to my Euphoria supplies, brother?”

Drake nodded, his hands diving into the cardboard and placing the smaller packages in a line up on the table. Each one had a purple orchid stencilled on the top.

A big fuck-off hint what the main ingredient was.

A cocky decision on my end, yet my witless brother hadn’t realised the clue staring him in the goddamn face.

“Found your playroom. Couldn’t figure out how to load a fantasy, though, so that’s another thing you’ll have to divulge, along with telling me how this stuff works.” He ran his fingertip over the lids. “Seeing as we have time while waiting for Eleanor Grace to arrive, how about we do an experiment?”

I held his stare. “I’ve already tested and perfected the sensors. They don’t need further experiments.”

“Oh, these do.” He picked up the oil, sloshing glittery liquid in its bottle. An oil specially crafted to distort the sense of touch while in the virtual reality hallucination. “Let’s just say, I’ve tweaked them. Made them better.”

I didn’t ask what he’d done.

I wasn’t an idiot.

Whatever he’d done would guarantee pain.

That was his MO.

Torture, then torture some more, keep torturing until death.

“I helped myself to your supplies while you took a nap, but I couldn’t find your stash of elixir. Where is it?”

I bared my teeth, cursing the rush of sickness originating from my harpooned leg. “Don’t have any left.”

My patience was a big fat fucking zero.

The wire beneath me, the handcuffs biting me, the threat of Eleanor’s life? It’d put me in a right shit. The only thing stopping me from killing him was a cage and these handcuffs. My injuries wouldn’t matter the second I got close enough to slaughter him.

His temper flared, his forehead trying to furrow but struggling thanks to Botox. “Bullshit, where do you keep it?”

“It’s true. My supplies are gone.”

It was bullshit.

Kind of.

I had three vials left in my apothecary cabinet in my office.

But that didn’t include the entire box that’d just finished cooking in my lab on Monyet—another island named in Indonesian for monkey. An ode to all the primates that’d died in the quest for useable drugs. An island that was my most heavily fortified, hidden, and priceless jewel in my empire.

“Still a terrible liar, Sullivan.”

I smiled savagely. “What can I say? I detest thieves.”

“A thief? Me?” He chuckled. “Just taking what’s rightfully mine.”

“And I’ll take your life for this.”

He clucked his tongue. “You’ve created a fantasy, and now, you’re believing in one.” Unboxing the rest of my VR sensors, he lifted out eye lenses, fingerprint deceptors, nasal stick, taste scrambler, and earplugs. Unlike my carefully designed stock, these had been tampered with. The contents were different. The colours all wrong.

Raising his eyebrow, he sighed as if he’d rather just be resting than preparing to torture his own flesh and blood. “Ah well, first things first.”

My stomach clenched as he snapped his fingers at a mercenary who came gingerly toward my cage. Drake passed him a key, and the man swallowed as he inserted it into the lock and opened the gate.

One imprisonment down.

I rolled my wrists in the handcuffs, hissing as my torn skin oozed blood. Pain gathered on top of pain, but I ignored it all.

I had to stay lucid for this.

I had to survive this because I fucking refused to fail Eleanor again.

Drake took the key back from the guard and replaced it with the skin oil. His blond minion wrapped his fist around the bottle.

Drake arched his chin at me. “For the next few hours, you are my own personal guinea pig. You liberated all those animals in our labs. You feel such empathy for the rats and vermin that were born for that very fucking purpose. Therefore, you will become them. You get to feel how they did, baby brother. You get to have your skin burned, eyes blinded, and veins pumped with concoctions.”

Reaching through the bars, he patted my head like I was some doomed beagle ready for a scientist and their syringe. “Rather poetic, no?”

I tore my head away, snarling, “You’re a sick sonovabitch.”

Nodding at the mercenary, he said, “Pour that oil on my brother. He won’t bite.”

I snarled as the guy ducked to enter the door. He legitimately looked afraid about climbing into a small cage with me.

He should.

My arms might be restrained, but my legs weren’t—even if one had a massive hole in it.

Drake pulled up his chair and sat as if I was his favourite brand of entertainment. “Maybe we’ll get you spouting the recipe for elixir before Eleanor arrives. If we get business out of the way, we can focus on pleasure the moment she lands.”

I fucking hated her name on his tongue—I wanted to rip it from his godforsaken mouth for ever mentioning her.

I had a tally.

A tally on every infraction Drake had done to me since I was fucking born. I owed him a lifetime of torture for what he’d done to Serigala, to my animals, and to Jinx. I had an entire notebook requiring savage reciprocation, and I couldn’t fucking do a goddamn thing as the guy bent and poised over me, the bottle tipping to pour oil over my bruised and broken body.

Drake had taken away my ability to deal with this as a man. He treated me like a creature...so I’d become a fucking creature.

I didn’t wait to strike.

I just did.

Kicking out, I scissored my legs around the guard’s ankles, dropping him to the floor. The oil splashed onto my belly, burning, bubbling—a form of acid chewing through my flesh.

I bellowed with agony as he cried out and bounced off the metal wire, then screamed as I wrapped my thighs around his throat and squeezed.

I fucking squeezed.

I locked my ankles and crushed his goddamn windpipe.

“Ah, for fuck’s sake.” Drake clapped his hands in impatience, signalling for reinforcements. “All of you, it seems this is gonna be a team affair. Stop my brother from murdering your colleague and get some rope for his legs.”

Three mercenaries jumped from the shadows. One went behind me and shoved his hand through the bars. I tried to bite him, but he managed to grab a fistful of my hair, jerking my head back.

The guy between my legs turned blue, his eyes bugging as I shoved him closer and closer to death. He scratched at my thighs, making me bellow when he clawed at my wound.

I squeezed harder.

His eyelids fluttered closed.

Two mercenaries climbed into the cramped cage with me, kicking at my guts until I couldn’t ignore the pain anymore.

“Fuck!” I let my victim go.

I breathed hard as the two men carted their colleague’s lifeless body from the cage and dropped him at Drake’s feet.

They didn’t revive him.

Instead, they entered the cosy quarters I’d found myself in and wrapped a heavy rope around each ankle. Only once they’d tied me to each side of the cage, spreading me, making me utterly defenceless did the redhead one leave to deal with the unconscious guy.

A dark-haired one grabbed the abandoned oil bottle.

He gave me a nasty smile and squatted between my spread legs, pulling out a knife from his commando boot. “Not so scary now, are ya?” With our eyes locked, he tipped the oil down my chest, rivering over silver scars courtesy of a younger Drake, dripping into fresh scratches from our beach battle, stripping flesh from my bones with corrosive and caustic agony.

My vision went red.

My back arched.

I howled.

The last thing I heard as I tripped into deeper hell was my brother muttering, “Put in the lenses. Let’s see how he likes being blind.”