There’s no clock, no windows, no way for her to determine what time it is or how long she’s been here. But time is insignificant now. Kieran isn’t at home waiting for her. He’s not even searching for her. Harlow would look for her. It’d be a cold day in hell before Ruarc lifted a finger to help his dead brothers wife. All she has is time. Idly she wonders if his body has been found. Has enough time even passed for Ruarc to be wondering why his brother didn’t show up for work? Her tongue runs over the front of her teeth in contemplation. Surely it’s been that long, she’s seen her captors a handful of times, roughly once a day if she had to guess. Sometimes it’s both of them and sometimes it’s just one. They have wisened up though and keep her hands cuffed and attached to a long chain thats tethered somewhere outside of the small cell she resides in. She sneers each time one of them arrives still sporting a black eye. They weren’t the only ones with fresh bruises.
She’s fairly certain a couple of her ribs are fractured at the very least, judging from the heavy bruising and the damn near blinding pain that spread across her sides like fire when she takes a breath or moves. Her wrists are raw and bloodied from her restraints. The rest of her doesn’t fair any better. The hours she’s not alone are long, full of a various “games”. But she’s numb to it all. She’d disassociated from her new reality days ago. The cramping in her lower abdomen is a growing concern too. She wouldn’t be surprised if she had some internal bleeding. Not that there’s anything she can do but wait for her fate.
Her pajama shirt is dirty and spattered with blood that is both hers and not. And she’d kill for a fresh pair of underwear. It’s a small mercy that neither of them have raped her. Yet. She doesn’t have high hopes that it will remain that way, not when she’s sees the way their beady eyes roam her body. It’s bad enough that even they touch her to begin with. Wandering, groping hands bring up past memories she has worked hard to forget. Distantly, she hears a door open and close, and she sighs. Nylah is tired, her heart broke in a way she never thought possible, she no longer has the energy to play games with her captors. She has a plan to put into action.
Early on, she learned the sounds of their door steps so she knew it was both of them. She sighs again just before she’s greeted with the customary jerk of her leash, her arms yanked forward and forcing the rest of her to follow suit. Resisting had earned her scraped knees as she had been dragged across the concrete floor. Today’s no different when her hands are pulled through the bars, forcing her to rest her weight against the hard metal until one of them decides who’s bravest to come get her. Today, it’s her husbands killer. Anticipation settles deep in her bones. What she doesn’t account for, is an interruption. His hands grip her upper arms as he presses his weight against her back. She inwardly cringes as his hot breath tickles her neck. He chuckles when she stiffens as his hands skim down her sides to grip the tattered hem of her shirt. She starts to struggle in earnest as his hands find her bare skin, lifting her shirt in the process, but the strain on her arms is pulled tighter, securing her in place against the unyielding bars.
Bang!
Nylah jumps, startled by the sound that is immediately followed by the slack in her leash. In front of her, one of her captors drops like a sack of potatoes. Dead. ”Fuck!” His buddy hisses at her back before her loops an arm around her throat and the other reached for his gun, pointing it into the darkness that soaked beyond her cage. He uses her as a human shield and Nylah half expects to end up shot. But Nylah isn’t going down as a damsel in distress. So she doesn’t help him with a clear shot. She writhes in his grip, bucking against the bars as she takes advantage of his direction. When she gets just enough room in front of herself, she uses her feet to shove backwards, using the bars as leverage and toppling them over. She lands squarely on her captor, his grunt a satisfying sound in her ear. And there, they begin to struggle in earnest. Until there was the unmistakable sound of the cell door being wrenched open.
Large, warm hands wrapped around her arms, pulling her off her captor. A slew of profanities leave her lips as she continues to struggle. So many men touching her. She snaps. She doesn’t see who’s in front of her, only another man. A fist goes flying, catching this new man square in the jaw. Fuck! Nylah!” He shakes her roughly while dodging her second punch before she finally meets his glare. It takes a moment for his face to register. Ruarc. Nylah can only stare at him, dumbfounded, only half aware of the other men that flood her temporary home and restraining her remaining captor. A hysterical half sob, half laugh parts her bloodied lips. He doesn’t lose his scowl. ”Ruarc.” She breathes out his name as he starts barking orders.
”He’s mine!” She snarls, wrenching herself out of Ruarcs unforgiving grasp to whirl on a bunch of men she’s never met. One look at her face has several pairs of eyes turning to Ruarc. Looking over her shoulder, she stares at her brother in law. Nylah possesses neither the energy nor the decorum to keep vengeful darkness from her features. ”He shot Kieran, he’s mine.” She repeats, her voice lower now but not less venomous. Ruarcs stare is assessing, maybe a touch curious before he gives only a single nod. His reasoning doesn’t matter and Nylah doesn’t linger to ask. She barks orders of her own. ”String him up.” One last time she turns to Ruarc, reaching out to unload him of the knife she’d seen him carry countless times in his waistband.
Nylah drags in a ragged breath. The room spins and she’s fairly certain she’s not making it out of her alive - her body finally giving up. But that doesn’t stop her from standing in front of the man who killed Kieran. With the same malicious smile he’d given her, she plunges Ruarcs knife into his wrist, angling the blade so it severed tendons and renders his hand useless. He screams. And oh how she missed such a sound. The adrenaline high feels like a home coming. Extending her hand without looking at anyone else, she isn’t kept waiting as a new blade is dropped into her waiting grasp a moment later. She pays no mind to its owner because she’s busy crucifying the man that’s trapped under her vicious hand. There’s something so satisfying about the feel of a blade slide through flesh before lodging itself in wood. She repeats until he had a blade similar stuck through the top of each foot. The man sobs and pleads for mercy that was beaten out of her many years ago. Nylah is deaf to it.
A final knife is placed in her waiting palm. The cramping in her abdomen intensifies, nearly taking her breath away. With the blade angled down, she runs her hands up under his shirt, just like he’d done to her, before she plunges the blade into his soft belly. He screams. She doesn’t repeatedly stab him like she wants. Nylahs training has been thorough, she knows exactly how to kill someone slowly. Painfully. So she guts him like a pig, eviscerating his abdomen so that his intestines slip out in a wet pile at her feet. The sweet relief of death isn’t in his near future. Her own body begins to sag under the weight of exhaustion and suffering.
The quiet request for a gun isn’t lost amongst the man’s sobs. Aiming it at his chest, her toys with the trigger as he pleads for her to do it. The barrel of the gun drops and two bullets leave the chamber in rapid succession. Each one lands in each of his knee caps, leaving him with two legs that he can’t stand on. His own body weight tortures him more as each pound of fat and muscle pulls against the blades embedded in his wrists. A wave of nausea rolls through her and her vision starts to darken around the edges. She sways on her feet as her abdomen contracts painfully.
Seemingly unfazed by the man’s condition, she tugs his pants down carelessly. Her victim is barely clinging to consciousness. Squirming only makes him hurt worse, but that’s doesn’t matter when she grips his balls, pulling tight before she picks up a discarded blade and slices them right off his body. His scream is different this time. It’s bloodcurdling. She silences him when she shoves his balls in his mouth. He slumps then, his brain shutting down in an attempt to keep him from dying in this moment, to block out the pain.
There’s a rush of warmth between her legs and she’s acutely aware that something is wrong. Blood soaks her underwear and it doesn’t take long for it to start to run down her pant-less legs. Her chest heaves with a cocktail of pain, exhaustion and exertion, the savagery of her expression dulls but it doesn’t fade. Turning, she looks at Ruarc, approaching slowly to place bloodied weapons in his hands. ”I think I need to see a doctor.” She says it like an after thought before she sways on her feet.
He’d spent hours upon hours obsessing over video footage, trying to track the cars that had left the building where he’d found Kieran near death with a handful of more dead bodies. He had an entire unit of men also looking, reviewing all city cameras while using illegal technology to try and find facial structure matches in the masses. It had felt like weeks had turned into months, but that was probably because Ruarc wasn’t sleeping.
In the hospital, Kieran was currently chained and handcuffed to his bed, subdued with narcotics to both ease the pain from his injuries as well as keep him incapacitated so he didn’t try to escape. Ruarc knew his brother well enough to know the idiot would go try and find Nylah without a single logical thought about his current physical state, and the don couldn’t risk losing both of them. And while he was healing, it wasn’t quick enough for him to be able to come on the rescue mission.
It was only a week later when the puzzle was figured out. They’d taken her to an old, run down building in one of the abandoned industrial sectors of the city. And so with orders to keep Kieran medicated, Ruarc left to go find his sister in law.
Their security was trash. Armed with a pistol equipped with a silencer, Ruarc made quick work of the guards and dispatched nearly the entire team. Blood spattered the cuffs of his sleeves, but luckily he was wearing thick black mechanic gloves so none of the disgusting fluid got on his skin.
Two left, as he rounded the corner deep within the small fortress. Noises, as if they were speaking, trickled towards him but he paid no mind to what they were saying. And if his calculations were correct, he should find Nylah very soon.
Bang!
He fired, the bullet sinking deep into the man’s chest cavity as he slumped to the ground. He aimed the gun at the other, but he quickly scrambled to grab Nylah and use her as a shield. She bucked against him wildly before the toppled to the ground in a mess of limbs and guttural screams, and he couldn’t shoot the guy clearly enough to feel comfortable firing where Nylah was also fighting. With a sigh, he quickly pilfered the keys from the dead man’s pockets and opened the gate, hands grabbing at the collar of her shirt as the venomous woman hissed and spat and—
Thudk!
Fist connected with bone and an explosion of angry pain radiated from his jaw. It took every ounce of willpower not to hit the woman back as he cursed at her. Clarity seemed to clear the haze from her eyes as she spoke his name, realizing that he was on her side, not another assailant. With a grunt at her, he acknowledged her demand but nothing could have prepared him for what she had in store.
Ruarc watched as a man was literally crucified in front of him. Blood spilled all over the ground, pooling beneath the man and the don could only stare. She was relentless, showing that her reputation was true right down to the nitty, gritty details. Bile rose in the back of his throat, but for the moment he swallowed it back down. In the recesses of his mind, he thought about what she said. She’d witnessed him being shot. Where did she think he was now?
Until, that is, when she cut the man’s gonads off and fed his own hairy ballsack into his mouth, as tears ran in rivers down his cheeks.
Vomit flooded his mouth, but he clamped his jaws shut tight. Swallowing repeatedly, he got the chunky fluids back down before they could escape from his mouth, though traces were present along his lips - and surely his breath was now rank as well.
A few more moments, and the guy was dead, or soon would be. And then she turned to him, swaying on her feet as blood ran down her legs and all the colour in her face drained in seconds. She collapsed in his arms, and alarm bells rang in his head at the sight of all the blood.
Taking one last look at the dead man, he scooped up his sister in law and scrambled to get her back to the hospital.