Page 8 of Fighting for Scarlett

Ignored by the two men confirmed her belief that she was nothing but the weak, pathetic mess her parents had always accused her of being. She couldn’t survive whatever they had planned for her.

Turned out she wasn’t taken far from her cell, just walked past a few more cells, all of which were empty as far as she could see, into a room at the end of the passageway. A chair sat in the middle of the room, blood stains beneath it. Hanging on the wall was a range of implements designed to torture someone.

Panic got the best of her, and any pretense that she could do this flew out the window as she struggled.

“No, please. Don’t put me in the chair. I don’t know why I'm here, I don’t know anything. Just let me go and I won't tell anyone you kidnapped me,” she begged.

Of course, she was ignored, and despite her desperate struggles, she was easily shoved into the chair. Metal cuffs locked around her wrists and then her ankles, securing her to the torture chair.

Tears streamed down her cheeks. She tried to fight against the cuffs, knowing it was pointless as she continued to plead for her life. “Let me go. Please. I haven’t done anything, I don’t know anything, I just want to go home. Please. Please. Let me go home.”

“I do so love it when a lady cries,” a voice spoke, and Scarlett looked through her tears to see Raul Castillo himself standing in the doorway.

Dressed in black suit pants with a crisp white shirt rolled up to his elbows, he looked completely out of place in this torture chamber.

Begging was pointless.

It would only turn him on more.

Still, Scarlett couldn’t seem to stop herself. “Please, I just want to go home. I don’t know anything, I didn't do anything, I don’t understand why I'm here.”

“On the contrary, you know exactly what I'm after,” Raul told her as he closed the short distance between them, stopping right in front of her.

That made zero sense.

What could she possibly know that would be useful to a man who dealt in weapons?

She was a lab geek. She ran forensics for Prey, and she and her team worked on various side projects out of pure interest.

“I … I … don’t … I don’t understand,” she said, no longer able to catch her breath as she began to hyperventilate. Panic clawed inside her, squirming and wriggling through her body as it took control of her.

This couldn’t be happening to her.

It couldn’t.

“You’re here because of the Reactivator,” Raul told her.

Scarlett froze.

Because of the Reactivator?

That made no sense.

More tears flooded her cheeks. “I don’t understand, the Reactivator isn’t a weapon.” The opposite in fact. It was a drug she and her team had been working on for almost two years. There were several aspects of it, but basically, it was designed to help injured soldiers survive in the field. The drug worked to slow bleeding, encourage faster healing, dull pain, and add extra adrenalin to the patient’s system to keep them on their feet.

While nowhere close to being finished and ready for trials, Scarlett was hopeful the drug would indeed end up doing what it was designed to.

Meaning it would be a game-changer.

But it wasn’t a weapon.

So why was Raul Castillo interested in it?

“I want that drug, Ms. Madden. Not only is it worth a fortune for those who intend to use it as you had planned, but it could also be engineered in reverse to make a weapon that would inflict unimaginable suffering.”

Technically, that was true, but it would take years to create a drug that would do that, it wasn’t as easy as Raul was making out, you didn't just make it in reverse. Even aside from that, there was no way she was going to give this man the formula for the Reactivator. Athena Team had created it to do good, not to be sold to the highest bidder and used against the people they’d wanted to help.

Bad news for her.

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