Page 23 of Risky Passion

“Shut up, you fucker.” I gritted my teeth and kept pulling.

His eyes shot open. His body went rigid.

He jerked like he’d been hit with a Taser, thrashing violently in my grip.

“Help!” he screamed. As the sound ricocheted off the metal walls and tin roof, the pigeons exploded from the rafters in a frenzy of wings.

“Stop moving, you stupid bastard,” I snarled, tightening my hold.

“Help!” he screamed again, twisting, jerking, clawing backward in a desperate attempt to grab at my arms.

“Fuck!” I hissed as he slipped from my grip.

He dropped like a deadweight, hitting the floorboards with a sickening thud, and cried out in pain. He scraped his fingernails over the splintered wood, trying to twist around to see me.

We’d never been face to face before, and as far as I knew, he had no idea who I was or what I looked like. He just knew me as B, the woman who’d been pulling his strings for years. My heart thundered as I stepped into his line of sight.

“Hello, Grant,” I said, smirking. “Or should I say, Thomas Apollo?” I hated that this greedy prick had the same name as my son.

His eyes flew wide as the weight of realization slammed into him like a guillotine blade.

“Fuck!” he shouted. “Help! Help!”

"Save your breath." I circled him slowly. "Nobody can hear you."

“Where am I?”

“You’re in the last place anyone would ever look for you.”

His eyes flew even wider. “Fuck!” He tried to push himself up on trembling arms. "What do you want?"

I kicked his hip, and he toppled onto his back.

"Help!" His scream bounced around the emptiness. "Somebody, help me!"

He rolled onto his stomach, dragging himself across the floorboards. I followed, pleased that he was crawling exactly where I needed him in the center of the warehouse, where four massive timber pillars supported the rusted hoist that had once lifted boats from the water below the floorboards.

"Help! Please! Somebody!" His voice shattered with desperation.

A chair waited by the nearest pillar, with rusty chains coiled beside it. The same chains that had restrained so many bastards before Grant.

Four feet shy of the chair, he stopped, going rigid. Maybe he’d realized that the chair was marked for him.

He turned to me, panting like a rabid dog. “What do you want?”

I smiled. “You.”

I kicked his temple hard enough to make him dizzy, but not enough to knock him out.

As he howled and tried to curl into himself, I grabbed his arm and dragged him the last few feet to the chair and let him drop with a thud.

“Get on the chair,” I ordered.

Groaning, he clutched his head like he was trying to stop his skull from exploding.

The chains attached to the hoist above him clinked softly in the draft whispering through broken windows.

I kicked his hip. “Get up.”

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