Page 18 of Viking

She shakes her head, her long auburn hair hanging between us as if it could shut me out.

“Where is it?”

She doesn’t reply, so I pull the cuffs from my back pocket and slap one on her wrist. She jerks away, shaking uncontrollably, her breath bursting in and out of her lungs. Her entire body is tensed, coiled to spring. I yank her other arm closer and cinch the metal cuff tight.

“Viking!” CJ barks and tries to grab my shoulder, but I shrug her off and step closer to the bed. “What the hell are you doing? The poor thing is scared shitless.”

“Back off CJ. This little bitch is gonna talk to me whether she likes it or not.”

“Not like this she’s not. You need to uncuff her, that ain’t right. Go snort a fucking line or have a drink and fuck the shit out of some of that nasty club pussy you keep around, but you are not getting answers like this. Not today, maybe not ever. Haven’t you heard of catching more flies with honey than vinegar?”

I crumple up the sketch and shove it in my pocket and then I head for the fucking door because CJ is right. I’m not gonna get answers out of a goddamn mute.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Viking

Icall the brothersinto church. Normally we save that shit for a mandatory Friday night, but there have been a few new developments in the last two days that we need to keep on top of—like the teenage bitch I just fucking kidnapped.Odin, save me.

I light up a Mary Jane, because I need a little something to take the edge off, and lean back in my chair at the head of the table. Everyone waits for me to speak, but I’m starting to see the appeal of being mute.

“CJ checked over our Jane doe. She’s not talking ... at all, but she drew this.” I fish the receipt with the bitch’s drawings on it out of my pocket and slide it to Blue. “So far, all we know is that she’s from a fucking island where she was likely raped daily and kept in a goddamn cage.”

My blood boils as I say the words. I fucking hate this. I don’t even know the bitch, but I think about my little sister Gypsy in her shoes, and I want to make those assholes pay.

“Jesus,” Blue says, in his thick Australian accent. “That’s a rough trot, that is.”

“There has to be some kind of road access—a causeway or something—because if this drawing is correct, there’s a whole fucking town center there, and those cages are big enough for several women.”

“No way to get something that big on by boat,” Breaker says. “I mean ... cargo, yeah, but I reckon those waters aren’t deep enough to sail a ship. More likely, they came on the back of a truck and were assembled, or they came fully welded. Either way, bars that big? There’s gonna be a crane involved.”

“My thoughts exactly,” I agree.

“If it’s a large enough land mass, we should be able to find it on Google Maps,” Rat pipes up from the end of the table. “Couldn’t we just narrow it down and search the area?”

“We don’t know how long she was in the ocean,” Blue adds. “A rip can drag a body further than you think. It happens all the bloody time in Australia.”

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