Page 147 of A Dirty Business
Okay then.
I went back inside, and this time, one of the guys was coming up from the basement. He saw me and whistled. “She’s here.”
“Bring her down.” That was Ashton.
He gave me a nod, jerking his head toward the stairs. “This way.”
I didn’t move, eyeing the stairs.
I hadn’t been scared going with Ashton in the beginning or riding with them out of the city, but now a whole different form of trepidation was filling me up. I didn’t like basements.
Dead bodies tended to accumulate in basements.
I didn’t want to be the dead body this time.
“He’s not going to kill you.”
“Yeah?” I shot the guy a look. “You’re well versed in situations like these?”
“Unfortunately, yes. This is an interrogation with padded handcuffs. If that helps?”
It didn’t. Going at me soft didn’t mean the end wouldn’t result in the way I feared.
“Is Trace here?”
“You really think he would let him come?”
I gave this guy another look because he was feelingsupercomfortable in his responses, but his expression was bland. Neutral.
Ashton had come up the stairs. “Come on. Sooner this is done, sooner we can move on to more pressing matters.”
The dread just lined all of my organs, moving down my legs, into my toes, up through my chest. It went down my arms, my hands, my fingers, and it was circling up to my shoulders. There was no good feeling anymore, but I moved forward, my legs feeling like lead.
I stopped when I saw the room and began backing up. “Nope. This is not going to happen.”
Ashton’s hand came to my arm as he stepped to my side. The other guy took my other arm, and I was dragged/lifted to a single chair in the middle of the entire basement. The walls, the floors, the ceiling were all covered in plastic.
“Jesus Christ, Ashton. Are you serious?”
They shoved me down and held my arms as the third guy zip-tied me to the chair. My ankles were zipped next.
I should’ve fought. I was 98 percent sure that I wouldn’t have been able to overpower them, but I should’ve tried. I just followed orders, sat down, and let them tie me up. But I knew why.
Hope.
In the back of my mind, I thought that if I fought them, that would immediately put me into the enemy category. Ashton might not even interrogate me. They’d kill me or simply let me go, but inform Trace that I had ... I didn’t even know. I had no idea what they thought right now. This was as much my interrogation as theirs.
I had to remember that.
But damn. I still should’ve fought.
“You’re going to kill me, Ashton? This is a bit of an overreaction because I didn’t give you a little bit of warning for the raids.”
He came to stand in front of me, and it was like I’d never seen the real Ashton. Slowly, as he watched me, I saw a layer of him strip away. There were no more grins. No dark teasing. No smirks. No kindness. No patience. (Not that I saw much of those, but they’d been there when he interacted with Trace.) All that was gone.
In his place was someone who liked cruelty.
I saw the dark delight. Ashton just let some evil into the basement, and that evil was him.
