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He smiled as if reading my mind and gave the slightest lift of his chin. It was almost unnoticeable, but I caught it. Not a second later, the butt of a gun was slamming into my jaw and I was on the ground just like he wanted.

Pain exploded up the right side of my face; a metallic tang flooded my mouth.

Holy fuck, it hurt. I swallowed a mouthful of air to drown out my whimper and blinked three times to clear the tears away.

I glanced up at the blonde who was now smirking down at me. Keeping my head was an incredible test of my willpower. I tampered down the urge to lunge up and wring the bitch’s neck. Attacking her would only cause me more harm.

“Now, that wasn’t very nice.” I gave her a big smile, feeling blood dribble down my chin. I spit the back tooth she knocked out, right onto her black boots.

I heard a laugh, and then someone told her “no,” not a fraction of a second before her gun came down again on the back of my head.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The heat was unbearable.

Perspiration gathered on my brow and slowly rolled down and pooled between my breasts. It was only a matter of time before I’d be sitting in a deep puddle of my sweat.

I could feel a solid lump on the back of my head, and the side of my face was painfully swollen. There was a throbbing ache every time I swallowed or moved my tongue.

A man had been screaming and begging for his life for what seemed like hours on end, abruptly cutting off just minutes ago.

Now I could hear someone pitifully sobbing.

A solid brick building was at my back offering no shade, and I had loose rusted chains around each of my wrists, but I wasn’t going to complain about that. Not when the two women beside me were completely nude and hanging upside down from some manmade contraption.

They weren’t moving, and both of their eyes were shut. I stared at their naked bodies until I saw the slight rise and fall of their chests. Their skin was covered in raised heat blisters and had an ugly red tint. They were slow roasting in the sun.

I shifted on the concrete when my ass started to fall asleep. If the abundance of old bloodstains splattered across it was anything to deduce, this wasn’t going to go well for me.

“Hellooo?” I called out for the hundredth time. My voice sounded like two pieces of sandpaper being rubbed together. Unsurprisingly, no one answered me.

Pulling my legs up to my chest, I rested my cheek on my knees and tried not to breathe too deeply.

The smell of body odor and death was potent, and I only cared for one of them.

I had no idea where Tito was. The man screaming had too deep a voice to have been him. I couldn’t see anything but a manicured grassy field and a house in the far distance.

Studying the two women beside me again, I noted how drastically different they looked. The one on the very end had purple hair and was heavyset. The one next to me had brown hair and was almost as thin as I normally was, aside from the protrusion in her midsection.

I wondered how long it would take me to look like they did, and why I hadn’t been hung the same way.

My throat was parched, my body ached, and my stomach churned with another bout of sickening nausea, but I held it together.

I was so damn tired of ending up in situations I had no control over.

Lifting the rusted-orange chains up so I could examine them, I couldn’t see a way to get them off. I was stuck. Fighting was always my number one option, but I had no idea what I’d be up against—or who—and I wasn’t exactly in the best physical condition.

I knew I had to consider a few added limitations. I wasn’t an idiot. But the position I’d found myself in didn’t make me a delicate wallflower, either. I wasn’t the first woman in the Badlands to end up this way. Hell, some women popped kids out like they were pinball machines. I couldn’t even be that far yet.

Regardless, if it really was set in motion and meant to be, I could handle it.

What I couldn’t do was magically escape a set of chains. There was only one person I could think of who could get me out of this, and he was nowhere near the facility.

Groaning, I leaned my head back and shut my eyes. I just needed him to save me one last time.

I was almost entirely out of it when I felt the rim of a plastic water bottle at my lips. Slowly peeling my eyes open, I saw a woman in front of me, encouraging me to drink.

“Come on,” she whispered encouragingly when I coughed the first bit of water right back out. Her next attempt paid off. I guzzled down the soothing liquid like a newborn calf whose life depended on it.