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14

STAR

UNDISCLOSED LOCATION, CATSKILLS MOUNTAINS

“Hello, Sheridan,” I called out, waiting, ear hovering against the shipping container for him to reply.

He didn’t disappoint. “LET ME OUT OF HERE!”

I smirked at no one in particular. “Where would the fun be in that?”

“FUN? You sick bitch! Let me out of here. Who the fuck are you? Do you know who I am?”

“Unfortunately for you, she does,” Conor said with a chuckle.

“You need to keep away from the door, Sheridan, or I’ll make you regret the day you were born,” was my amicable retort as I leaned one of Conor’s toys against my leg.

Conor dipped his head to whisper in my ear, “It’ll take a cow down if you’re not careful.”

“Isn’t that the point of a cattle prod?”

“How the fuck do you have such good hearing, D?” Conor grumbled.

Ignoring them, I tapped the shipping container. “Sheridan, are you standing near the door?”

Silence.

“I bet he’s by the door,” D mumbled. “Never did have any sense.”

“I agree.” Bracing myself, I turned to them, nodded, and watched as the three stood behind me like a barricade in case Sheridan managed to get the drop on me.

Unlikely, but we tried to plan for all eventualities.

I reached for the padlock, turned the key I’d slipped into the barrel, and waited for the loud click.

I turned on Conor’s toy, nodded, and that was their cue.

Troy leaned forward, unfastened the padlock, then D opened the door.

He was there.

Ragged, filthy, eyes wild.

Desperate.

All I could think as I stuck him with the metal prongs was, He knows how I felt now.

There was no pity in me, no remorse, no guilt.

Not an ounce.

If that made me as bad as him then I didn’t have a problem with that.

If it made me evil when his body started to steam from the force of the electricity ramming its way through his muscles, then I’d take that too.

“He’ll die if you don’t stop,” Conor informed me, his voice calm.

I released my rigid hold on the cattle prod, aware that Conor hadn’t undersold the strength of the weapon in my hands.

Little judders ricocheted through Reinier’s body in the aftermath, as if his nervous system were still responding to the surcharge of energy.

Picking up the flashlight I’d laid on the ground by our feet as we set this place up, I took a step into the shipping container, turned around to face my peeps, and said, “I’ll see you on the other side.”

Conor frowned. “I still think this is a bad idea.”

D clapped him on the shoulder. “That’s because you still ascribe to the patriarchal belief that men need to fight women’s battles for them?—”

As Troy slammed the door closed behind me, a whistle of wind drifted into the space, sharp and bitter as I flicked on the flashlight.

It was powerful, another of Conor’s designs, and it lit up the disgusting pit that had been Reinier’s home for the last few weeks.

“The sweet smell of piss and shit,” I drawled, unsure if he could even hear me, uncaring if he couldn’t. “How well I remember it.”

I moved to Reinier's side and levered a foot beneath him to turn him over so that he was facing down in case he started seizing and choked on his fool tongue.

Retreating to the door, I leaned against it. “I never imagined when I enlisted that was something I’d acclimate to.”

And that was the sorry truth.

It hadn’t been the sex slave part of my past that had made me adapt to the most perturbing of sights and smells.

Nah, that had been on Uncle Sam’s dime.

And the best lesson they'd taught me?

Swipe Vaporub on your top lip.

Helpful, right?

For a good twenty minutes, we stayed there like that. Me leaning on the door, him face down, all while outside, I could hear Troy, Dead To Me, and Conor arguing as they prepared for Foundry's and Smythe’s punishments.

Working as a team on this was strange, awkward almost. But good. Ordinarily, I’d be in here and there’d be no one out there. I was used to that, well at ease with the solitude of working alone, yet that didn’t mean this didn’t feel right.

“Who are you?” The words were slurred. Weak.

I didn’t believe the fragility of his tone. He was running on adrenaline. Reinier knew what this had been—his only chance of escape.

“That you don’t recognize me hurts my feelings, Sheridan. I mean, you went to so much effort to eradicate me, you’d think you could remember who you tried to destroy.”

If my voice was bland, free from emotion, then so be it. If I lost control now, I’d just watch him fry on the floor of the shipping container like a piece of human bacon.

I had that in me. That rage. That hatred. And Conor had armed me with the tool to make it happen.

God, I needed to kiss him for that later—I had the best boyfriend ever.

Okay, fiancé .

Reinier finally flopped onto his back then peered at me with heavy-lidded eyes. “Star Sullivan,” he said after a long time of just staring at me.

“That’s right, Sheridan. Do you want points for remembering?”

He dragged himself onto his elbows. “I think that’s only fair,” he retorted, as snarky as ever.

“I knew you were high up the hierarchy,” I mused.

“You just didn’t know I was the hierarchy.” He released a soft chuckle that, to me, sounded nervous. “Few ever did. Until now. What do you want?”

“You to die. Horribly,” I said pleasantly.

“I can give you whatever you want, Star. I have uncapped resources at my disposal.”

“Your world is tumbling down around you, Sheridan. You don’t have dick at your disposal anymore.” I smiled at him. “How does it feel to know that one of your sex slaves is holding the bonds to your freedom, hmm? Bittersweet? Annoying?”

“I knew I should have harvested your organs instead. I just preferred the prospect of you suffering more,” he growled.

Harvesting my organs?

I didn’t, not for a moment, let my expression falter.

“Sounds like this got personal a long time before I served under your directorship, Sheridan. Sharing is caring. Want to tell me when you started hating my guts?”

“In our Brothers we trust,” he mockingly sang.

“You thought I was a Brother?” I sneered.

“No. I knew who your family was though. Even if you didn’t.”

My mouth tightened. “How did you know that?”

He just scoffed. “What are you going to do with me? The director of the CIA can’t go missing. There are repercussions?—”

“I wasn’t a Brother before, but I’m not against using every option open to me when the time comes.”

“That old bastard—more faces than Janus himself.” He turned a stony look my way. “If you trust him, then you’re a fool.”

“I trust no one.”

It was only when I uttered the words that I realized that was a lie.

And that was not a conversation I needed to have with myself right now.

Chuckles sounded outside, and his shoulders hunched as he whipped around as if he could see with his own two eyes what was happening. “What is that?”

“Don’t you mean who? Got some of your friends here, Sheridan. It’s going to be one big party.”

For the first time, his stoicism ruptured—his jaw quivered. “I can give you anything you want.”

“I don’t want anything.”

“Power, money?—”

“How about, after years of being raped, can you delete the memories? Can you give me back nights where I sleep through without being plagued with nightmares? No? Didn’t think so.”

“I have connections!”

“What connections could you give me that would put you in a position to bargain?” I crowed.

“There must be some reason you’re here,” he shouted, sounding more and more desperate by the minute. “You must want something or you'd have just killed me weeks ago!”

I smiled at him. “You know, at my core, I’ve always been a hater. It’s just in me. It’s just who I am. And you, my dear Sheridan, have gotten on the wrong side of all that hate.”

I strode forward, letting the metallic tip of the cattle prod shriek as I trailed a path into the metal wall.

At my approach, with the last of his waning adrenaline, he tried to kick out, to take me down, but I just clipped him around the head with the tool in my hand, using its bulk to aid me, then I dug the prongs into his cheek.

“The question is, do you want to live, Sheridan? I could kill you right now. Take you away from this with just a couple of pulses from this device. But then that robs you of what you’re still hoping—that you’ll be saved. That someone from your world will come and rescue you and you can eke out another decade of getting rich on other people’s misery.” I dug the tip into his cheek harder, until blood bloomed on the flesh and it was scraping against his teeth. “What’ll it be? Life or death?”

I wasn’t waiting for an answer, not really, but he snapped, “Kuznetsov is just using you.”

“As far as I can see, he’s giving me everything I could have hoped and dreamed for. Unlike you.”

I let the prongs trail down his chest and buried them against his dick. As he yowled in pain, I watched with sweet satisfaction, feeling the switch being pressed in my brain as the indoctrination this man had overseen during my training began to kick in.

Pain = answers.

Answers = mission success.

At some point, it didn’t even matter about promotions. They just had you so fucking hooked that mission success became equated with your country’s safety, even if you were pulling stunts you knew that no American would dream you were doing in their name.

“Come on, beg. You might as well. You don’t know what I’m going to do, so you should try to bargain with me.” I retreated at the last moment before I zapped him in the crotch. “Once upon a time, I used to be able to make grown men weep without even touching them. Now, I have this.”

He tried to shove the cattle prod away from his junk, but I kicked my leg out and pressed my booted foot to his throat. He gasped as I added extra pressure to his trachea.

“I’m not—” He spat. “Going to—” He groaned. “—waste my breath.”

I dug the prod harder into his balls. “Yeah, you are. You’re going to sing for me. You’re right in that it won’t affect my judgment, but you have to try, don’t you? Just like I had to try and accept my fate.” I smiled as I borrowed Dead To Me’s catchphrase. “Sucks to be you, Sheridan.”

“I-I can give you information.”

I tried to pretend I wasn’t interested. “About?”

“Your grandfather.”

“I can find that myself.”

“You can’t! He’s not as?—”

“I’m bored. I think I’ll play with some nuts,” I snarled, watching his eyes flare wide in horror and a high-pitch screech escape him as he wheezed:

“I have files, records, at my estate in Florida. Blackmail material. Worth billions of dollars in the right hands!”

“On whom?”

“Clients,” he rasped. “Friends. Politicians. Everyone I came into contact with.”

“You don’t have an estate in Florida,” I disregarded.

“S’a secret,” he cried as I added to the pressure of my hold on him, making it almost impossible for him to speak. But then, there was nothing he could say that would halt this. Nothing he could promise that would stop me.

“A secret. So secret it doesn’t exist?” I laughed. “If you’re going to lie to me, Sheridan, at least make it entertaining.”

“No! I’m not lying! Please! No?—”

But his pleas were too late in coming.

It was time for vengeance.

Time for me to take back what had been stolen from me in the only way people like Reinier and I understood—blood.