But that wasn’t the worst damage. Not by far.

Oh my God…

Her “friends” had brutalized him in a way that defied belief or imagination. And like Maris had said, with a muzzle in place, it wasn’t done for information.

He’d been tortured for entertainment.

Maris clicked to another page of the report. “They fed him his own vomit, along with urine and excrement.”

Zarya couldn’t see past the tears in her eyes as her stomach lurched over the viciousness. “I knew them. They… they weren’t animals. They were fathers and sons, daughters and mothers. Loving spouses and parents. How could they do that to anyone?”

Yet there was no denying the proof in her hands. She saw it with brutal clarity.

They had torn Darling apart. No wonder he was insane. Who wouldn’t be?

“Darling wasn’t a person to them,” Maris said in a strained voice. “He was an effigy. He stood for everything in their lives that they despised and hated—for every person they felt had it better or easier than them, anyone who had ever done them wrong or ever used them—and they took their own anger at the world out on him. They didn’t see him as a human being. Only as an enemy they wanted to feel every pain, real or imagined, they’d suffered in their own lives.” Maris went to yet another page. “They even cut off his finger and fed that to him, too.”

She rushed to the toilet and barely made it before she was sick.

Still, Maris took no pity on her. “They brutally and repeatedly sodomized him with objects we have yet to identify, and beat him to the brink of death. They attached electrodes to his genitals and muzzle, and ran enough electricity to him to leave burn scars all over his body, including his face. Anyone would be broken by that. But you have to remember, these weren’t strangers to him. These were people he’d protected. People he’d risked his own life, and that of his family, to help.”

People he’d been wounded for…

Zarya’s stomach heaved again under the true horror of what she’d allowed her men to do to him. Why hadn’t she checked on their prisoner?

Just once…

Her head swam from the horror of it all. “I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t. I wouldn’t have allowed them to do that to my worst enemy… not even Arturo.”

“You were in the room with him when we arrived.”

She sputtered in guilt and remorse. “I had just found out that we still had him in our custody. Literally right before your arrival. It was the first time I’d gone in. I swear.” But like the others, she hadn’t seen Darling as a person either. He’d been nothing to her but…

Dear gods, I slapped him while he wore a muzzle…

Her stomach heaved again as she realized just how much that would have hurt him. How could I have done something like that? She’d always prided herself on being fair and impartial. Compassionate.