Cleft gestured with a wave of his hand, and the bastard with the cane brought it down on her again. After three more strikes, he pulled the rubber band from her hair, and her curls tumbled around her shoulders in a mess of tangles. He freed her from the shackles, the fucking bastard apparently satisfied he’d broken her.

But she wasn’t broken. She couldn’t be. I wouldn’t let her fucking break. She’d come too far for these assholes to do her in.

Depleted of strength, she crumpled to the floor. Blood slickened her backside, and the sight of the deep red horizontal lines on her skin turned my stomach. Brock and another guy picked her up and carried her from the room.

“Where are you taking her?” I shouted, cranking my head around. She lifted her lids, just enough for me to see a spark of the woman I’d do anything for. In that moment, I knew it was true. Alex had me by the soul, her love winding around me like an unbreakable rope of which I couldn’t escape.

I didn’t want to escape her, but we had to find a way to escape this place.

Cleft stood in front of me and folded his arms with an air of nonchalance, as if we were old friends having a friendly chat. “That was your first lesson. If you so much as sneeze without my permission, she’ll take the punishment. Do you understand?”

“What do you want from me?” I asked through clenched teeth.

“You destroyed my family.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Same old memory problems.” He rolled his eyes. “You’re pathetic, Mason, but your head issues won’t save you. I’m here to collect a debt, and I’ll take it all, pound for pound, from your girlfriend’s flesh.”

I couldn’t hold it in anymore. The chains were the only things holding me up as I vomited on the gritty floor. “Kill me,” I begged. “She’s innocent.”

He tilted his head. “Is she?” He stepped closer, his sneakered feet bypassing the mess I’d made. “She’s the reason you were in that fucking prison in the first place. One lie that sent you away,” he said, pausing long enough to snap his fingers, “and my life is fucked. She’s as much to blame as you.”

“She was only fifteen. Don’t do this. Whatever I did…just fucking kill me for it and let her go.”

“Believe me,” he said, his breath rancid in my face with the stench of tobacco. “I will cherish that day when it comes.”

I wheezed air between my lips, muscles bunched, aching to pound him to a bloody, unrecognizable mass of body parts.