cuffs of his sleeves and rolled the sleeves up.
The smirk deepened, becoming a sneer. “I shall administer your punishment myself.” He licked his lips, again causing Chad to think of a wolf. A wolf about to descend upon a gaggle of undefended chickens. “Twenty lashes.” He chuckled. “No, thirty!”
He removed the whip from the peg, uncoiled it, and snapped it against the floor with a crisp flick of the wrist. He nodded at the guard holding Cindy. “Prepare her.”
The guard pushed her toward the corner Chad now realized functioned as a sort of bare-bones torture chamber. He looked at the drain and the coiled hose again. A shiver went through him. The curiously equipped corner likely served a dual purpose. Torture was just the first phase of punishment. Perhaps, if you were lucky, the only phase. The second phase was certainly execution. The hose was a heavy-gauge one. It could be turned on the prisoner as an additional element of torture, but Chad believed its primary purpose was to drive blood and tissue down the scummy drain.
Chad’s stomach rumbled.
“Please don’t do this,” he mumbled.
Another guard clubbed him in the ear. “Shut up.”
The guard assigned to Cindy slammed her against the wall, causing her to cry out. Chad winced at the brutality. He had to remind himself this was far from the worst of what he would see before this nightmare was over.
The shackles snapped shut around Cindy’s wrists and ankles. The tall man approached her slowly, flicking the whip against the floor again and again. Chad sensed a terrible relish in the man’s deliberate approach. He radiated malevolence. His dark eyes reflected no hint of mercy.
He stood before Cindy and smiled. “Who do you serve, bitch?”
Tears were streaming down Cindy’s cheeks. “The M-Master.”
“Yessss.” The tall man sounded like a snake poised to strike. “As we all do. And you have offended the Master with your insolence. Now you pay.”
Cindy’s knees shook. “Please. Please don’t.” She was sobbing now. “I’ll do anything.” Chad wanted to look away, but he found himself unable to do so, as though some outside force compelled him to bear witness to Cindy’s indignity. The heartbreaking part of it was the strength that still resonated in her voice. “Anything at all. You got anybody you want dead? I’ll make them dead. Use my body in any perverted, fucked-up way you want. I’ll make it better than your sick mind ever imagined. Just please don’t do this.”
The tall man laughed. “Really? How tempting.” Laughter from the guards this time. “Of course, I’m used to pleas of this nature from people in your position, but I find this interesting.” He nodded at Chad. “Would you kill him?”
Something at the center of Chad’s being went very cold. Cindy made eye contact with him and held his gaze for a period of seconds that seemed eons long. Then she looked at the tall man. “Would you approve my petition?”
The tall man’s eyes narrowed and he turned to appraise Chad more fully. He stroked his chin with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. In that moment the warden was the epitome of a Mephistophelean figure, diabolic and crafty. It was just one more unpleasant association on top of a whole heap of unpleasantness, and Chad suddenly felt very weary.
He was really and truly fucked.
The tall man seemed amused by Cindy’s gesture of ruthless self-interest. “I would consider it a second time, perhaps more favorably?
Cindy scowled. “Fuck that. You have to promise.”
Chad had to wonder what the point of that condition was-this was so clearly not a man who honored his word. His promises would be worth less than Confederate cash. And he didn’t know what to make of Cindy’s tentative acquiescence, either. He had a hard time believing she would kill him, not if he trusted the truth of the things she’d told him in the cell, but maybe none of that mattered anymore.
Maybe all she gave a damn about at this point was self-preservation. He strongly suspected no one survived three years in this place without making that the number-one priority of every waking moment.
So, yeah, he could see her killing him.
All of a sudden, he felt a little less detached from the situation.
A little more in imminent danger of serious harm.
He didn’t know how to deal with it. Should he protest? Beg for his life? Maybe whimper and cower like the cowardly cur he secretly feared he was. Maybe there was some other angle he was missing. Wasn’t it possible Cindy was acting, playing the angles until she could work out a way to get them out of here? The helplessness he felt was humiliating. Debilitating. He’d handled some pretty stressful situations in this business world, scenarios that called for quick thinking and an ability to solve complex problems in creative ways, and he’d come to believe he was pretty damn smooth.
Well, that self-image was all shot to hell now.
He didn’t have clue fucking one what to do.
The way the warden was eyeing him wasn’t helping matters. He looked like a serial killer sizing up a lone prostitute at two in the morning. “I’ll tell you a secret. This is a personal insight I’m giving the two of you. The thing I treasure most about my position Below is the freedom to do as I wish with my inferiors.”
He started to coil the whip. “Before I came here, I ran an office of twenty. I worked my people hard, and most of them did good work. Some of them, though, were slackers. Layabouts. I did my best to get rid of them, but that wasn’t so easy a proposition with the ones who’d done enough to fake their way through the probationary period. The corporate bylaws made them almost untouchable. The niggers were the worst. That affirmative-action shit made my life hell, I’ll tell you. All that red tape. All those government regulations. I can’t tell you how much it all pissed me off. I would’ve given anything to string any of those assholes up by the balls.”
He finished coiling the whip and handed it to a guard, who returned it to the peg behind the tall man’s desk. “Here …” He spread his hands wide and smiled. “I have none of those worries. Procedure?” He indicated the pile of shredded paper on his desk. “You’ve seen how much proper procedure means to me.” He addressed one of the guards. “Release the woman.” The guard took a ring of keys from his belt, unlocked the shackles around Cindy’s wrists and ankles, and moved back as she stepped away from the wall. She rubbed her wrists as she walked slowly to the center of the room. She walked straight toward Chad, making fearless eye contact with him, and came to a stop several feet in front of him.
She said, “We do what we have to do down here.” She extended an open hand and a guard slapped a baton into it. She held out her other hand and the handle of a knife was pressed into the palm. She began to advance on Chad, who was dismayed by the gladiatorial gleam in her eyes. She smiled. “It’s going to feel good to kill.”
Chad drew in a deep, anticipatory breath.
This is it, he thought.
Ready or not, this is it.
Holy shit, say a prayer or something.
He barely perceived the rest of the warden’s monologue, but he could see Cindy was waiting for him to be done speaking. “Two more examples. Two mysteries someone else might give a damn about solving. Two people who wound up sharing a cell with you, young lady. Two people who were never signed in.”
He chuckled. “Typical administrative sloppiness. Accurate record-keeping isn’t one of our priorities. It bothered me in the beginning, when I first took this position, but now I appreciate the freedom it gives me.
“No record, no official notation of their presence, means they were never here.”
Another chuckle.
“You can think of it as a license to kill.” A pause. “Again.”
Cindy’s voice was a breathy whisper. “Thank you, dead man.”
Chad winced, bracing himself for the killing blows.
He wasn’t prepared, however, for the roar of gunfire that suddenly filled the room. He flinched and hunched his shoulders, but he didn’t seek cover-because Cindy’s stolid green eyes never wavered.
She smiled at him. “You’re okay, Chad.”
Her voice released him, and his gaze darted about the room, taking in the carnage. Three guards were dead on the floor. A fourth guard stood to his right, a 9mm pistol aimed at the still-standing warden, who was now a
