“Simpson gave a weak-ass bleat of protest, but Styles was his buddy—his buddy who was missing his wife and kids—and it was Dillon's fault. So Simpson didn't do anything to stop Styles.
“They left Dillon bound and gagged for two days straight, randomly dumping buckets of ice water over her.
"The other guy, Lewis, didn't do much other than clean his guns and sharpen his knives, like it was just another day at the office.
“Fuckin' psycho asked me if I was uncomfortable with the work. I said ‘fuck yeah, I'm uncomfortable.’ We were standing by while an innocent woman was being tortured because Styles was a fuckin' wife beater.
“He shrugged and said, 'it's just the job,' and I knew right then I was going to quit, but not before I convinced my supervisors that our 'sure thing' was a complete bust and we had our facts all wrong. Terrorists at GITMO were treated with more respect, for fuck’s sake.
Tobias took another long pull on his bottle, wheezing after swallowing, so white now his skin was almost translucent.
"I shouldn't have left, but I did. I couldn't take it anymore. I went to see my supervisor's supervisor in person and got him on board to review the intel we had.
“Took him all of ten minutes to agree we'd gone too far on piss poor information and recognize Styles set the whole thing up, fabricating evidence and shit, all to get Dillon to tell him where his wife was.
“The supervisor gave me full authority to shut the interrogation down, and I headed back. When I got there, even psycho fuckin’ Lewis looked disturbed, which told me everything was beyond FUBAR.”
As the memories came faster, Tobias stared blindly at nothing, and those tears he'd been trying to hold back started to roll down his ashen cheeks.
No one said anything about the display of emotion, all of them struggling to listen, to take in what Tobias told them.
“Styles had her strung up, tied to one of the beams,” Tobias rasped, his voice fading to barely a whisper.
“He'd already laid into her so many times with an actual bullwhip, I couldn't see the skin on her back for all the blood. He wasn't interrogating her at that point; Styles was just hurting her for the pleasure of it.
“I put myself in the line of fire to cover Dillon, and color me fuckin' shocked when Lewis whipped out his piece and shot Simpson and Styles both, no hesitation.
"He helped me get Dillon down. Helped me wrap her up in a blanket and drove the car to the hospital. By the time he got us there, there was so much blood I thought... I thought she was dead when the doctors wheeled her away.”
Tobias finished off the whiskey with a grimace, not bothering to wipe the tears off his cheeks. “As soon as they told me she'd recover, I quit the agency and enlisted, praying to catch a bullet in some godforsaken desert halfway across the world.”
The silence blanketing the room was nearly suffocating as all of them visualized the picture Tobias painted for them.
Just when Nasa thought he couldn't take another second, Tobias shook his head and got to his feet, swaying slightly as the booze started to do its work.
He reached up to touch the edge of a scar that peeked out from the collar of his shirt, rubbing it almost absently.
“Seven days. We had her for seven days, and even after all the hell Styles put her through, she never gave up the wife and kids.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The familiar smell of Elka's fur comforted her. Dillon could feel her heart steadily thumping where Dillon had thrown her arm across the dog sometime in the night, hugging her like Elka was a teddy bear.
Another inhaled breath brought the smell of unfamiliar laundry detergent. The sheets that shifted against Dillon's bare legs were nice, but not spa quality Egyptian cotton.
Dillon opened her eyes and found herself staring at the soft, shimmering blackness of Elka's fur. A turn of the head brought the room into focus, along with the spine twisting lance of pain that came from sleeping on a pillow not her own.
Her neck was tight, sore, her elbows and knees hurt, her palms ached with healing abrasions. Every flex of muscle pulled the already taut skin even tighter, tugging at the edges of the small wounds. Her mouth soured with the uncertainty of not knowing where she was or how she'd gotten here.
“You're safe,” a deep voice rasped, and she lifted her head to find Nasa, sprawled in an uncomfortable looking chair beside the bed.
He looked... wrecked. Utterly wrecked, and she couldn't imagine a single reason why. Before she could ask, Elka shifted and stretched all four legs out as far as she could, throwing her head back to rest her huge head across Dillon's throat, licking her chops right in Dillon's ear.
“Elka! Gross.” Dillon tried to wiggle out from under the dog's bulk, back on the road to Full Freak-Out town when it became clear Dillon was as weak as a newborn kitten. .
Elka's nasty mouth sounds forgotten, Dillon looked at the humongous biker sitting next to her with mistrust pumping right alongside the adrenaline struggling to give her a boost.
“Did you kidnap me?”
Revulsion curled across Nasa's face, the low light in the room making the blond scruff on his jaw shimmer slightly. The leather of his biker vest creaked as he hunched forward to brace his tattooed forearms on his knees.
He wore beat up Harley boots on his enormous feet, acid wash jeans covered his powerful legs, and a black tee with the Punisher skull emblazoned on the chest.
The shirt hugged his muscled torso like a second skin, straining around the width of his biceps. His blond hair was just long enough to pull back into a stubby tail, perversely making her fingers want to comb through the pale gold strands.
There were lines around his fjord blue eyes,
