Eleanor!
Stay the fuck away from here!
I couldn’t catch a proper breath. My leg drained me of every awareness and energy. My mind fixated on Jinx. On the horror that I couldn’t fucking protect her. That I’d failed her. I’d failed fucking everyone!
Drake snapped his fingers, summoning two mercenaries as the ringing of my handcuffs fell silent. “Let’s get started. Don’t have all fucking night.”
My hate reached critical levels, blistering through me and feeding me false power.
I glowered as a man dressed all in black brought over a foldable table, and another man deposited a box on top. The weak glow of the light above created shadows and sinister promises.
I stopped fighting.
My eyes locked onto the box and the contents that I was highly intimate with.
Fresh agony swamped me. My back arched as metal bars bit into me. Blood trickled once again down my thigh. If I kept struggling, would I eventually get free or would I fail Eleanor faster than I already was?
Breathing hard, covered in pain-sweat, I growled, “Crawling over my island and helping yourself to my Euphoria supplies, brother?”
Drake nodded, his hands diving into the cardboard and placing the smaller packages in a line up on the table. Each one had a purple orchid stencilled on the top.
A big fuck-off hint what the main ingredient was.
A cocky decision on my end, yet my witless brother hadn’t realised the clue staring him in the goddamn face.
“Found your playroom. Couldn’t figure out how to load a fantasy, though, so that’s another thing you’ll have to divulge, along with telling me how this stuff works.” He ran his fingertip over the lids. “Seeing as we have time while waiting for Eleanor Grace to arrive, how about we do an experiment?”
I held his stare. “I’ve already tested and perfected the sensors. They don’t need further experiments.”
“Oh, these do.” He picked up the oil, sloshing glittery liquid in its bottle. An oil specially crafted to distort the sense of touch while in the virtual reality hallucination. “Let’s just say, I’ve tweaked them. Made them better.”
I didn’t ask what he’d done.
I wasn’t an idiot.
Whatever he’d done would guarantee pain.
That was his MO.
Torture, then torture some more, keep torturing until death.
“I helped myself to your supplies while you took a nap, but I couldn’t find your stash of elixir. Where is it?”
I bared my teeth, cursing the rush of sickness originating from my harpooned leg. “Don’t have any left.”
My patience was a big fat fucking zero.
The wire beneath me, the handcuffs biting me, the threat of Eleanor’s life? It’d put me in a right shit. The only thing stopping me from killing him was a cage and these handcuffs. My injuries wouldn’t matter the second I got close enough to slaughter him.
His temper flared, his forehead trying to furrow but struggling thanks to Botox. “Bullshit, where do you keep it?”
“It’s true. My supplies are gone.”
It was bullshit.
Kind of.
I had three vials left in my apothecary cabinet in my office.
But that didn’t include the entire box that’d just finished cooking in my lab on Monyet—another island named in Indonesian for monkey. An ode to all the primates that’d died in the quest for useable drugs. An island that was my most heavily fortified, hidden, and priceless jewel in my empire.
“Still a terrible liar, Sullivan.”
I smiled savagely. “What can I say? I detest thieves.”
“A thief? Me?” He chuckled. “Just taking what’s rightfully mine.”
“And I’ll take your life for this.”
He clucked his tongue. “You’ve created a fantasy, and now, you’re believing in one.” Unboxing the rest of my VR sensors, he lifted out eye lenses, fingerprint deceptors, nasal stick, taste scrambler, and earplugs. Unlike my carefully designed stock, these had been tampered with. The contents were different. The colours all wrong.
Raising his eyebrow, he sighed as if he’d rather just be resting than preparing to torture his own flesh and blood. “Ah well, first things first.”
My stomach clenched as he snapped his fingers at a mercenary who came gingerly toward my cage. Drake passed him a key, and the man swallowed as he inserted it into the lock and opened the gate.
One imprisonment down.
I rolled my wrists in the handcuffs, hissing as my torn skin oozed blood. Pain gathered on top of pain, but I ignored it all.
I had to stay lucid for this.
I had to survive this because I fucking refused to fail Eleanor again.
Drake took the key back from the guard and replaced it with the skin oil. His blond minion wrapped his fist around the bottle.
Drake arched his chin at me. “For the next few hours, you are my own personal guinea pig. You liberated all those animals in our labs. You feel such empathy for the rats and vermin that were born for that very fucking purpose. Therefore, you will become them. You get to feel how they did, baby brother. You get to have your skin burned, eyes blinded, and veins pumped with concoctions.”