Total pages in book: 137
Estimated words: 132791 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 664(@200wpm)___ 531(@250wpm)___ 443(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 132791 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 664(@200wpm)___ 531(@250wpm)___ 443(@300wpm)
“If it’s communicating under the radar you’re after, you should learn the American Sign Language,” Michael said. “I can teach you. My wife is deaf. She taught me to speak it. Always drove my friends nuts when they came over and couldn’t understand what we were saying.”
Tiernan liked that idea. He liked it a lot.
“You don’t have more than two weeks in you,” Tiernan said tonelessly, nonetheless.
“I know,” he allowed. “But two weeks are enough if you make the most of them.”
Tiernan was a fast learner. So was Tierney.
“All right. What do you want in return?”
They bartered everything in the camp. Food. Drink. Clothes. Medicine. The older kids bartered sex, too. But Tiernan refused to let Tierney do anything stupid for a bowl of porridge.
“Your clothes. Blankets. Coats. Anything to fight this cold.” The man shivered, coughing into his fist. Splatters of blood flaked his blue skin.
Tiernan ran his finger over the burn marks on his knees. Igor had tortured him with fire before he went to Moscow for the holidays. The abuse he had taken was becoming too dangerous. He didn’t have time to waste. He needed to get out of here.
“That’s too much for a few language lessons,” Tiernan said.
“If you give me your food and clothes until I die, I will help you escape here.”
Tiernan cocked his head.
“It’s too late for me,” Michael acknowledged. “But you still can. If you ever find your way out of these gates, you take the road of bones to Yakutsk. That’s a twenty-hour drive, so you better have a car. Once you’re there, go to Lenin Square. Every day, at exactly noon, a man named Dima will wait beneath the statue. He is my ride out of Russia. My wife pays him well. He’ll take you out of here. Tell him Michael sent you.”
“What if he doesn’t come there anymore?”
“Impossible. My wife said she’ll pay him to do it until the day she dies.”
That sounded like a risky plan and a load of bullshit. Then again, Tiernan had no other choice. He’d never set foot beyond these gates. Hadn’t known a place other than this work camp.
He could drive well enough. He transported logs back and forth using vehicles. But he and Tierney would need a car and some food. A map of the Sakha. And, of course, the code to the main gates.
“You need to escape or die trying, Tiernan. This is no way to live,” Michael said. His lips were so chapped they hardly moved.
Tiernan shed his jacket and handed it to him. Not because he cared, but because he needed Michael alive to teach him sign language and everything there was to know about the outside world before he expired.
Michael burrowed into the fox’s fur. “Thank you.”
“Least I could do.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
TIERNAN
228 DAYS TO SELF-DESTRUCTION
“Callaghan, you dumb fuck.”
Tate Blackthorn rubbed at his eyes tiredly, hooked to lie detector wires in the Ferrantes’ dungeon.
Sam was sitting on the other end of the screen, monitoring his answers. He arched a smart-ass eyebrow. “No lies detected.”
“Ouch.” Enzo smiled ruefully, playing with his knife in the seat next to Brennan. “Blackthorn decided to club Tiernan with a truth stick. Someone get the first aid kit.”
“You’re just here to answer questions,” Luca informed Tate laconically, lighting up a cigarette.
“Nothing more. For now.”
Tate turned to face him, somehow looking both calm as fuck and angry as hell. “This is bullshit. Your brother-in-law just gave me two black eyes and a split lip.”
Guilty as charged. As soon as I saw his sorry face, I was reminded of Lila’s sketch and something compelled me to make his features just a little less symmetrical. It wasn’t like he was shopping for a wife. He already had one.
“We pulled him from you in time,” Luca reasoned. “He didn’t break your nose.”
“Night’s still young,” I pointed out. If Tate was Lila’s rapist, his nose was going to be the least of his problems. I was going to hang his balls on a meat hook from the ceiling and kill him over weeks, if not months.
I didn’t usually indulge in long, torturous killings—I lacked the time and patience. But something made me especially rabid for the rapist’s blood.
It was that stupid kiss at the shooting range last week. It undid my goddamn existence.
My whole life derailed from that moment forward. My entire days were currently planned and arranged around kissing and dry-humping my wife like a bleeding teenager. We spent every night practicing in bed. She didn’t realize it, but she was making loud, porn-worthy sounds. I didn’t want to alert her, because she was self-conscious as it was about her lack of hearing, but it made for very awkward breakfasts with Imma.
My new maid thought I was screwing the little girl she had raised.
Only Lila was no longer a little girl. She was shaping up to be a woman. One that no longer found it scary or distressing when her panties got soaked.