Prohibited (Tulsa City Sinners #1)

34. Ryan

Chapter thirty-four

Ryan

A wild, animal fear tore through Ryan as one of the coppers approached him with the handcuff key in his hand.

But he seized that fear and drew it back into himself. Took his deep, steady breaths through his nose. Just like in the war, he told himself. When the bombs were falling, when they had to leave the trenches and crawl out into the open across the deadly plane of No Man’s Land in the dead of night, when men around him started dropping under the deadly hits from sniper rifles in the forests of France. He just breathed.

His body felt lost to him, something he existed outside of when the toadie unlocked his right hand. Fucking dammit, his dominant hand. The other toadie dragged the table over until it was right next to Ryan.

“Hold his arm on table. And don’t let go.”

It was futile, but Ryan fought them both. One arm against two men wasn’t very effective, and they pinned it to the table and held it, easily as a mounted butterfly. Ryan gritted his teeth and breathed through his nose .

The lieutenant walked around Ryan and drew a knife from the belt of one of the coppers holding onto him. Then he walked back in front of Ryan and gave him a good look at the blade. It was a bayonet knife, just under a foot long. He almost laughed at the vicious irony of a weapon of his own army being used against him now, on the soil of his own country. His own state. His own city.

He felt cold, detached while the Lieutenant walked to the table and scraped the blade across the back of Ryan’s hand.

“Reconsider?” the Lieutenant said, then set his mouth into a hard line.

“Never.” A surge of adrenaline went through him, but he forced himself to stay perfectly still.

“Hold him,” the Lieutenant said. And then he brought the blade down onto Ryan’s finger and pushed.

Blinding white agony. Pain that radiated through his body and turned all of his nerves to thin, melting agony.

Ryan jerked, couldn’t help it, as the pain moved through him and tried to wrest control of him. He clenched his teeth together so tightly that his jaw ached, especially where he’d lost the tooth. He made a low, animal sound in his throat that he couldn’t hold back and contracted into himself, holding his body so tightly that it shook. And he tried not to look, didn’t want to look, but he forced himself to look at the hand. At the table where a black puddle of blood was forming around his fingers. Crimson staining them now. Staining Robert’s hand, which held down every finger except the small one that had just been butchered. He’d taken only the top phalange. The bastard was going to take it piece be piece.

Roberts looked at him, hair in his face, veins in his neck standing out. His eyes blazed with a ferocious animal elation that violence could bring out in men.

“Shall we try again?” Roberts said, breathing heavily.

“I’m not telling you shit!” Ryan gritted his teeth and steeled himself for more agony.

Roberts didn’t wait a moment before chopping off the middle portion of his pinkie. Again, his body contracted to hold in the scream that leapt to his throat. Again, a small, ragged sound managed to escape him. His whole body was shaking now, turning to cold liquid. Sickness was churning in his stomach from the pain, from the idea that parts of him were being taken from him and there was nothing he could do about it.

Except to talk.

And he wouldn’t. He wasn’t going to give up the people he loved.

Loved.

After all this time, by God, he did still love her. And Lindsay. And Alex. This thought spiraled through him over and over again, and he held onto it. Didn’t analyze it. Didn’t try to break it apart or deny it or justify. It was this knowledge alone that held him there, that helped him find the courage to say, no, again, knowing the blade would bite down in the place where his pinkie met his hand and take what was left of it .

“You have more mettle than I accounted for,” said Roberts, knocking the next piece of the finger off of the table with the knife. Ryan thought he heard one of the toadies gag, but he tried to pretend he didn’t. The sound made his own stomach heave again. His entire body was cold and completely wet with sweat, causing his shirt to stick to his stomach and his back. It dripped down his face, down his sides, and pooled at the waistband of his trousers where his belt kept them cinched to his body. He couldn’t stop shaking and there was a fog over his mind. And still, he focused on the bite of the cuff into his left wrist. The floor beneath his boots. The chair beneath his ass. The coolness of the room. The smell of must in the air. Anything but the pain in his hand.

“But don’t worry, Lockwood.” Roberts laughed, a huff that made Ryan’s blood run cold. “Everyone has a limit. And I have all night. Once we’re through with your fingers, we can move onto… other appendages.”

Oh God. Ryan couldn’t even bring himself to contemplate it. The urge to scream rose up into this throat so fiercely that his effort to keep it back turned into a strangled cough. No one would come. No one would rescue him. He was not going to get out of this room. He had to face what was here. It was possible that he could even die here. The extent of Roberts’ corruption was making itself apparent.

He thought about the floor. The chair. The smell of the mildew. The floor. The chair. The mildew.

The floor. The chair .

The mildew.

“Hold him,” Roberts said again, and Ryan gritted his teeth and tightened his body.

The fresh assault on his ring finger brought a new wave of agony that was not abated at all by the pain he was already experiencing. He clenched his left hand so tightly that he felt his flesh split beneath his fingernails. A hot flash went through his body that was so intense, he broke out in a fresh wave of sweat. Another sound ground its way out of his throat.

“I’m confident that we’ll turn things around between the two of us,” Roberts said. Panting. That maniacal look in his eye. “I know you can be persuaded.”

Evie’s face appeared in his mind’s eye. He traced her lips, the dark fringe of her short hair.

The knife bit into his finger again, taking the middle phalange. He was never going to be able to hold a pistol again. Agony, blowing through him like a mine exploding below a trench.

Evie’s skin, etched with the most delicate lines as if by the hands of a master sculptor. The way her eyelashes touched her cheek when she closed her eyes.

Roberts said something, but he was far away. A dull sound. A dull presence. Ryan was in a fog where nothing existed but for him and the agony in his hand. His body was no longer his, but a foreign country he had left behind. The room was somewhere else, an echo of a memory .

The knife came down to where his ring finger met his hand. A brutal chop. Somewhere very distant, another sickening crunch as the last of his ring finger was gruesomely separated from his hand.

He let his head fall forward, sweat dripping from his forehead onto the thighs of his trousers. Suddenly, he realized that his jaw ached. Horribly. Not just from the blows the asshole Lieutenant had landed on his face, but because he was grinding his teeth so hard he was certain they were about to crumble in his mouth.

As if from another dimension, he thought he heard three taps. All three of the men around him went perfectly still. While Ryan watched, one tiny crystalline drop of his blood fell on the table next to his hand. His mutilated hand.

Nausea roiled in his stomach again, but he swallowed it down. Breathing heavily through his nose, he slowly raised his eyes until he was looking into Roberts’ face.

“Go get the door,” Roberts said over his shoulder. He looked away and slowly straightened up, letting the hand with the bayonet knife hang down by his side .

A temporary reprieve. Ryan gulped down several clear breaths and clung to the relief. Though the fingers were entirely gone, he could still feel each of the six brutal cuts, the knife biting into each digit three times, chipping away one piece at a time. Six crunches that flipped his stomach over and filled his mouth with bitter saliva. He stared at the hand, feeling the pain in each of the digits, trying to understand how they still hurt in six places when they were both gone.

Footsteps coming back down the stairs. “You have a visitor, Lieutenant,” one of the toadies said. Ryan couldn’t tell which one it was and he didn’t care. All he cared about was the fact that Roberts had stopped carving pieces off of his hand.

“I’m busy,” Roberts said, snapping out each syllable with acute irritation.

The man dropped his voice, but Ryan still heard him say, “It’s urgent.”

Roberts sighed and looked down at himself. Then, he looked at Ryan, eyes simmering with the bloodlust that had overcome him. Then he flipped the knife over and handed it off to one of the toadies. He took his jacket from the other one and shrugged it on, over his rolled up sleeves and all. He yanked a handkerchief out of his breast pocket and managed to wipe most of the blood off of his fingers.

Shaking, sweating, Ryan wished he could ram that knife into his gut.

“Take him back to his cell. Wrap his hand so he doesn’t bleed everywhere.”