Vicious Villains (Ruthless Villains Book 4)

Ijerked awake as lightning crackled through my body, making my limbs shake. Whipping my head from side to side, I blinked while trying to figure out where I was and where Audrey was and what the hell had happened. All I remembered was stepping out of the fight club and then…

My mind tried to sort through my memories, but my head felt unnaturally slow. Blinking hard, I tried to clear both my vision and my head.

Smoke. The last thing I had seen was white smoke and then I had blacked out completely. Dread sluiced through me. Which must mean that it was…

“Sleepcore,” a male voice said, as if he had been reading my mind. “In case you were curious.”

I shook my head as I tried to get my body to work properly again. Lifting my hand, I rubbed my eyes. Except my hand didn’t move. I tried again. Only a metallic rattling answered me.

Panic spiked through my chest.

Closing my eyes, I drew in some deep breaths. Whoever was in the room with me waited patiently.

When I at last opened my eyes again, my vision had finally returned fully. Shock pulsed through me as I took in the scene. I was standing in the middle of a room with metal walls and floor, and the reason why I hadn’t been able to move my hand was because I was chained to the walls. Handcuffs were locked around my wrists, keeping my arms spread wide with chains that had been secured to the walls on either side of me. My legs were similarly trapped. Manacles had been snapped around my ankles and then more chains bolted to the floor.

I flicked my gaze around the room. With all the metal and chains, it looked eerily similar to locations that Levi used for exactly these kinds of… meetings. But that didn’t make sense.

At least I couldn’t see Audrey anywhere. Hopefully that meant that she had been able to get away before she was taken too.

However, there were two other people in the room. Two men. They were standing side by side in front of me, blocking my view of what lay straight ahead, and their dark eyes were fixed on my face.

“Finally back with us?” the gray-haired one said.

“Who the hell are you?” I ground out. My mouth felt dry, and I swiped my tongue through it a couple of times.

The younger one, who had a scar along his jaw, gave me a cold smile. “We’ll be the ones asking the questions.”

Now that the effects of the sleepcore were finally gone, anger rose to fill my soul. Locking hard eyes on them, I spoke slowly and clearly. “I’ll give you one chance to release me from these,” I yanked at the chains keeping me trapped, “before things start getting ugly.”

“Oh things will be getting ugly. But not for us.”

They took a step to the side, finally revealing what had been hidden behind them.

My stomach dropped.

Audrey.

She was chained up in exactly the same way as me, except she was still in the deep dreamless sleep that the drug known as sleepcore caused. Metal rattled as I thrashed furiously against my manacles.

“Don’t you fucking touch her,” I snapped. “Don’t you dare fucking—”

“Wake her up,” Old Guy said.

Scar twisted around and brushed his palms together in one fluid motion before sending a bolt of lightning into Audrey’s chest.

A snarl tore from my throat.

But her eyes flew open, even as her limbs shook from the current that crackled through her. She snapped her head from side to side while blinking, probably to deal with the same problem that I’d had. Vision and mind not working properly.

“The hell do you want?” I growled, trying to bring their attention back to me instead.

Who the hell even were these people?

Old Guy turned towards me with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “What we want is information.”

“About what?”

“Trevor Gale.”

Confusion shot through me, and I furrowed my brows. What the…? Then realization crashed over me. Oh. Ohh. I flicked a glance towards Audrey. She was still blinking furiously, but her hearing should be unaffected, so hopefully she had figured out the same thing that I had since there was no way I could tell her.

Keeping that genuine confusion on my face as a ruse, I scowled at the gray-haired man before me. “I don’t know anything about Trevor Gale. At least not anything that isn’t already public knowledge.”

“Our sources say otherwise.”

“Then you have shit sources.”

A lightning bolt zapped into my shoulder. I bared my teeth at the young man with the scar, and yanked at my manacles again.

“Don’t lie,” Scar said, a mocking smile on his lips. “We know that you work for Gale.”

“I don’t work for anyone.”

“Tell me about your go-between. You’re not receiving instructions from Gale himself, so who is it that you’re meeting with?”

“Do we really look like people who follow someone else’s orders?” Audrey snapped.

I studied her intently. It looked like she had recovered from the sleepcore, and she didn’t look hurt. Her gaze flicked to me briefly, and she gave me a barely noticeable dip of the chin. Confirmation that she also knew exactly what was going on.

“Who are you working for?” Old Guy pressed as he turned and stalked up to her instead.

Panic flickered through me, but I could only watch as he stopped in front of her.

Audrey flashed him a smile dripping with poison. “The last time I worked for someone was during the summer break when I was fifteen. So take your fucking—”

Old Guy touched his palms together, summoning a stream of water, and then shoved the water down her throat while slapping his hand over her mouth. Her eyes widened and she thrashed desperately against the chains.

Clanking metal echoed through the whole room as I yanked violently against my restraints as well. “Stop!”

While keeping his hand over Audrey’s mouth, he looked back over his shoulder at me. “Who are you working for? Where are you meeting him?”

“We’re not working for anyone!”

I sucked in a strangled gasp as lightning struck my chest. Momentarily losing control of my muscles, I simply hung there in the chains while my body shook.

“Liar,” Scar growled as he readied another white bolt.

Old Guy pulled his water magic out of Audrey’s body. She coughed and retched violently. Before she had recovered, he touched his palms together and then slapped his hand over her mouth again. Her body trembled in the chains as water filled her lungs once more.

“Who. Are. You. Working. For?” he ground out right before Scar shot another lightning bolt into my chest.

My vision flickered and my limbs spasmed.

“Last chance,” Old Guy said. His dark eyes were locked on me while he kept his hand over Audrey’s mouth. “This time, the water doesn’t come out until she dies, or until you tell me who you’re working for and where you’re meeting him.”

“We’re not working for anybody,” I croaked. “You fucking idiots.”

Audrey jerked in her chains. My heart almost cracked at the sight of her like that. I was going to torture these people to death if it was the last thing I did.

A slow clapping sound echoed into the room. I snapped my gaze to the man walking up from somewhere behind Audrey. Brown hair lay combed back, and a neatly trimmed moustache decorated the smiling face below.

David.

Old Guy immediately pulled his water out of Audrey’s lungs. She coughed and dry heaved again, but there was no liquid to throw up since he had already removed everything.

“Well done,” David said. His brown eyes slid to the two other men in the room. “Unlock them.”

“What the hell do you think you’re doing, David?” I ground out, letting him see the real rage burning in my eyes.

“I apologize for the theatrics.” The arrogant advisor gave us what I think was supposed to have been a regretful smile. “But Mr. Gale needed to know that you could truly be trusted before we bring you in for our most important plan.”

Which both Audrey and I had figured out the moment he asked about Trevor Gale. This whole room, with the metal and the chains, along with the information that they tried to get us to share, was supposed to make us believe that we had been kidnapped by some of Levi’s people. The only problem with their little plan was of course that we were already working for Levi, so we knew without a doubt that it wasn’t him.

In the beginning, I had been worried that it was Johnson and his gang. But they wouldn’t have asked about Trevor Gale, which only left one party. David himself. So both Audrey and I knew that we had never been in any real risk of dying. It was only a test. One which we had just passed with flying colors. I was still going to kill all of them at some point, though.

“This was a test?” Audrey spat with very convincing outrage.

“Yes. Like I said, Mr. Gale needed to be sure that you wouldn’t sell us out to Levi at the first sign of danger.”

My knees almost buckled, courtesy of the lightning strikes, when Scar removed the last of my chains. I rubbed my hands up and down my thighs while Old Guy freed Audrey as well. There was still a tingling sensation in my legs, but I felt confident enough to take a step so I looked up and opened my mouth to speak right as Audrey lunged.

In a heartbeat, she had grabbed the front of Old Guy’s shirt, yanked out the knife she had apparently kept strapped to her thigh, and pressed the sharp edge against his throat. Fury, the likes of which could have set the world on fire, burned in her eyes as she dragged her gaze from him, to Scar, and then finally to settle on David.

Surprise flickered across the advisor’s face. Had he seriously thought that she wouldn’t retaliate? He was lucky that she wanted to keep the true extent of her powers secret and had used her knife instead of her magic because otherwise all three of them would be writhing on the floor in a cloud of poison right now.

“If you ever pull something like this again,” Audrey said, her furious eyes still locked on David, “I will kill you, and Trevor Gale, and your parents, and your siblings, and your entire extended family, and your friends, and your old lovers, and anyone who has ever had the misfortune of exchanging more than a handful of words with you.” She pressed the blade harder against Old Guy’s throat. “Am I making myself clear?”

For a moment, David just stared back at her in utter shock. Hell, he really had no idea who he was dealing with, did he?

“Yeah, uhm…” He cleared his throat. “Like I said, I apologize for the theatrics.”

Audrey shoved Old Guy away and then rammed the knife back into its hidden sheath. “Our agreement with you is on precariously thin ice right now.” Anger still danced in her sharp green eyes, and she leveled a commanding stare on David. “So if you want our help with taking out Levi Arden, you’re going to tell us about this real master plan of yours right now. Or we walk.”

“Yes, I uhm… I was just about to get into that.”

He looked very rattled by the turn that this meeting had taken, and it took him a few more seconds to compose himself again. I used that time to walk over to Audrey. Crossing my arms, I drew myself up to my full height next to her and then fixed David with a hard stare. He drew his fingers along his moustache and then cleared his throat again.

“Our plan is to locate Levi’s wife,” he said at last.

I frowned in confusion. Very convincingly too, in my opinion. “Why?”

“She’s pregnant, very pregnant, and therefore isn’t in the best state to defend herself. So we want to use her to bring Levi to his knees.”

“Let me get this straight,” Audrey said, her voice sharper than the blade she had just wielded. “You want to hurt a pregnant woman?”

“No, we don’t want to harm her. We just want to obtain her so that we can hold her safety over Levi’s head to make him do what we want.”

“So you want to kidnap a pregnant woman?”

“Well, yes.”

We, of course, already knew all of that. But we needed to make it seem as though we didn’t. And based on the slightly uncomfortable look on David’s face after Audrey’s cutting remarks, he was buying our act fully.

“So why haven’t you done that yet?” I interrupted.

David shifted his attention to me, and annoyance blew across his face as he said, “Because Levi has her squared away in some kind of safe house in the city, but we don’t know where.”

“Fucking hell.” I dragged a hand through my hair and shot him an exasperated look. “Do you have any idea how much time you’ve wasted playing these games with us? I used to work for Levi, for fuck’s sake.”

“We know, which is why we approached you.”

“I know all of his safe houses. Why didn’t you just tell us this earlier instead of sending us to do grunt work?”

“Because, like I said, we needed to know that you could be trusted.”

“Well, you’ve wasted a shit ton of time on it. I hope it was worth it.”

Hope rose in his eyes. “So does that mean that you can find out where Levi is keeping her?”

“Yeah, like I said, I know where all of his safe houses are. I helped set most of them up, for fuck’s sake.” With very convincing exasperation, I raked a hand through my hair again and blew out a sigh. “Just give me a few days to find the right one.”

“Excellent.” He flashed me a genuine smile. Then his gaze darted to Audrey, and he scratched his jaw. “And again, sorry about the… test.”

She just gave him a sharp smile in reply.

Satisfaction swirled up inside me.

Finally.

We had finally reached the endgame of our scheme.