Hidden Currents by Christine Feehan

with you, right here in your mind. Lose yourself in me. Baby, please don’t let them take you from me. Love me enough to live.
    She could almost see him, tears on his face, in his voice and mind, his forehead pressed against the mosaic tiles of her ancestors. Her sisters’ voices rising around him, holding the bridge, keeping it strong, unknowing about her fate and God help her, it had to remain that way, because she could never live with their knowledge of what these men were doing to her.
    Her air was gone. Long gone. She had to make a decision. Live or die. Subject herself to the horror of this degradation or kill herself.
    Live for me, Elle. Love me enough to live for me. God knows I don’t deserve it, but love me enough to believe in me—that I’ll come for you, that I’ll fight for you with every breath in my body, every skill I have.
    She gasped, drew in great gulps of air and Drako shoved himself deep, gagging her. Stavros’s hand went from her hair to her throat, fingers clamping like a vise.
    “Look at him, sweetness,” Stavros commanded, his low voice almost like silk. “Look into his eyes.”
    Her gaze jumped to Drako’s face. Stavros whipped out a gun, shoved the barrel into Drako’s mouth and pulled the trigger. Drako’s body jerked and blood splattered across the floor and on the walls. His body dropped to the floor at her knees. Elle screamed, but no sound emerged.
    Stavros tightened his fingers around her throat. “Do you understand now? Or shall I bring in another man? Because I can keep this up all night.” His hand tightened, cutting off her air as he shook her. “Answer me. Tell me you understand, because there isn’t a man in this world that would be safe if they touched you.”
    She nodded her head, tears streaming down her face.
    “No one touches you. No one. Not ever. If another man dares to put his hands on you, or his mouth or his cock inside you, I’ll have him killed. Do you understand me, Sheena? Are we clear? There is nowhere in this world you can go. No one you’ll ever be safe with. You can stay on your knees and pray for forgiveness while you watch him rot.”
    He let go of her throat and walked out, leaving her with the blood streaming around her in a thick puddle. She heard herself screaming. Once she started she couldn’t stop.
     
     
     
    JACKSON heard his own raw cry, and he slammed his fist deep into the mosaic tiles. The floor softened under his punch, absorbing his flesh, allowing him to punch through as if the floor was gel and not solid. He swore, over and over, a vicious, steady, relentless spewing of every brutal term he’d ever learned in the bayou, the biker camps and the army.
    Elle. Baby. I know where you are. I’m coming to get you.
    He hit the floor again out of sheer impotence, seeing her broken, torn body, feeling her shattered soul. He had been a prisoner of war, brutally tortured, his mind fragmented, just as hers was. The Drakes had sent him soaring across the ocean so that he was in her mind, in her head, living her experiences and God help him, he wanted to murder someone. He found himself on his hands and knees, fighting not to vomit, feeling every humiliation, every lash, knowing exactly how broken she felt. He’d been there, exposed, brutalized and it had been her voice that had saved his sanity. Elle.
    She kept screaming in her mind. He had to find a way to bring her back. Stavros was far closer to breaking her than he could imagine. She was trying to crawl inside her own mind and escape. Jackson could feel that she was partially there. Her sisters were worn-out and sooner or later the bridge between them would fail. It was only the tremendous love they had for their sister that kept them going past the point of sanity. Using the amount of psychic energy to bridge an ocean would leave the Drakes unable to move for hours, but he needed to stay with Elle as long as possible, at least until Stavros relented and took the body away.
    Jackson