“They were wrong to interrogate him so harshly, but—”
“Lady,” he said, interrupting her, “they didn’t interrogate him at all. They had a muzzle buried so deep in his throat that it caused permanent damage to his esophagus and voice box. Darling said it was the first thing they did to him when they took him into custody and before he’d regained his ability to move, never mind speak. There was no way for him to answer anyone’s questions once that was in place. And I know he’s not lying. It took the surgeon four hours to dig it out of the tissue it’d cut and grown into because he’d had it in his mouth for so long.”
Her stomach hit the floor at what he described.
No… she refused to believe it. Her men wouldn’t have done something so awful. Not to mention, she didn’t remember seeing a muzzle on Darling.
Could she really have missed it?
She tried her best to think back to her few minutes with Darling before they’d rescued him. But all she could remember was the feral hatred in his eyes and her own absolute lack of judgment. “Was he really muzzled?”
The moment those words left her lips, and even before Maris spoke, she flashed on the men who’d freed Darling.
The angry conversation between themselves. Darling had been muzzled. She remembered them talking about it now. So much had happened so fast, that it hadn’t made an impression on her at the time, and since then, her thoughts had been on other things.
I am the biggest dolt who was ever born.
“You truly don’t know what was done to him, do you?” Maris pushed her back into her cell and sat her on the floor while he pulled out his mobile device.
Oblivious to the fact that he was wrinkling what had to be an extremely expensive outfit, he sat down beside her and handed her the file he’d just pulled up.
“What’s this?”
His dark eyes blistered her. “Just read.”
Irritated, Zarya let out a breath of frustration. But as she began reviewing Darling’s medical report, her stomach shrank into a painful knot. No wonder Maris had sat her down first. Had she been standing, she might have fallen. “Is this for real?”
“Yes. It’s why I pulled it. I knew if I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.” He reached over her to scroll to photos of Darling that were also in the file. There, she saw for herself the damage done to his mouth by the muzzle. It had worn permanent holes under his tongue and had pierced it through.
But that wasn’t the worst damage. Not by far.
Oh my God…
Her “friends” had brutalized him in a way that defied belief or imagination. And like Maris had said, with a muzzle in place, it wasn’t done for information.
He’d been tortured for entertainment.
Maris clicked to another page of the report. “They fed him his own vomit, along with urine and excrement.”
Zarya couldn’t see past the tears in her eyes as her stomach lurched over the viciousness. “I knew them. They… they weren’t animals. They were fathers and sons, daughters and mothers. Loving spouses and parents. How could they do that to anyone?”
Yet there was no denying the proof in her hands. She saw it with brutal clarity.
They had torn Darling apart. No wonder he was insane. Who wouldn’t be?
“Darling wasn’t a person to them,” Maris said in a strained voice. “He was an effigy. He stood for everything in their lives that they despised and hated—for every person they felt had it better or easier than them, anyone who had ever done them wrong or ever used them—and they took their own anger at the world out on him. They didn’t see him as a human being. Only as an enemy they wanted to feel every pain, real or imagined, they’d suffered in their own lives.” Maris went to yet another page. “They even cut off his finger and fed that to him, too.”
She rushed to the toilet and barely made it before she was sick.
Still, Maris took no pity on her. “They brutally and repeatedly sodomized him with objects we have yet to identify, and beat him to the brink of death. They attached electrodes to his genitals and muzzle, and ran enough electricity to him to leave burn scars all over his body, including his face. Anyone would be broken by that. But you have to remember, these weren’t strangers to him. These were people he’d protected. People he’d risked his own life, and that of his family, to help.”
People he’d been wounded for…
Zarya’s stomach heaved again under the true horror of what she’d allowed her men to do to him. Why hadn’t she checked on their prisoner?
Just once…
Her head swam from the horror of it all. “I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t. I wouldn’t have allowed them to do that to my worst enemy… not even Arturo.”
“You were in the room with him when we arrived.”