Honor sank against the seat, pain and intense heat bathing her side. She must have fallen on something when she hit the ground so fast. But over her dead body would she ever let these assholes know that she’d sustained another injury while saving their ungrateful ass of a teammate. They could all fuck off as far as she was concerned. Just when she began to tell herself that she misunderstood Hancock and his men and that they weren’t really flaming assholes, they just as quickly dissuaded her of that notion by proving yet again just what jackasses they were.
The demon inside her, the very pissed-off outraged demon, wouldn’t simply let it go as Hancock had commanded. She turned her head so she faced Conrad and stared him down unflinchingly, not giving a shit that he could snap her like a twig with two fingers.
“So you would have preferred I just stand there like some hapless twit and let you get killed? Really? Does your life mean so little to you?”
She couldn’t keep the derision or scorn from her voice.
Conrad’s scowl deepened and his features grew even blacker, if such a thing were possible. He looked like an angry storm cloud in spring tornado season. His brow was so furrowed that his eyebrows bunched together to form one continuous line of hair over both eyes. And those eyes glittered with fury.
“Ungrateful ass,” she muttered, before refusing to look at him a second longer.
Instead she leaned back, tilting her head against the seat even though the rough terrain made it impossible for her skull not to endure battering from all the holes and bumps in their path.
She closed her eyes, shutting them all out. If she was lucky, she could fall asleep and they could just wake her up when they got to wherever they were stopping and she could be a good little hapless maiden and go sit on her hands while the big bad alpha males got their balls shot off.
It couldn’t happen to a nicer group of guys.
CHAPTER 12
HANCOCK—and the rest of his team, for that matter—had fallen silent after her scathing putdown of their ingratitude. She’d made no bones about the fact she thought they were all complete unfeeling bastards.
She wasn’t wrong.
His men didn’t give a shit what anyone thought of them when it came to doing their job at any cost. Like they were ultimately handing Honor back over to the very men they were currently saving her from. And that was all sorts of fucked up. Yeah, they tended not to give a rat’s ass whether they were saints or Satan himself. But it was in every man’s eyes, expressions, demeanor, that Honor . . . mattered.
They respected her when they respected no one but their team leader and each other. And if that didn’t throw a serious kink in their plans, he didn’t know what did. What if he ended up with a full scale rebellion on his hands? What if his men grew a conscience, as Hancock had in recent years—and he had vowed he’d never let that conscience interfere in another mission—and refused to hand Honor over to Bristow, then Maksimov and ultimately A New Era? There were too many ways for this to go wrong. What if Maksimov decided to say fuck you to A New Era? He was out of their reach and probably the only unofficial organization that would be an even match with A New Era. Maybe even far superior because Maksimov had no cause, no emotion. The members of A New Era were ruled by emotion, rage, a sense of righteousness and justice. They had no problem sacrificing themselves for the greater good. Their greater good.
None of Honor’s choices were remotely pleasant. Bristow was an evil bastard who got off on hurting women. Maksimov was brutal with his women, sometimes killing them with his depraved fetishes. In his world women were a dime a dozen and completely expendable.
And, well, if Bristow and Maksimov actually did turn Honor over to A New Era, she would endure unspeakable torture and degradation. She would pray for death, no matter how strong and fierce she was. No woman or man could endure what A New Era would dole out to her day after day, week after week until finally they killed her, and again, it wouldn’t be slow or merciful.