"Is that why you retired from being an agent, because it was becoming too easy to do terrible things?"
He was a perceptive one. "Partly."
"What's the other part?"
"I lost my son. I wasn't good enough to get to him before the enemy finished him off."
I was going through that same hell now. Was it already too late to rescue Deshavi?
"My mom thinks I retired, because of the strain it caused her for me to be in danger's way and partly that was it. But most of my reason for quitting was that I was beginning to like my job too much. Killing was becoming easier than it should be."
I nodded in response. I had surmised much the same for Trent's abrupt departure from a life he'd been so ingrained in. The cells had been empty to either side of us for quite some time. Business must be bad these days.
I couldn't get over the lack of security in the place. Just then up ahead of us and around the corner I heard the noises of a man approaching toward us.
"We need him alive!" I whispered, only loud enough for Trent to hear.
He nodded grimly and moved forward and as the guard rounded the corner he was snapped up by Trent in a choking hold and held upright virtually immobile. His eyes were flared wide in alarm at his capture. His gaze registered me in the murky light, as I stepped up close bringing a knife up to his face. His eyes went from the knife to me and I knew I had his attention.
"Now being in a place like this I imagine that you've seen just about every foul torture practiced and known to man."
The man actually had the audacity to slightly nod.
"Having seen so much torture and suffering I'm sure that you can recognize the benefit of a quick and relatively painless death, as opposed to a tortured one." I turned the blade of the knife to lay against the skin of his face.
The guard, who tortured for a living, had no stomach to face the same for himself. His eyes full of fear he asked, "What is it that you want to know?"
"Five days ago you received a crate with a young woman in it. Is she still alive?"
He nodded.
"Where is she?" I asked.
"Around the corner ten cells down on the left. I just came from giving her evening flogging to her."
I glanced down at the man's belt and was in time to see a drop of blood fall off the end of a strand of the whip stashed there to land with a splat on the floor. I stared at the drop of blood on the floor, my Deshavi's blood.