When I reached the main cluster of buildings, I paused at the corner.
Clear.
Lance signaled me ahead while he provided cover, and I returned the favor at the next building. It would go faster if we could run straight through the main streets, but we had no idea what enemies might be waiting in the wings. Even our own people might shoot first and ask questions later if they were in the middle of a firefight.
Sprinting, I rounded a Dumpster and pulled up short beside the building. I breathed hard and waited for Lance to catch up with me.
He didn’t.
Peeking around the Dumpster, I called out in a low voice. “Lance? You there?”
Silence. First the team went silent, now Lance. It was starting to become a problem. No, scratch that. It was already a huge fucking problem.
I crept near the dark side of the wall, moving quietly and quickly. I had to hope Lance had made an unfortunate wrong turn. I prayed I’d get a chance to tease him about it. Because if he’d run into someone…if I really lost him…
I rounded the corner where I’d last seen him. Empty. I was alone. I
should
have been alone, but I wasn’t. I felt someone watching.
“Lance,” I whispered.
The hair on the back of my neck rose. Fear. Real fear. There wasn’t time to savor it. I heard the faintest rasp of a rough indrawn breath. Not mine. Gasping, I turned to run. Something heavy slammed into me from behind. I fell, face-first, into the brick wall. My arms wrenched behind my back. I called out, but no one was there. Just my assailant, and he worked quickly and efficiently to subdue me. A prick of pain entered my neck.
A sedative, I realized as the numbness spread over me.
My assailant set me gently on the ground, guiding my fall as my legs stopped working. He turned me over so I was looking up at the orange and purple sunset. His head and shoulders were a silhouette, blocking the light. Even now, I couldn’t get a good look at him. Even now, he used the elements against me, keeping me in the dark.
At first I assumed it was a dream. My mind felt hazy, my body sluggish. My eyes were closed, with vague lights behind my eyelids, like a tilting, spinning ride at a carnival late at night. I felt like throwing up, and I tried to lurch up, to get out of bed. Except I wasn’t on my bed. And my arms didn’t move.
And when I opened my eyes, the world was still black.
A blindfold covered my eyes. It trapped my eyelashes back and forth as I blinked helplessly. Thick fabric stretched tight enough to block most of the light. I searched desperately for some glimmer of light peeking from below, where the cloth ran over the bridge of my nose, but the pinkish glow didn’t tell me anything. For all I knew it was the inside of my eye or some misfiring of my cornea. I couldn’t even trust my senses right now. Even my body had turned against me.
My arms were bound behind my back. The rope scratched at my skin, but didn’t chafe too badly as long as I didn’t struggle. There wasn’t much give though. I pulled carefully at my bonds, which only succeeded to make grooves in my wrist and yank my shoulder.
Captured. Fuck.
Resigned for the moment, I laid down my head. That was the most ridiculous part, the bed. The soft, sweet-smelling bed that I could lounge in for days, for weeks—forever. Sleep seemed like the best possible thing that could happen to me now. Just drift away and never wake up, drowned in a luxury too good for me.
I lay there, unable to move my hands or my legs. Unable to see. Alone with my thoughts.
God, my thoughts. The very thing I’d been running from my entire life. But I would never escape. Especially now at a standstill. Full stop.
To anyone outside, my father must have looked like a good man. He worked all day at a nearby garage as a mechanic, then came home to make dinner for his motherless little girl. He racked up those single father sympathy points. He wasn’t bad looking either, judging by the women that would sometimes come around with lasagna and pointed questions about when he’d be home. Little did they know he was out stalking his latest victim. They never suspected just how perverted and deadly his preferences ran. He would be out until late while I huddled in my princess bed.
I loved that princess bed. My dad had taken me to pick it out. In the furniture store there were rows upon rows of king-sized mattresses of varying thickness and softness and material. A hundred different options for adults to pick from, the most expensive of which cost the same as a small car.
For children, there was only one. One brand and one type. Twin-sized. Even rich people were content to let their kids sleep on whatever-the-fuck.
But I’d seen this bed with large looping wheels made of metal and a sheer pink cloth draped over the top, and I’d begged my father. To this day, I don’t know why he gave it to me. Or why he’d even care what I wanted. Was he crazy only some of the time? Was his violence reserved for people not related to him by blood? If so, I’d fucked that up by tattling on him. He’d attacked me in the jail just fine.
I slept on the princess bed until the day Child Protective Services took me away. The foster homes weren’t as nice, of course. I had old, lumpy mattresses, some of them lousy with fleas. I had foster “brothers” who smirked at me when I got out of the shower and threatened to join me in bed that night. But they never did. It was a shitty environment and a shitty life, but no one ever hurt me.
Until now. Until someone had drugged and kidnapped me. Until he’d tossed me on the softest, most luxurious bed I’d ever imagined. The irony was almost enough to kill me, and I prayed it would, really. I’d looked at enough case photos to know what lay in store for me. I remembered the blood on my father’s hands. This wouldn’t end prettily or without pain, and I was helpless to change my fate. Maybe I always had been.
A sound caught my attention, the gentle squeak of hinges followed by booted feet on hardwood. My mind sketched in the picture, starting with me and radiating outward. Blindfolded and bound. Fully dressed, as far as I could feel. No, wait. My jacket was gone. No bulk around my shoulders. The tautness around my chest felt like my bra and dress shirt. The skirt was there too, thick and unwieldy as ever. Between my ankles, I felt the thin netting of my pantyhose.
I heard him coming. A man approaching, a quiet one. He stalked me. Maybe my mind was adding that element, because I felt so much like prey. But his step was fast enough to be purposeful and slow enough to be predatory.
My heart beat so wildly, and irrationally, I felt sure he must hear it. I swallowed thickly against the dryness in my throat, and I was certain he heard that too. Every brush of my sleeve against the bedspread, every throb of discomfort in my shoulder. Every sound and sensation magnified under the weight of sensory deprivation and pure, absolute fear.
A gentle hand brushed back the hair from my face. It tickled, and on instinct, my nose scrunched. He laughed softly. Oh God. I was amusing him. He thought I was cute. This was some sort of twisted flirtation, a touch and a response. An advance and a surrender.
“Special Agent Samantha Holmes,” I said between clenched teeth, rattling off my badge number. Name, rank, and serial number. In case this guy was sane enough to care about the punishment for cop killing.
Fuck you,
I added silently.
He didn’t laugh this time. At the first touch of his hand, I flinched away. But I only succeeded in pressing myself against the impossible plushness beneath me. He stroked my hair again, fingering the strands softly before letting them drop. He was exactly as gentle as the first time. Almost caring.
Don’t engage.
That was standard operating procedure for a prisoner of war—and the drug trade was war.
Wait for rescue.
Yeah, that was un-fucking-likely. I could be almost anywhere by now. In a room with a bed wasn’t exactly specific. Besides, I sensed he was something else, and I was too, like maybe this was personal. And that had a totally different set of rules.
Reach out, humanize yourself, make him want to help you.
But either way, one thing was clear. If I had the chance to escape, I would take it. That chance didn’t have to be large. It could be a single hand free, jamming his throat into the footboard of the bed until he passed out. It could mean running away from a man with a gun and letting him shoot me in the back. Criminals had been resorting to
suicide by cop
for decades. Only fair I could turn the tables if I needed to. I had no idea what this man would do to me, but it seemed likely that by the end I’d rather be dead.
An evil sociopath. A young woman. Fill in the blanks. Unimaginable horrors visited upon my body were practically mandatory.
So why did I feel a budding sense of relief? I struggled to contain it. Could he see it on my face? What sort of twisted, fucked up…but I already knew the answer to that. I’d been like this from the moment I’d turned in my dad. No, earlier. When I’d seen the blood on his hands, and I’d known.
I am in a family of crazy people.
I am crazy.
The textbooks couldn’t say that. The criminal behaviorists and the psychologists didn’t know either.
Survivor’s guilt
. Fucking clueless. They wouldn’t know crazy if it tied them up and stroked their faces, but I did. Oh, I felt it too. Shimmery and translucent, like looking in a mirror. Like being made of glass.
“Let me go,” I said, surprised at how bold I sounded. Unafraid. And why shouldn’t I be? What could he do to me, except what I’d always wanted? “You won’t get away with this. The FBI will find you.”
“Shhh.” He touched his finger to my lips in a sensual parody of a comforting motion. Not resting his finger across my lips, the way people usually did. He ran his forefinger across the seam of my lips, sending small tingles through my sensitive skin. What a crazy fucker.
But he didn’t know who he was dealing with. I could give as well as take. I bit him. I
bit
him, feeling his flesh give between my teeth, tasting the faint salt and musk of a clean man. A soft exhalation escaped him, part pain and part surprise. The callused pad of his finger rasped across my tongue. Like a dog with a bone, I wasn’t letting go.
He pinched the bridge of my nose. I bit down harder, sucking air into my mouth around the sides of his finger. It wasn’t enough, though. Dizzy, I opened my mouth to breathe in deeper, and he was free. In seconds, my small rebellion had been crushed. Rendered ridiculous. Only, why hadn’t he slapped me? Punched me? I would have let go of his finger in the face of violence, whether from shock or submission. But he hadn’t hurt me. Just done the bare minimum so I’d let him go.
He didn’t punch me now either, in punishment. He could have, and I probably deserved it, by the rules of this messed up captivity game. I hadn’t broken skin, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a black and blue ring around his forefinger tomorrow.
“So fierce,” he whispered, stroking my hair again.
And God. God. Why was he so gentle with me? His touch, the bed? It was a perversion, this kindness. A hardworking single father who killed in his spare time. A kidnapper who petted me and gave me luxuries I’d never afforded myself. The world had turned upside down, the sky underneath me while I looked up at the glistening sea.
“Please.” Less brave now. Was that my voice? More like a whimper. “Just let me go. Tell me what you want from me. Leave me alone.”
Three different requests. I was panicking. I recognized it with a kind of detached calm. One part of my mind was thoughtful, examining my predicament with professional precision. The other part was flipping the fuck out, an animal with her back against the wall. I jerked in my bonds, accomplishing nothing. I wriggled again, knowing I looked ridiculous and not giving a shit.
Fear had a taste, I discovered. Harsh and metallic. Like blood. I’d first tasted it in the surveillance van when I’d thought Hennessey was in trouble.
He still might be in trouble.
“Fuck,” I panted. “Let me go.”
“You’ll be fine,” he murmured, his voice barely above a breath. The only clue to his identity was the slightest hint of an accent. “I promise.”
My laugh cut the air, bitter. “Oh, you promise. I don’t even know you. I can’t trust you.”
“You can. I may not answer every question. You may not like what I say. But here, in this room, it will always be the truth.”
His voice rang with sincerity.
Impossible.
And yet, the offer was too seductive to ignore. I could ask him anything and hear the answer. What would we ask if we could be sure to know the truth? I found myself quiet. The truth had always been terrifying. I’d learned early on not to ask questions.
This will be our little secret, okay?
As a child, my ignorance had been an uncomfortable sort of bliss. And the truth had set me free, but only in the most painful ways. I’d been alone in the world, tossed with one indifferent family after another. The truth wasn’t what I really wanted from him, but it was all he was offering.
“Is he alive?” My voice came low and thready. I was afraid to know the answer.
“Who? Your partner?”
I flinched beneath the blindfold. “The man who was with me at the docks.”
“Ah, that one. Very much alive, last I heard. He was wearing a vest. Unlike you.”
Relief. Because Lance
had
worn his vest. Had he been shot because he wouldn’t die? No, I was giving my captor too much credit. He didn’t care about Lance’s life. He wouldn’t care about mine.
“Are you going to let me go?”
“Eventually.”
Most kidnapping victims died within the first twenty-four hours. “Are you going to rape me?”
“No. Not until you ask me to.”
Then it wouldn’t be rape, his tone implied. But we both knew otherwise. I was his captive, under his control. There were thousands of ways a person could be made to do something they didn’t want to. Ways a person could be made to
ask
for something they didn’t want. Coercion. Blackmail. Persuasion. Which ways would he choose?
Deep breath. “Are you going to hurt me?”
“Only as much as I need to.”
Which meant yes. As horrible as it sounded to be hurt, there was a relief as well. At least this time I wouldn’t be spared. There was also a glimmer of hope with how regretful he sounded. Maybe he didn’t want to hurt me. Maybe it was something we could talk about.
Negative transference.
That was another fancy buzzword the textbook left me with. He didn’t want to hurt me. He wanted to hurt
himself
. Yeah, I was sure that would go over great with a sociopath.
Last question.
“Are you Carlos?”
Silence. I thought for a moment he’d invoke that privilege he’d been careful to retain, not to answer certain questions. Or maybe put me on the defensive with his many aliases, Carlos Laguardia, or Matthew Genner, or William Hernandez. That he’d staunch the trickle of information altogether, but in the end, he did none of that. He told the truth.
“Yes,” he finally said. “But then you knew that. You knew the answer to all these questions. You just wanted reassurance. Put your mind at ease, little one. You’ll be tortured here. That’s what you wanted to know, isn’t it?”
Tears leaked from my eyes, dampening the cloth across them. He was right, and I hated that he was right. I hated that I’d always escaped every horrible scenario and that I’d never had the strength to hurt myself instead. I looked at cutters with longing, those who could inflict brutal self-harm. Even people with anorexia caused long-term damage to their bodies.