“Did you see them?”
Before I can answer, he asks, “Do you know who they are?”
“No. But they know my name.”
“Mine too.” His breath smells rank.
I press myself farther away from him and ask, “What happened to you?”
No one has to prod Beckett to talk about himself. It’s one of the ways he deals with tension. The month before his midtenure review, he almost lost his voice, and after a week of his nonstop monologue, I wished he had. Now I want to know how his story compares to mine.
“I was at the university, working late on a new piece—a deep exploration of the psyche through reverse point of view, experimental and very exciting—and I completely lost track of time.”
He’s tripping over his words, an excessive amount of them, as if he’s trying to smother the fear and uncertainty of our situation under the weight of his own narrative. A ball of irritation gathers in my gut, but I just let him talk.
“When I left, I was still completely immersed in that mental state—you know? And they took advantage of that. They must have been waiting for me to come out. I felt a sting and I got dizzy, and I woke up in the back of a van with my hands tied together. I don’t know how long I was out. I couldn’t see anything, but I think we were going uphill. Then the road got really rough, like gravel, and we pulled up here. But that woman wasn’t driving. She opened the back of the van, and somebody else drove it away. A man.”
All the pieces of his story—the van, the male driver, the drugs—match what happened to me. “Let me see your hands.” I feel the familiar zip ties around his wrists. “These are what they used on me too.”
“They untied you?”
“I broke out of them.” I can tell by his sudden silence that he doesn’t want to believe me. “It’s easy if you know how.”
If you know how, and if you have more space than we do, and any practical knowledge or coordination or an infinitesimal amount of competency.
“Show me.” Beckett must be terrified if he’s asking me for help, and I feel a pang of pity.
Blindly I’m trying to scoot him into a corner to give him enough room to raise his arms and bring them down hard enough to break the tie, and he’s explaining to me that this will work because the zip tie is weakest at the junction, when the door opens again.
The woman and her dog are silhouetted in a painful rectangle of light. Behind them the windows of the house shine in the early morning. Before I can move, Beckett shoves his way outside, stumbling out of the shed, and runs. The woman’s eyes never leave mine as she says, “Zeus, fass!”
Beckett is not athletic on a good day, and with his hands tied in front of him he runs like a character in a sketch comedy. I didn’t marry him because of his physical ability. Beckett seemed smart, interesting, and had a pallid, dreamy intensity. Now terror rises in my throat and I shout, “Beckett, stop!”
But Zeus gets there first and brings him down. It’s frighteningly efficient, and the analytical portion of my brain marvels at the dog’s beauty, pure muscle avoiding the flailing legs to seize the upper arm, completely immobilizing Beckett.
My own body is shaking. I’m crying and gasping. The woman’s mouth purses in disgust. That’s right, I’m weak. Just a girl. She doesn’t know my mind, my will. My cheeks are wet with tears, but there’s steel in my heart. I will survive. I step out of the shed.
Beckett is curled into a ball on the ground, and the dog’s jaws are still around his bicep. Zeus’s tail swishes back and forth with pleasure. That dog could kill Beckett. I am helpless, as helpless as I felt when Zeus brought me down yesterday. Underneath my fear lies anger. If that dog attacks me again, he’ll lose an eye.
Despite my apparent hysterics, the woman keeps her gaze on me and her cattle prod at the ready. “Mr. Coughlin, are you quite finished?”
Beckett moans.
“Enough. Zeus will let you go, and I expect you to stand up and walk over to me. If you don’t do exactly as I say, he’ll rip your throat out on my command. Are we clear?”
Somehow she interprets the noise Beckett makes as assent. “Aus! Pass auf!”
Zeus releases and takes a step back, keeping watch. Beckett pushes himself to his knees and stumbles upright. His face is blotchy and he ducks his head, avoiding my eyes, his humiliation tearing at my heart.
The woman isn’t cutting him any slack. “Come here.”
Slowly, Beckett walks over, stopping right next to me. Reflexively I reach for his hand, but he twitches it away, a stinging reminder that he’s still my petty ex-husband.
Zeus returns to his mistress and stands at attention by her side, and I imagine using German to command his obedience, but the way he glances up at our captor makes me think he wouldn’t obey just anyone. She’s his handler, his alpha, his everything.
She motions us forward with the cattle prod. “Go on.”
None of our drama has deterred the inevitable—we are going to the house. It looks like an upscale cabin in the woods with exposed logs, a wood-shingled roof, and a wraparound porch with Adirondack chairs. Those empty chairs face the yard like seats in a coliseum, watching the spectacle of our pain and degradation.
The woman follows behind us. “Go on,” she urges. “Up the steps and through the front door.”
My heart is fluttering, my fists are clenched. I glance back and see on her lips the flicker of a smile. I don’t know this woman well enough to judge whether she enjoys our distress or revels in her own power, but I do know she’s hyperorganized, with a headquarters in the wilderness, isolated from the world for a reason I don’t yet know but dread.
Zeus presses against my knee and Beckett hurries ahead. I will not shrink or run away as Beckett is doing. This dog is a tool, this woman’s tool, and I will not betray my fear to either of them, even as I try to remember how to walk, how to move my body with the animal so close, approaching a house that must hold terrible secrets.
At the front door, Beckett stops, his hands still zip-tied in front of him.
“You, Ava. Open the door.” She does not have a German accent, but she certainly has the attitude.
The polished door is unmarked by time or weather, shining dark. If I could open it quickly enough, I could get inside and slam it shut, leaving the woman and her cattle prod outside. Maybe I could find a phone, maybe …
I can’t keep myself from looking back, and our captor has a gleam in her eye, like she knows exactly what I’m thinking. She’s not even a little bit worried I’ll escape, and sending us through the door first could be a kind of test, or a trick, or one more excuse to cause pain. I remember the dark figure who drove me here—this woman has an accomplice, so even if I slammed the door in time, I bet I wouldn’t be alone in the house.
And Beckett is in the way.
I reach around him to turn the knob, and he stumbles through the door before it’s fully open. No matter how quickly I move, the woman’s right behind me, already shutting the door and shooting the dead bolt.
Inside, everything—the concrete floors polished to a high gloss, the stainless-steel kitchen counters, the minimalist black leather sofas—is high-end, contemporary, and cold. This does not look like a cozy retreat. Oddly, it’s the kind of decor my parents would love.