She saw a flash of surprise in the clear depths of his eyes, and there was a slight lift of his lips into a smirk. He was amused by her words. Probably wasn’t used to someone like her fighting back. He probably preferred his victims docile until he killed them. Well, he wasn’t going to get that with Shaun.
She was a fighter.
He sat on his haunches and contemplated his captive. Then he leaned over, brushing her arm with his, making her jerk back, and pressed the gun to the head of his other victim. The man he’d most likely beaten until his heart had given out. Though the gun was pressed to the skull of the man lying on the floor, her captor still stared at her, speaking with his face and eyes.
Despair rushed through her. What should she do? She couldn’t actually let the man be murdered right in front of her, could she? Not if there was something she could do. She’d made an oath to do no harm. Yet, would she be doing more harm by helping? Patching him up just enough that he could be awake for his own death?
She glanced over the man and reassessed his injuries. The main issue was a suspected coronary. She couldn’t know for certain what was going on inside him, but her best estimate was that this man had no more than a few hours left without intervention. A lot could happen in two hours. Maybe by some miracle, the hospital had managed to alert the military to her abduction, and maybe they were casting a net in hopes of finding her. It sucked that she wasn’t within the city limits anymore but had been driven out to the countryside. Maybe someone saw the van and reported it. Maybe, just maybe the military was on its way.
She couldn’t let the patient die if there was even the glimmer of a chance that she could save him. She sighed deeply and nodded. “Okay, I’ll do what I can. But I don’t know if it’ll be enough for you to talk to him. He’s pretty far gone.”
She hoped if the man on the floor was listening at all, that he was capable of understanding the conversation taking place over his prone body. Shaun thought it would be best for him to stay unconscious, even if that meant he had to pretend. The longer he was unresponsive, the longer he and Shaun would stay alive.
Her kidnapper tucked his gun back into the holster and stood. He took a few steps away and leaned against a stone wall, his arms crossed in front of him in a negligent pose. Shaun suspected he could be across the room and on top of her within seconds if she made any wrong moves. He made his position very clear, in both his posture and the hard stare that never wavered from Shaun; he wasn’t budging until he got what he wanted.
She worked silently for several minutes, crushing up a handful of aspirins and mixing the white powder with some water before slowly trickling the liquid into her patient’s mouth. She used her finger to rub the extra mixture from the spoon onto his gums, where the skin was thin and the blood vessels were close to the surface, allowing the medication to reach his bloodstream faster. He didn’t swallow, which meant he was unconscious again. She checked his pulse. It was worryingly faint.
There wasn’t much more she could do about his heart.
She turned to the rest of him, tugging on clothes, and inventorying and treating injuries, until the basement faded away and it was just her and her patient. His body, his injuries spoke to her, even while he could not. She had enough experience from her time spent working in the Montréal General Hospital that she could tell what had made the marks and how much pressure had been applied. If she had to guess, she would say that he took several punches to the face, chest and abdomen, kicks to all of his limbs, probably when he’d fallen to the ground. His hands and fingers had been stomped on, as were his feet. The intent had been to cause extreme pain without doing life threatening damage.
Shaun had no way of dealing with a cardiac arrest beyond thinning his blood with aspirin, and without a hospital, it would ultimately be what killed him. After she finished cleaning and dressing the injuries that she could actually treat, she sat back on her heels and surveyed the man. It was no use ‒ he was going to die, and he was going to do it soon. His breathing was shallow and his skin was grey and clammy.
“That’s all I can do,” she said, feeling helpless and afraid.
She lifted her eyes to meet the unsympathetic ones of the man across the room. He hadn’t moved while she worked, just watched. He now shifted his eyes down to her patient, his victim. He took a long look, then signed to her, wake him up.
She didn’t know how to make him understand that she couldn’t just wake the patient. She sighed and rubbed at the headache hovering over her left eyebrow. A stress headache that came along once in a while when she found herself in an impossible situation.
“What’s your name?” She decided on a new tactic; try to form some kind of bond with her captor so he might trust her.
He pushed away from the wall, straightened and rolled his shoulders back as though releasing tension. Finally, he signed the letters - J - O - Z - E - F.
She nodded, and said softly, “Jozef.”
He looked at her, his eyes dropping down to her mouth, a strange expression flitting across his hawk-like features.
“Jozef.” She deliberately repeated his name. “You have to understand, this isn’t a matter of just ‘wake him up’ or ‘don’t wake him up’. You, or whoever did this to him, beat him until his heart gave out. On top of his other injuries, he probably has a concussion at best and a skull fracture at worst. He may never wake up.”
Jozef growled and began pacing the basement, his big booted feet kicking up dust from the floor. He was such a terrifying and imposing figure. If she had to guess, she would put him in his mid-thirties, same as her. He was probably a professional criminal with a good dose of street thug. He was the type of person that mamas and small children would cross the street to avoid.
Throughout her career, Shaun refused to avoid anyone, to be intimidated by people like Jozef. In her profession, she’d learned that anyone was capable of anything. Sweet little old ladies could be serial killers and the biggest, noisiest, scariest looking men could be teddy bears who cried over a few stitches. She’d seen it all and knew better than to judge. Unfortunately, Jozef was proving himself to be the former, rather than the latter. He’d already killed one person and she was terribly afraid there were two more on his list.
After another minute of pacing, he turned on his heel and strode out of the basement. The moment he was gone, Shaun hovered over top of her patient and shook his shoulder.
“Hey, wake up. Can you hear me?”
There was no response, so she tried harder, tried to wake him up without jarring his injuries too much. She checked his breathing and his pulse again and realized it was a lost cause. This man was going to die very soon, and he was going to do it without helping her escape.
Before she could come up with something else, she heard the clatter of feet on the rickety wooden steps. She glanced up in fear as Jozef returned with another person, one of the men from the van. Jozef walked toward her, his steps so rapid, she lurched back. He didn’t reach for her though, instead picking up the bucket of now dirty water and throwing it in the face of the man on the ground.
Shaun gasped and grabbed hold of his wrist, trying to pull him back. As soon as her fingers touched Jozef’s arm, he gave her a look of such loathing that she instantly dropped her hand and scuttled backwards on the dirt floor. He switched his focus from her to the injured man, who was sputtering water and groaning in pain.