He picks me up and throws me over his shoulder.
Though I can’t see him through the hood, I can tell he’s big. Strong, too. This is no mastermind. No strategist. This is the guy the higher-ups send when they need serious muscle. His arm around my thighs is as hard as steel. He’s got an easy, loping walk, like my weight on his shoulder is completely insubstantial.
He’s probably used to carrying weight like this a lot.
Dead weight.
Inhale for four counts. Hold it for four counts. Exhale for four counts. Hold it for four counts. Start over again.
We go up steps. His boots make a different sound on wood than they do on gravel. A heavy, hollow sound. He stops for a moment. I hear a metallic clang, then the complaining creak of unoiled hinges. Then it sounds like a large door is being pulled open—no, rolled open from one side.
The pungent, distinct scent of horses and damp hay hits my nose, followed by the fainter scent of fresh water.
We must be in the country. There are no sounds other than the gentle chirping of crickets and tree leaves rustling in the cool breeze. I probably have been unconscious for a long time. I’m far away from the city.
If anyone’s looking, they’ll never find me.
Inhale for four counts. Hold it for four counts. Exhale for four counts. Hold it for four counts. Start over again.
My captor starts walking again. He changes directions a few times, disorienting me. The building we’re in must be large because we walk for quite a while until we stop.
We abruptly begin to descend.
When the elevator lurches downward with a loud creak, I suck in a startled breath.
“Rule number two: be silent unless you’re told to speak.”
I bite my lower lip and swallow the scream clawing its way up my throat.
When the elevator stops, the air is warm and stale. I smell cigarette smoke and the low drone of a radio tuned to a talk channel. There’s a burst of electronic noise, then a voice crackles over a ham radio.
The voice doesn’t speak in English, so I can’t understand what it says.
I’m flipped upright and deposited onto a hard metal chair. The hood vanishes. I blink into blinding white lights directly in front of me. Beneath my feet, the floor is dirt.
From beyond the lights, a man says in English, “State your name for the camera.”
We’re doing this already? They’re not wasting any time.
I moisten my dry lips. Breathe slowly. Sit up straighter in the chair. “Juliet Moretti.”
“Louder.”
“Juliet Moretti.”
“State your date of birth and birthplace.”
He’s totally dispassionate. Emotionless. This is only a job for him. I’m nothing more than a means to an end. He probably doesn’t even see me as human.
Behind my back, my hands shake so badly I can’t curl them to fists.
“January twenty-eighth, nineteen-ninety-five. New York Presbyterian Hospital, Manhattan.”
“State your mother’s maiden name and the name of your favorite childhood pet.”
I have to use the toilet. My bladder is so full it feels like it will burst. “Elizabeth Bushnell. Pippi Longstocking.”
The blinding white lights shift to reveal the shadow of a man behind the video camera. The camera is on a tripod. Three more men stand to one side, silently observing. I can’t see their faces, but I feel their eyes on me. I feel their focus.
One of them has a short leather whip in his hand.
I start to hyperventilate. Breathing in squares does nothing to help.
Killian. I’m so sorry. I was an idiot. I was a fool.
If I could see him right now, I’d tell him that none of it matters. His secrets, his past, his whole life—I don’t care. All I care about is how I feel when he looks into my eyes.
All I care about is him.
No matter who. No matter what.
Just him.
“Say hello to your father, Juliet.”
My eyes are full of water. I blink rapidly to clear them. My pulse is like the roar of the ocean in my ears. I whisper hoarsely, “Addio, papa.”
Addio is the formal way in Italian of saying goodbye to someone you believe you’ll never see again. It’s what I was trained to say in this situation if I felt that the odds of my survival weren’t good. A code to let my rescuers know they needed to hurry.
It’s what I said to my mother’s closed casket the day they lowered her into the ground.
All the little pieces of her they could scrape together.
The man behind the camera steps forward. His head is shaved. He’s wearing all black. A skull tattoo covers his Adam’s apple.
He puts a hand on my shoulder and shoves.
I crash backward. My head hits the floor with a horrible dull thud. I gasp in pain, instinctively rolling to my side, but the man grabs my tied ankles and whips a plastic cable tie around them, binding my feet to one leg of the chair.
I lie on my back with my feet in the air staring up into darkness, panting, convinced I’m about to die.
But death isn’t what they’ve got planned for me. At least not yet.
For now, it’s a little light torture.
I hear the zizz of the whip cutting through the air a split second before it hits my flesh. The tender, unprotected flesh of the sole of my right foot, between the ball and the heel.
The pain is worse than fire. Worse than a hot metal brand pressed against my skin. It’s searing. Stabbing. It goes through me like a spear. I jerk violently, but I don’t scream. Not then. Then I still have hope that it might be over quickly.
The man with the whip extinguishes that hope with ruthless efficiency.
As the camera rolls, he lashes the soles of both of my feet over and over again, until my flesh is shredded and bloody and my screams are so loud, they drown out the sound of his laughter.
Sometime later, when I swim up into consciousness through a throbbing red sea of misery, I find myself in a room. A cramped room dug out of the earth with no windows and no doors, and only an empty metal pot for—I assume—a toilet. The ceiling is an iron grate, about twelve feet above me.
Okay, it’s not a room. Technically, it’s a hole in the ground.
It’s a dungeon.
I look around, fighting panic.
On the plus side, there will be no chance of developing a pesky case of Stockholm Syndrome, because unless one of my captors jumps down here with me for a chat and some brainwashing, it looks like I’m going to be in solitary confinement for the foreseeable future.
On the downside…it’s a dungeon.
I sit up, surprised to find my hands and ankles unbound. I’ve still got my clothes on, which is another plus. But judging by the state of my feet, I won’t be able to walk for a while, much less run away.
Not that it matters in any case, because there’s no way out of here unless someone lowers a ladder.
I peer up at the bars of the grate, wondering if they’ve sent the video to my father yet.
Then I decide I have to pee.
I discover quickly that being unable to walk is a big hindrance to going to the bathroom. Or using a pee pot, as it were.
When I’m done rolling around in the dirt and cursing, I spend several horrified minutes wondering what the hell I’m going to do when I have to go number two. I can’t crouch, and there’s no toilet paper. Things are going to get ugly, fast.