9. Caroline #2
"Oglethorpe." He rolls the name around in his mouth. "Fancy. You his girlfriend?"
"Whose?"
"The Russian's."
The sheer absurdity of the question makes me laugh. "No. Not even a little bit."
"Then what were you doing up there?"
"Hiking."
Buzzcut smiles. I thought the sneer was bad, but now that I've seen him in his full broken-toothed, cigarette-stained glory, I think I'd prefer the frown.
"Hiking, eh? Well, you sure ain't good at it, are you?
Ain't dressed for the weather, and by the looks of that knot on your head and your gimpy ankle, you and the mountain ain't on such good terms."
All three men guffaw at my expense.
But when they settle down, Gold Chain says, "Hell of a destination to end up at, too, sweetheart. Most people go up for the view of the valley. Not to shack up in a cabin with a man who used to kill people for the Lazarev Bratva."
Technically, that's not news, but my nervous system reacts as if it was. I get a little light-headed and my stomach knots itself up.
I knew what Afon was, what he'd done. The envelopes made that abundantly clear, and the rumors underlined everything else. But hearing it stated so baldly, by a complete and total stranger, is different from reading it in your dead father's careful handwriting.
"I'm a lawyer," I say, which is as true as it is irrelevant. "I'll cooperate fully when your boss arrives. But I need water, and I need the zip tie loosened. My fingers are going numb."
Buzzcut gawks at me for a long moment, then glances at Beanie. A wavelength passes between them—a look, a decision—and Beanie produces a water bottle from somewhere, saunters over, and holds it to my lips. I drink. It tastes metallic and stale, but I guzzle it all down.
No one does anything about the zip tie, so I decide we'll circle back to that particular little thorn in my side. Or in my wrists, or whatever.
"Alright then, sunshine," drawls Buzzcut. "You don't wanna talk, that's fine. We'll leave you to your thoughts."
All three men slink out of the room. The door clangs shut behind them.
The afternoon passes in slow, grinding misery.
Other men come in and out, but none of them look at me.
Someone brings in a space heater that rattles and clanks and makes the air taste like burning dust. I'm allowed to use a latrine dug out behind the bunkhouse, escorted by Beanie, who at least has the decency to turn around while I do my business.
My wrists are re-tied in front of me when I return, which is marginally better than when they were wrenched together at the small of my back.
I try to keep track of time, but there's no clock and my watch is dead and the eerie winter light filtering through those two small windows doesn't change much. It feels like I'm stuck in an endless, gray afternoon.
Gold Chain is mostly absent. Buzzcut goes outside, comes back, goes outside again. Beanie stands sentinel by the door, as talkative as ever, which is to say, not at all.
At one point, a fourth man comes in, a heavyset guy with ruddy cheeks, and speaks to Buzzcut in a low murmur. I catch the words highway and clean and no tail. That's not exactly a hard game of Charades for me to deduce.
They're confident no one followed us.
Given how we're clearly in the middle of fucking nowhere, I'd guess that they're probably right.
As the light in the windows dims from gray to charcoal, Gold Chain comes back in with a cigarette dangling from his lip. He claims the seat Buzzcut vacated earlier.
"So," he says, tipping his chair back on two legs. "Boss ain't coming tonight."
"Radioed again," Buzzcut confirms from the other end of the room. He's cleaning a handgun on one of the cots—a Glock, disassembled on a rag. "Earliest is tomorrow afternoon. Roads are fucked."
"Tomorrow afternoon." Gold Chain scratches his jaw. "That's a long time for us to entertain ourselves, huh?"
A nasty note in his voice makes the hair on my arms stand up. It's not what he says. It's the way he says it—loose and idle, like he's contemplating what to have for dinner, except the thing he's contemplating isn't dinner.
"Don't," Beanie growls from the doorway. It's the first full word I've heard him speak.
"Don't what?" Gold Chain gives him an innocent look. "I'm just saying. It's a long night. She's right there. And it's not like she's going anywhere."
"Boss said hold her."
"Boss said talk to her. Well, there's more than one way to get somebody talking, isn't there?"
All the sounds in the room go mute.
Buzzcut pauses with the Glock's slide in one hand, his eyes flicking from Gold Chain to me and back.
"She is pretty," Buzzcut notes. Slowly. Like he's trying the idea on.
"She bit you," Gold Chain says, grinning. "That sorta thing deserves payback, don't it?"
"Yeah." Buzzcut looks at his palm, twists it this and that in front of his face. "She did. It does."
I remember the domestic violence unit from law school, all those horrifying statistics I memorized for exams and then tried very hard to forget.
They were bad enough that they made me switch my concentration from corporate to pro bono.
And the stint I did at that clinic on the Lower East Side, the faces of the women I was tasked to help, the deadness in their flat, dissociated voices while I held their hands and wrote everything down and promised them it would be different now…
I never once imagined I'd be on this side of the desk.
My body is going offline. Breath shallowing out and stilling, fingers chilling to full-on numbness.
My hearing has dulled to nothing but a keening buzz, and the edges of my vision are going black like my brain would really prefer not to suffer through the images of what's about to happen next, thank you very much.
Don't you dare pass out, Caroline. Don't you dare.
Gold Chain stands. The chair legs scrape against the plywood with a sound that will live in my nightmares for a very long time, assuming I survive long enough to have nightmares. He takes one step toward me.
I don't flinch. I don't look away. I keep my eyes on his and let him see everything in them—the fear, yes, because I can't hide that, but also the fire.
"If you touch me," I spit, "there will be consequences. People know where I am."
"You told the Russian nobody knew you were here," Buzzcut interrupts. "I was listening."
I feel the blood leave my face.
Gold Chain stands. He cracks his neck, left then right, a grotesque popping sound. Then he walks toward me.
"Here's what I think," he says. "I think you're some rich bitch from Manhattan who came up here looking for her boyfriend, and nobody knows you're gone, and nobody's coming for you.
I think the boss isn't here, and what the boss doesn't know won't hurt him.
" He stops in front of my chair. "Although it might hurt you a little. "
He reaches for the zipper of my jacket.
The thought that pops up in my head right then is not rational. It's not strategic, nor even particularly helpful. It's not what my father trained me for, and it's definitely not what Dr. Levinson would endorse.
But it does feel, in its own way, kind of inevitable.
Because I think about Afon.
Not the cold-eyed golem who threw me out of his truck this morning, but the one who draped a blanket over me when I was nothing but a concussed inconvenience on his doorstep.
His hands on my waist as he lifted me onto the counter.
The care in his touch, every single time, and the obvious restraint it took him in every single second to hold back the tide of violence that's defined his life.
It doesn't change the situation to think about him.
But it does make me feel just a tiny bit better.
Gold Chain unzips my jacket. The cold air buffets my chest through my thin thermal. He hooks his index finger under the hem and tugs it up over my belly.
Buzzcut is watching on and salivating. Beanie has looked away.
It's funny that Afon was right, in the end. He told me it wasn't safe. Go home, Caroline; you don't belong here.
And what did I do? I called him a coward.
He wasn't being a coward, though.
He was just the only person paying attention.
Gold Chain leans in close. His breath is hot and rancid on my neck. My stomach heaves.
I close my eyes.