Iris
I wake up on cold, damp stone.
That's the first thing my body understands before my brain catches up.
The uneven floor under my cheek, and a headache that feels like someone parked a truck on my skull and left it running.
My mouth tastes like pennies and chemicals.
My wrists ache in a way that tells me they were tied at some point, even though they're free now.
Fingers. I can feel them. Toes, same. Everything aches, but everything moves.
Okay. Okay, good. That's something.
I crack open my eyes.
The room swims into focus slowly, gray stone walls, a small high window with no glass, letting in a slice of white daylight and a breeze that carries the smell of the ocean.
There's a thin mattress beside me and a bucket in the corner that I choose not to think about yet. One wall is just bars, like a jail, with a door I don’t need to test to know is locked.
I sit up too fast and the room tilts, my stomach lurching with it. I press a hand to the floor and wait for the spinning to stop.
Van. White van. Hands. The cloth over my mouth, sweet and awful.
The memory comes back in pieces, like someone shattered a vase, handed me the shards and told me to reassemble it.
I remember the small tissue-wrapped package of lace falling.
I remember fighting, my nails, my teeth, everything I had, and it hadn't mattered at all.
Whoever grabbed me had done this before.
My struggling had been an inconvenience to them, nothing more.
I don't remember the drive. I don't remember arriving here. There's a gap where hours should be, and the not knowing of it scares me more than the stone room does.
I stand, because sitting on the floor waiting to be terrified feels like a waste of the adrenaline currently trying to claw its way out of my brain.
My legs hold. I walk the perimeter of the room, palm trailing the wall, counting steps the way I've seen my brothers do when they walk a property they're thinking about buying.
Twelve feet by ten, roughly. One door. One window, too high and too narrow for anything but light and air and the sound of an ocean…
Where the fuck am I?
Voices drift from somewhere beyond the bars. Two men, maybe three, speaking low and fast in a language that is absolutely not English or Russian. It takes me a second to place the rhythm of it, the way it rolls and lifts at the ends of words.
Spanish, maybe? Italian?
My stomach drops.
I don't speak any Spanish or Italian.
I'm not in the states. I'm not anywhere near my family’s territory, our contacts, our reach. Wherever this is, it's someone else's world, someone else's rules, and I don't even know what language they're speaking in.
For a second, panic tries to take the wheel. My breath goes short and sharp, my vision narrowing at the edges the way it does right before I cry, and I hate it. I hate it so much, because crying doesn't open doors, it doesn't teach me a foreign language, and it doesn't get me home.
Don't freeze, Iris. Don't wait to understand. Just run.
Liam's voice, or maybe it's a composite of all five of my brothers, drilled into me since I was small enough to teach. I can't run. Not yet. Not through a locked door with no handle. But I can do the next best thing, which is the thing I've always been best at.
I can figure out the people.
Two men appear twenty minutes later. They’re both younger than I expected, maybe early thirties, and dressed like they're going to a nightclub. Dark jeans, expensive watches, the kind of casual arrogance that says they've never once been afraid of anything in their lives.
They unlock the door and the taller of the two slides a plate of bread and cheese across the floor, then rolls a bottle of water after it. The plate rattles to a stop just in front of my feet. The other one leans against the doorframe and looks at me in a way that makes my skin crawl.
I smile.
It's automatic. It's the same smile I've been using my whole life, the one that's disarmed strangers at investor dinners and softened my brothers' worst tempers and made Nadia laugh through her own fear in the back of a car once. I dust it off now like a weapon I didn't know I'd need.
"Hi," I say, keeping my voice light, easy, like we're meeting at a party instead of a stone cell. "I'm Iris.” I tap my chest in the universal gesture for my name. It all feels very me Tarzan, you Jane, and I almost cringe. “I don't suppose either of you speak English?"
The one against the doorframe tilts his head, and for a second, I think it worked, I think I've found the crack.
Then he says something to the other man in what is starting to sound more Italian than Spanish, from my limited understanding of each language, and they both laugh.
The way you'd laugh at a dog that did a trick you found unexpectedly charming.
"English," I try again, slower, like volume and enunciation are the problem. "Do. You. Speak. English?"
Nothing. The one who slid the plate towards me straightens up, wipes his hands on his jeans, and says something to his friend that makes them both look at me again, longer this time, and I don't need a translator to understand the meaning of that look.
I fold my arms over my chest and hug myself without meaning to.
"Okay," I say, mostly to myself now. "Okay. So a different approach is needed."
I try charm. I try my most disarming smile, the one that gets grown men to hand over information they didn't mean to share. I gesture at myself, at the door, try to look small and harmless and pleading, the universal language of please let me go, I promise I'm not worth the trouble.
They leave, locking the door with a clank. The sound of another door opening, closing, and being locked somewhere out of my line of sight makes my throat close for a second as panic tries to edge in.
I sit down hard on the mattress and stare at the bread and cheese like it might have answers.
I don't cry. I want to, badly, my throat is tight with it and my eyes are burning, but I don't let it happen. I have exactly one instinct in this room and it’s not to fall apart. It's to figure out where I am and how to get out. Falling apart is a luxury for later.
Not here, and not in front of the men who took me.
I eat the bread, because I'm apparently still capable of being hungry even while being held hostage, which feels like a personal failing but is probably just human.
I listen to every sound through the bars, footsteps, the murmur of voices, a television somewhere far off, the clatter of something being dropped and someone shouting about it.
I try to pick out repeated words. Capisci.
Vieni. Aspetta. I don't know what they mean, but I make a mental note of them anyway.
Information is currency. I've always known that.
I've just never needed to spend it to survive before.
The light through the high window shifts from white to gold to a deep, dusky pink while I sit there. A full day, or close to it, gone.
My brothers will be looking for me. I know that with a certainty that sits under my ribs like something solid.
Liam will have every contact he owns working the phones.
Killian will want to burn something down, and Aidan will be the one holding him back with cold logic and a spreadsheet of probabilities.
Connor and Rafferty will be doing whatever quiet, terrible things they do when someone they love is threatened.
Ma will be lighting candles and praying to a God she only remembers when it matters, and threatening that same God with consequences if He doesn't come through.
They'll come. I believe that the way I believe the sun rises. But believing they'll come and knowing when isn't the same thing, and in the meantime I'm alone in some sort of cell in a country where I can't ask for water without pointing at my own throat like a mime.
I press my back against the cold wall and pull my knees to my chest, and for the first time since I woke up here, I let myself feel it. The fear. The wrongness of a locked door with no handle. The absolute, bone-deep loneliness of not being able to make a single person here understand me.
I've spent my whole life being the person who makes people feel welcome, who turns strangers into family in under a minute, who reads a room and gives it exactly what it needs. And none of it works here. Not the smile, or the charm, or the softness in my voice that usually gets me anything I want.
For the first time in my entire life, I am completely, utterly useless to the people around me. The thought makes something small and stubborn start to burn in my gut.
Fine. If charm doesn't work here, I'll find what does. I'll learn their words. I'll learn their faces, their patterns, their weaknesses. I'll watch every single thing that happens on the other side of that door until I know this place better than they do.
I am an Orlova. We don't wait quietly for someone else to save us.
I wipe my eyes with the heel of my hand, once, hard, and I look at the door like it owes me something.
"Okay," I say out loud to the empty room, to the stone, to whoever might be listening on the other side. My voice doesn't shake nearly as much as I expect it to. "Let's figure out where the hell I am."