Chapter 23 #2
Adrian presses his lips together for one beat before he looks calm again, and I mark it, because his need to be understood has just shown me the one soft place on him.
Then he’s out the door, Lazar follows, and the lock clicks shut behind them.
I sit in the quiet he leaves behind and understand that Adrian made exactly one mistake tonight.
He needed me to see him. Everything else he did was clean, but that one thing was human.
I check both windows because I have to know, not because I hope he lied.
One faces a stone terrace and a dock with a single covered boat.
The other shows open water past a strip of scrub grass, gray to an unbroken horizon.
I test both latches, and neither gives, and the glass sits inside reinforced frames with no gap to force a tool into.
I can’t see a bridge, a road, or a neighboring shoreline from either side.
I count four men from the two windows and assume twice that many I can’t see.
Adrian already told me it took a boat to reach this place, and the water past the glass tells me he wasn’t exaggerating the distance.
Somewhere past it is a coast, and somewhere on that coast is a house with a portrait over the staircase and a man tearing his own empire apart to find me, and between us is more open water than I could swim at my strongest, which I’m not right now.
My mouth is dry in a way the single bottle of water they left won’t fix.
I ration it anyway, because dehydration is a real risk and I have three passengers who can’t afford it.
A wave of lightheadedness comes when I move too fast from the window.
I brace on the sill and wait it out, one hand splayed under my ribs.
The fear I can manage. The fear I can’t is quieter and lives lower down, the animal certainty that whatever happens to me happens to them.
I’m the only shelter three people have and the shelter is trapped on a rock in the middle of the Sound.
I make myself drink one more careful mouthful and sit before my body decides the matter for me.
I don’t know where I am. That’s the design. Adrian didn’t pick an island because it’s beautiful. He picked it because a place you can only reach by boat is a place no one stumbles onto, and a captive who can’t name her own coordinates can’t whisper them to anyone even if she found a phone.
I sit back down on the edge of the bed, and I press both hands low over my stomach.
The nausea returns in the late afternoon, as it has every day for weeks, except here there’s no ginger tea and no excuse to leave a room.
I ride it out with my gaze on the horizon and my hand pressed to the underside of my ribs.
I make myself eat half the bread they left even though my body wants none of it, because the three of them need it despite my queasiness.
That steadies me. I’ve already learned to keep going for people too small to know they exist. I won’t be the reason we don’t walk off this rock.
Then I turn back to the room to search more thoroughly.
The chair is too heavy to swing, but one of its legs ends in a steel foot the size of my palm, loose in its socket, worked halfway free by years of someone dragging the chair across stone.
I don’t pull it the rest of the way yet.
I seat it back into the wood so it looks untouched, and fix the location of it in my mind beside the four moves Platon taught me, and I let myself have the small mean pleasure of a hidden thing Adrian doesn’t know I have.
For a second, I let myself picture three children with Nikita’s gray eyes and my inability to sit still, learning to read and learning which of their parents to go to for which kind of trouble.
I let myself want it so hard it doubles me over on the edge of the bed with my forehead nearly to my knees.
That yearning is the thing that almost finishes me, not the vastness of water, Lazar, or even Adrian and his reasonable voice.
What almost finishes me is the thought that I might have watched three heartbeats flicker on a screen and never hold three hands in mine.
Then I make myself stop, because Platon taught me the rest of that lesson standing in a soundproofed range before dawn.
You can panic later. Panic now gets you killed, and it gets the people depending on you killed, and there are three people depending on me who don’t have names yet.
I can grieve after I get out. Right now I need to think.
I take stock instead. I have a locked door and two sealed windows over water I can’t cross.
I have a captor who keeps talking when he believes someone finally understands him, which means he’ll keep talking.
He’ll keep handing me things. I have Lazar, who was told not to break me yet, and yet is a word with an expiration date.
My husband will be looking for me. I used to think his control was absolute, but I watched it crack at the gala when a man put a hand near my throat, and part of me is afraid that the thing that will find me fastest is also the thing most likely to get one of us killed when it does.
Last of all, I remember the sequence Platon drilled into me at the range until I could run it without hesitation, the four moves in order, the instep, the elbow, the twist, and the distance, that turn a grabbed woman into a problem for the man holding her.
I straighten and lift my head, counting the men again. The one at the dock turns his back on the house every time he checks the boat. I count the seconds he gives me, and I start building the route out from there.