Chapter Three #2
“Don’t play dumb, girl. The Mona. Who sent you? How did you know we were going to be there at that exact time?”
“I swear, I didn’t know.” I don’t bother hiding the fear in my voice. It finds its way out, as well as the tears dropping down my cheeks. “This is a misunderstanding.”
“Lies!” His voice thunders off the walls as he leans forward, his eyes burning with irritation. “Tell me, was it Vasili?”
The switch of his tone throws me off guard, and I’m shaking like a leaf when I clasp my hands together before him. But he doesn’t seem fazed, even in the slightest.
“I don’t…” I heave, sniffling through tears. “I swear I don’t know who that is. No one sent me. I work there, at the Miami Marina. My name’s Elena Clark, and I’m a yacht charter manager. You can run my name through any database. I promise it’ll check out.”
“Doesn’t mean shit,” he clips out icily. “You could be a spy. A terrible one, at that.”
I try to speak again, but I’m fighting to breathe between sobs. I sneak one hand across my chest, clutching the knitted sweater tightly. It’s the only reminder I have right now of home, and the thought makes the tightness in my chest a thousand times worse.
By the time I look back up, my face is drenched in tears. “I don’t know what to say. I’ve lost everything, including my phone and the tablet. I don’t have any other evidence to prove that I wasn’t sent there as a spy.”
“Then what do you want me to believe? That you just happened to be taking a stroll down the dock at almost midnight? What a coincidence.”
“No.” I shake my head frantically. “I have a colleague. His name is Henry. He received a call from the office requesting an urgent inspection at the docks. He couldn’t make it because of an emergency, so he called in a favor from me. That’s the truth.”
He strokes his jaw, eyes going from hot to cold with a scary precision. “Very convenient story, if you ask me. And it doesn’t change anything.”
I bite down hard on my lip. It doesn’t help that the man is built like a wall of bricks, tough and impenetrable. If emotions won’t help, perhaps logic might.
“I have a family,” I start. “Parents and friends who’ll be out there looking for me. I need to leave this place. I can’t stay here.”
“You weren’t given an option.”
Monster! I want to yell.
I want to claw at his chest and punch hard him until he’s out of breath like I am. I want to pull at something, anything, until I’m no longer wallowing in this dreadful feeling.
The words rip from my throat before I can stop them, raw and scraping, sounding like a stranger’s voice.
“Please, I won’t say anything,” I sob, my hands shaking so violently I have to press them against my knees just to keep from falling apart.
“I swear to God, I won’t tell anyone. The docks, the crates, the packages…
I didn’t see anything. I was never there. ”
I just want to go home.
I want the mundane, boring safety of my bedroom. I want the morning light filtering through my blinds, the smell of burnt toast in the kitchen, the stupid, beautiful simplicity of my life before I went to work last night. I just want to wake up from this nightmare.
“Please,” I beg, the word catching on a jagged breath as I look up at him through a blur of stinging tears. “Please, just let me go. I’ll forget everything and disappear.”
“One of my men thinks you deserve two bullets for snooping around.”
“Jesus.” My eyes widen. “Is that supposed to be comforting?”
His gaze hardens. “It means you’d be dead already, if that’s what I wanted.”
More tears spill over, tracking down my cheeks. “Great. I guess I owe you my life now.”
I’ve never been the crying type. It’s humiliating, stripping myself of every ounce of pride, offering up absolute submission just to survive.
But I can’t help it. The terror of being in this place is like a physical weight crushing my chest, and the shame of my own helplessness burns.
He doesn’t move.
He just stands there, watching me unravel into a pure mess. His jaw tightens, a hard line etched into stone, but there’s unreadable flicker in the dark depths of his eyes—a brief, turbulent shadow that passes before it’s locked away.
And then it hits me, the same way the cold gusts of wind battered me on the docks.
It’s a sudden, sickening jolt right beneath my ribs.
Even as my heart hammers in pure panic, even as my mind screams at me that this man is dangerous, I feel a strange, magnetic pull toward him.
Like an irrational anchor in the middle of my trauma, an inexplicable gravity draws me to the very person holding my life in his hands.
That realization frightens me more than anything else. It makes me feel sick to my stomach.
How can I crave anything from the person who put me in this prison?
He takes a slow step back, the shadows of the room swallowing him up, but his gaze never leaves mine.
I realize he’s leaving, and the first thought that escapes is, “You never told me your name.”
“Persistent,” he grumbles. Then, with a sigh, it comes. “Leonid.”
Then he turns and walks out, the heavy metal door clicking shut behind him.