Chapter 9
Jordan
The tablet sears my palms, but it’s impossible to set down. Impossible to tear my eyes away.
Ashley tosses her head back, laughing at something off-screen. She looks safe. Normal. So wonderfully alive and oblivious to the danger stalking her.
I can’t breathe. I want to scream. To smash my fists against the windows until they bleed and someone comes to save me so I can save her.
But no one will.
There’s only me.
Me and the architect of this nightmare, the one who dropped this weapon into my hands.
Kirill.
But he’s not a monster.
That’s the twist of the knife.
Most predators I understand. But Kirill’s so cold and calculating. He doesn’t hate me, crave me, or wish me pain. I’m just a variable. A node in his logic tree. A line in his ledger.
And Ashley?
Simply another widget in the equation. Leverage, he called her. As if she’s not flesh and spirit, not a daughter or a friend or a soul. Only a button to push to see what I’ll do.
I slump, hugging the tablet to my chest and sliding down until the bed frame presses against my spine. How did I end up here? How does a spiral of manifestation journals, wellness streams, and water-only breakfasts lead to this? To Ashley in jeopardy because of me?
Kirill’s kiss crackles through my blood, soldering together my shame and desire. I crush my fingers to my lips, desperate to erase the lingering spark of him.
The worst isn’t that he kissed me. It’s that for one bright, reckless moment, I kissed him back. With a killer’s mouth on mine, I felt more alive than I have in years.
What does that make me?
I have you.
His words keep circling in my head. He didn’t say them like a threat. More like a revelation. A possession.
And isn’t that what he meant? I’m his now, to do with as he pleases. To break or bend or discard when he’s done.
But people want possessions.
So somewhere beyond the surface, beyond why he’s bent on acquiring my father’s things, Kirill wants me.
And want is a human desire. I can work with human.
I just need to figure this out.
If I mess up—if I keep Kirill waiting too long or say the wrong thing—Ashley dies. I know her innocence won’t stop someone like Kirill from hurting her.
So I need to play this carefully.
On the screen, I watch her neatly and methodically collect her things. The camera shadows her, nosing closer as her hand closes around her jacket. Just another Monday night. Just another person heading home. But will she make it? Or will the men following her do more than just watch?
Will they abduct her? Break her?
Panic tightens my chest in waves. I’ve spent years explaining to people that fear is just energy. That the body is only confused about its own strength. I used to claim that anxiety is a sign of power.
But I can’t meditate this very real fear away. No smudge, crystal, grid, or chant can bend the energy into submission.
Men with guns don’t care about positive affirmations.
So I have to keep my shit together. Keep Ashley safe and myself alive.
Time melts. I lose count of the minutes and hours I spend thinking, reflecting, asking the universe for an answer. On the monitor, Ashley slips through her day, unaware of the trap orbiting her.
The door to my prison opens.
I sense my kidnapper’s presence like a drop in atmospheric pressure. I don’t look up. I can’t bear to see his empty eyes or the mouth that kissed me with such unexpected gentleness now set in a line of indifference.
I know if I meet his gaze, I’ll falter. And I can’t do that.
Kirill stands at my back as I stay focused on the screen.
“The key.” No inflection. Just flat certainty that slices open the space between us. “What does it open?”
My eyes remain glued to the monitor.
If I reveal what I know—that the key belonged to the room my father stayed in at the Alibi Club on Isla de Huesos—everything unravels. He’d see straight through me. Every lie. Every dodge. And then what? What would happen to Ashley? To me?
Get it together, Jordan.
I close my eyes and suck in a breath. “I don’t know.”
He moves closer, the threat settling around my shoulders like a too-tight coat.
I lick my dry lips. I just need to give him enough to appease him until I come up with a real plan.
“I can try and help you find it, though. The information you want.” I finally face him and catch those icy eyes.
“The universe always provides. Maybe the key is a message. A doorway opening somewhere in your life, and you just need…to…”
I trail off when his jaw tightens. The flicker of muscle beneath the skin poses as a warning.
“Information is an asset, Jordan. Just like your friend’s job. Her ability to pay her mother’s medical bills.” He leaves without another word, the door locking with a snick that echoes in the emptiness.
The tablet remains in my hands, the screen glowing with Ashley’s innocent face.
The pendulum swings lower, a guillotine over my neck. If I don’t do what he wants, Ashley loses everything. Her job. Her mother’s care. Maybe her life.
All because of me.
I clench the tablet tighter.
I can’t give him answers I don’t have. But I won’t let her get hurt.
Jordan
Morning steals across the room, greedy and silent, leaching the darkness from every corner until a thin, sickly light clings to the window. Sleep never touched me. My raw, swollen eyes ache, crusted with the tears I didn’t let fall.
After eating two sandwiches and a banana, I lay awake contemplating my life choices and worrying about my friend.
The tablet sits abandoned on the nightstand, where I’d finally dropped it sometime in the dead hours when nothing dared move.
Ashley got home.
I watched, pulse hammering as I counted each one of her steps from the train to her door, my lungs burning with the air I held back until the lights in her windows flickered on. Safe.
For now.
But how long does safe last?
I push myself up from the floor. My joints snap and complain, each stretch alien, as if I’m only puppeteering this body from a distance.
In the bathroom, I splash cold water across my cheeks, refusing to meet my reflection. I don’t need to see the traitorous woman staring back. The one who kissed the man threatening her best friend.
I shake droplets from my face.
I need to stop thinking like that. So final. So defeatist.
I’ve been through worse. Delivered myself from hell.
So I can do this.
The lock on the bedroom door clicks.
I freeze as water trickles down my throat in slow, cold lines.
He’s coming. The machine disguised as a man.
With my pulse pounding, I slip back to the bedroom and plant myself near the desk.
An idea needles through the fog, reckless and weak, but it’s all I’ve got. If I can just make it work, maybe I’ll find a way out.
Maybe I can warn Ashley and then leave town. Start a new life elsewhere. As a nomad.
The door swings open.
Kirill enters with a tray in his hand. His gaze lands on me like a searchlight before measuring out the room. Clocking every inch. Not a single detail escapes him. He sets the tray on the desk, his movements clinical, distilled down to nothing but purpose. Not even the tiniest gesture wasted.
“Eat.” He starts to leave.
Now.
I have to do this now.
I lunge forward and stumble, my hip slamming into the desk. The tray rattles. Coffee surges over the rim of the mug in a brown arc. The plate tilts, slides, and crashes. Silverware leaps from the tray and scatters across hardwood.
I release a sharp gasp, and my hands flutter around the mess.
“I’m sorry! I’m so clumsy.” The words are involuntary and almost laughably obvious, but I roll with them.
I drop to my knees and dart my fingers along the floor.
Shards of plate. Fork. Spoon. I close my hand around the butter knife and tuck the blade against my palm, hiding the utensil under the pretense of cleaning up.
He looms above me. Silent.
Watching.
I don’t look up because I can’t make myself meet his stare. Does he see through this? Does he recognize the theater in every motion? Notice the lie in the twitch of my hands?
It’s not a lie. Just a…ritual exercise in drama.
“Really. I’m so sorry.” I gather the ruined plate, stacking the jagged ceramic and setting the silverware on top, methodical even as my hands tremble. The butter knife slides up my sleeve in a cool shiver of metal against skin. I don’t let myself check if it’s visible. Movement would betray me.
A sliver of ceramic rests on the floor beside his foot. My fingers brush his boot as I sweep the piece closer. My gaze flicks up.
Dark jeans hug his thighs, which are right here, just centimeters from my face. If I wanted to, I could lean forward and touch my lips to his fly.
Which I don’t want to. I would never.
But my eyes drift higher, to the glinting silver of his belt buckle, the compression shirt hugging his chest, the sharp cut of his jaw.
Our eyes meet, and heat flickers across his blue gaze.
Warmth tickles my stomach as I remember his lips on mine, seizing, claiming…
Still he says nothing.
Just retreats a little, giving me space to finish. I force my gaze back down and collect what’s left for the tray. Everything except what matters most.
Hope is a sharp, metallic taste in the back of my mouth as he leaves.
The door closes, and the lock clicks home. I kneel and listen to the fading echo. Wait. Count each heartbeat as if it matters. One, two, three…sixty. Only then do I rise, slowly and carefully, and draw the knife free from my sleeve. When my fist closes around the handle, relief tints my terror.
I have the knife.
My hands shake, and my lungs burn, but the blade sits in my hand.
It’s not much. Dull with a rounded tip. The kind of utensil that squashes more than slices. Utterly inadequate, really, if we’re being honest. But for the moment, it’s mine.
A fragment of real potential cradled by my palm.
I send a silent thank you through the air.
I wait for night to descend, until shadows crawl up the walls and every corner becomes a hiding place. I inventory the room.