Chapter 5
FITZ
Iwatch Jordan prepare to speak, and I can see the calculation in her eyes. She's planning something. Christ, she's going to make this worse, and there's nothing I can do to stop her.
The camera's red light blinks steadily. A laptop sits beside it, screen showing a live feed counter climbing - already thousands watching.
The leader stands behind the camera, waiting.
Jordan's wrists are still bound behind her back, her red dress torn at the shoulder from when they dragged her in here.
Her hair has come loose from its updo, and there's a raw scrape on her cheekbone.
Every dominant instinct I have screams at me to break free, to put myself between her and danger, to protect what's mine.
But the zip ties bite into my wrists, and the three guards have their weapons trained on me.
One wrong move, and they shoot. Then Jordan's alone with these bastards.
So I stay still. I stay silent. And I watch my wife prepare to do something monumentally reckless.
"My name is Jordan James-Fitzwallace," she begins, her voice steady and clear. "I own Baker Street, a private establishment in London. For the past five years, I've worked to extract young women kidnapped by Boko Haram from captivity and help them rebuild their lives."
"Good," the leader says from behind the camera. "Now apologize. Tell them you were wrong."
Jordan meets my eyes for just a moment, and I see the defiance there.
The spark that tells me she's not going to give them what they want.
No. Don't do it. Don't antagonize him. But I know that look.
I've seen it before, in our playroom when she's testing boundaries, pushing limits.
The difference is that in our playroom, I control what happens next. Here, I control nothing.
"I was wrong," she continues, and I see the leader relax slightly.
For half a second, I think maybe she's going to cooperate. Maybe she's going to say what they want to hear, and we'll get through this alive.
Then she keeps talking.
"I was wrong to do it alone. I was wrong to think seventeen girls saved was enough when over a hundred are still missing."
The leader's posture changes. Tension coils through his shoulders. "What are you doing? That's not—"
"I was wrong to think that the world would care.
" Her voice is rising now, passionate and furious.
"I was wrong to believe that governments and international organizations would prioritize the lives of young African women over political convenience.
And I was especially wrong to think that men like you—cowards who hide behind religion and tradition to justify rape and slavery—would ever see these women as human beings deserving of freedom. "
My heart hammers against my ribs. That's Jordan. Brave, reckless, and about to get herself killed.
"Cut the camera!" the leader shouts, but one of his men is too slow, fumbling with the equipment, and Jordan keeps talking.
"To the girls still in captivity—I haven't forgotten you. I will never stop looking for you. And to the girls who have escaped—they're coming for you. They know where you are. You need to disappear. Change your names again. Run."
The leader moves fast. His hand is a blur as he backhands her hard enough that she falls from the chair, blood streaming from her split lip.
The sound of flesh on flesh echoes in the room, and something in me gives way.
I roar, lunging against my restraints hard enough that the chair topples, taking me with it.
The zip ties slice into my wrists, and I can feel the warm slickness where they've cut through skin.
"You stupid bitch!" He's on her now, his hand around her throat, lifting her partially off the ground. "You just signed their death warrants. Every single girl on our list will die because of you."
Jordan's face is turning red, her bound hands useless behind her back. She can't fight. Can't defend herself. And I'm on the floor, tied to a chair, watching the woman I love struggle for air.
"Then you'd better get started," Jordan gasps out, her voice barely audible past his grip, "because by the time you find them, they'll be gone. I have friends. People who will hear that message and know what to do."
He releases her throat and stands, breathing hard. Jordan collapses, coughing and gasping. "Bring in the Okafor girl. If Mrs. Fitzwallace won't cooperate, maybe watching someone die will change her mind."
"Touch her," I snarl from the floor, my voice dropping into the deadly calm that used to send my SAS unit scrambling for cover, "and you won't live to see morning. I'll kill you with my bare hands."
"Empty threats from a bound man." But I can see the uncertainty in his eyes. He's done his homework. He knows who I am. Knows my record. Knows how many men I've killed. The question is whether he's smart enough to be afraid.
Jordan is still coughing, trying to catch her breath. She rolls onto her side, and our eyes meet across the room. Blood runs from her split lip, and her cheek is already swelling, but she's smiling.
Smiling.
My wife is battered and bleeding and bound, and she's looking at me like she just won.
"Did the message get out?" she rasps.
"Before I cut the feed? Yes. But it won't matter. We'll find them all." The leader kicks her in the ribs, and the sound of boot meeting flesh sends me past reason.
The chair is solid wood, but fury gives me leverage. I thrash against my bindings until something cracks. The chair back splinters. One of the legs breaks.
The guards are on me in seconds, weapons trained at my head, shouting in Arabic. One of them presses the barrel of his rifle against my temple, and the cold metal brings me back to something resembling sanity.
"Separate them," the leader orders, his voice tight with anger. "And this time, make sure Captain Fitzwallace understands that any further resistance means his wife loses fingers. One at a time."
They're dragging me from the room, hauling me up by my arms while I'm still bound to the remnants of the broken chair. Jordan is trying to sit up, one hand pressed to her ribs where he kicked her, the crimson fabric of her dress clinging to her skin.
"Fitz!" she calls, and I hear the fear in her voice now, the adrenaline crash hitting.
"I'm coming back for you," I promise, my voice deadly calm despite the fury coursing through my veins. "I'm coming back, and everyone who touched you dies. Everyone."
The guard shoves his rifle harder against my head. "Move."
They haul me out, down a different corridor than the one we came through.
The resort's beautiful facade is gone now.
We're in the service areas, concrete walls and fluorescent lights and the smell of industrial cleaning supplies.
They take me past the kitchen, past storage rooms, into what looks like a maintenance area in the basement.
The room is small and cold, filled with pipes and electrical panels.
They shove me inside, cut away the remains of the broken chair, then retie my wrists with fresh zip ties.
These ones are doubled, one set on top of the other, and they pull them so tight that my hands start to tingle within seconds.
"Stay," one of them says in heavily accented English, then slams the door.
The lock clicks. Footsteps retreat down the hallway. Voices fade.
I'm alone in the dark, my wrists screaming, my wife beaten and bleeding somewhere above me. I give them thirty seconds to get comfortable with the idea that I'm secured.
Then I get to work.
The zip ties are professional grade, the kind we used in the SAS for prisoner restraint. Thick plastic, double-locking mechanism, rated for over two hundred kilograms of tensile strength. Whoever tied them knows what they're doing or at least knows enough to be dangerous.
But they made one crucial mistake.
They didn't check my pockets thoroughly enough. They took my phone, my wallet, my wedding ring—that one hurts more than it should, seeing it stripped from my finger—but they missed the thin piece of spring steel sewn into the waistband of my trousers.
It's a trick I learned from an operator in Hereford who'd spent six months in a Taliban prison before escaping. "Always have a way out," he'd told me. "Always have something they miss."
I'd thought he was paranoid. Now I'm grateful.
The problem is that the spring steel is sewn into the back of my waistband, and my hands are bound behind me.
I need to get my fingers to the small opening in the seam, work the steel free, then use it to pick the locking mechanism on the zip ties.
With my hands going numb and my wrists already damaged.
The first two minutes are the worst. I have to arch my back, twisting my spine in ways that send fire shooting up my vertebrae. My shoulders scream in protest. The zip ties bite deeper with every movement, and fresh warmth runs down my palms.
But I find the opening in the seam.
My fingers are slippery now, and I can barely feel the stitching. I have to work by touch alone, feeling for the small channel where the spring steel is hidden. The metal is thin—barely two millimeters wide—and I nearly lose it twice as I work it free.
Five minutes. That's how long it takes to extract the steel from its hiding place.
My hands are shaking now, partly from the restriction of blood flow, partly from adrenaline. I take three deep breaths, forcing myself to calm down. Panic gets people killed. Panic makes mistakes. Jordan is depending on me. I don't get to panic.
The zip tie's locking mechanism is a simple ratchet system. The spring steel slides into the narrow gap between the teeth and the housing. I work it carefully, feeling for the catch, applying just enough pressure to release the lock without snapping the thin metal.
Three more minutes. Then the first zip tie releases with a quiet snick.