Chapter 25 Penny
Penny
Penny slumped against the office wall, hovering somewhere between wakefulness and sleep.
Darkness had been her only companion for hours now, pulling her towards the sweet embrace of her dreams. For a night, she could forget she’d been dumped in an abandoned office waiting for her execution; instead, her mind could fool her into believing she was beneath glittering green lights with Rhys’s arms around her.
A faint noise from somewhere in the building wrenched her out of her fantasies.
She sat up like a shot, straining to hear whether it was a one-off. The wind slamming a door. A bird landing on the roof. A branch clattering against a window.
But there was only silence; silence and the furious pounding of her heartbeat.
Blowing out the breath she’d been holding in, Penny leant back against the wall.
Then the footsteps came. Heavy boots moving in purposeful steps.
Blind panic flooded her system as the steps moved closer. Not knowing what to do next, Penny climbed to her feet, preferring to meet her visitor head-on rather than crouched on the floor like an animal. She held the weight of the chain in her good hand, ensuring her shattered elbow felt none of it.
They stopped outside her door, accompanied by the sound of a key rattling around in the lock—then a click.
The door swung open. Instead of the gaoler who’d given her the cheap burger and bottle of water, it was Bielak who stood there, the corridor lighting almost blindingly bright behind him. He didn’t look surprised to find her on her feet. “Boss wants to see you.”
Her stomach plummeted. Penny knew what that meant.
Bielak crossed the room, uneven shadows falling behind the raised scarring on his face. He inserted a key into the lock that secured her chain to the radiator before pulling it free. “Walk.” He rattled the chain. “I will hold this.”
Trying not to show her fear, Penny took her first careful steps, wincing against the bright lights overhead.
“Turn right.” Bielak was closer than she’d realised. “Follow the corridor.”
She obeyed, her eyes slowly adjusting as she marched towards a watery grave. The wider office seemed to be in just as poor a state as her room was. She caught glimpses of cardboard box stacks through open doorways, but she saw nothing that would aid her in an escape attem—
Bielak’s chain looped over her head and pulled tight around her neck.
The cold grasp of the metal was the first thing she registered, with the blind panic of having her breathing suddenly cut off coming in a close second.
Penny tried to suck in air in a desperate frenzy, forgetting entirely about her injured arm.
She clawed at her neck one-handed, but she had no chance against Bielak.
Pressure rose beneath her eyes until it was almost unbearable, her vision slowly receding into nothing—until she found herself fading away with it.
Just when she was about to accept her fate, the chain fell away. And in her oxygen-starved state, Penny went with it.
She collapsed, hitting the floor with a thud. Pain speared through her elbow, but her cry of pain was lost in an unstoppable coughing fit.
“Get up,” Bielak ordered her, as though he hadn’t been the one strangling her.
Not wanting to show the pain she was in, Penny obeyed, struggling up to a seated position. She went to stand, but Bielak caught her off guard, landing a powerful kick between her shoulders. Penny flew forward, her cheek scraping against the rough carpet, and her elbow lost to agony.
Bielak had no mercy. “I said up, cunt.”
This time, he let her. She struggled to her feet, refusing to let her tears fall. It was hard to reconcile this Bielak with the polite, albeit distant, man she’d known in the months prior to receiving that fucking video file.
But then, she thought, I’d be pissed off with someone if they threw hot coffee in my face as well.
“Through these,” he told her, unlocking a pair of exit doors that led onto a grated steel staircase. “And down the stairs.”
Penny didn’t hesitate. The cool evening air filled her lungs as she descended, not wanting to catch another kick and end up with far more serious injuries than a few grazes.
She was so focused on what Bielak was doing behind her that it wasn’t until she hit the bottom step that she looked around. A wall of metal storage containers almost blocked off her view to the right entirely, leaving only a narrow corridor on one end.
To her left, the docks stretched out before her, a smooth ocean of concrete leading to what she feared most: the Thames.
“Walk,” Bielak uttered, giving her a sharp shove.
Penny did the only thing she could do; she walked with as much dignity as she could muster.
It wasn’t until she was nearly at the river that she sighted Chomsky.
He reclined against the door of a storage container, lighting a cigarette and taking a deep drag as he looked out across the river.
The opposite bank was lost to the darkness, with a few distant lights suggesting they were in the Thames Estuary—where the distance between the banks widened as the river met the sea.
How long had it been since they had last seen each other? It had been in the meeting room attached to his office, a few hours before she’d seen that fateful video.
And now she was here, in the same position as that poor man.
Chomsky regarded her with none of the personable charm he’d always inhabited.
Instead, there was a coldness to his gaze—and she wondered if this was who he really was, whether the rest had been an act.
“You’ve been unexpectedly difficult to track down,” he observed.
“Max said I have Rhys Stone to thank for that. I must say, I was surprised to hear the two of you were travelling together.”
Her eyelids flickered at the mention of Rhys’s name.
“Have you and Rhys been friends this whole time, or is this a new development?”
She said nothing, not wanting to give Chomsky any more information than he already had.
Chomsky rolled his eyes, a hint of the charm returning.
“Come on, I’m intrigued. You and I have worked together for months.
It’s well-known that the two of you can’t stand each other.
Well,” he paused, “you can’t stand him. He’s actually quite amusing when you get to know him.
I don’t even need to ask whose idea it was to send poor Max off covered in graffiti.
That had Rhys Stone written all over it. As it were.”
There was a pregnant pause in which Chomsky clearly expected her to say something, but she remained silent.
“Nothing to say?” Chomsky asked, tapping his foot.
He sighed. “Very well, enough small talk. You were copied in on a file you weren’t meant to see.
Instead of deleting it, you copied it onto a USB drive—a USB drive you had in your possession when Bielak picked you up.
” Chomsky’s tone was almost conversational, as though he was remarking on nothing more important than the weather.
“Who were you planning on sharing that with, Penny?”
Again, she remained quiet.
“Have you shared it with Rhys?”
The mention of Rhys had her brows drawing together in a possessive frown. “Go fuck yourself.”
Chomsky drew back in surprise, a small smile lifting the edge of his mouth. Catching Bielak’s eye, he nodded.
Before she could wonder what that nod meant, Bielak’s huge hands were mercilessly twisting her broken elbow.
White-hot agony coursed through her, emptying her mind of anything but pain.
Her screams echoed around them, merging into a single unending note.
It was agony beyond anything she’d ever known.
She couldn’t think. She couldn’t breathe.
She ceased to exist as she was, replaced with a torture that would never end.
As if it heard her, her elbow broke anew with a sharp snap. The sound was sickening, cutting through her quivering screams and embedding itself into her brain.
“Stop.”
Bielak’s touch vanished immediately, but its aftermath left her shuddering in a cold sweat. She found herself on her knees, staring at Chomsky’s polished designer shoes, although she couldn’t remember getting there. She sucked in deep inhales of air, trembling uncontrollably.
Chomsky took a step closer to her. “We have all night,” he said softly. “So, who were you planning on sharing the USB with, Penny? Have you shared it with Rhys Stone?”
Penny shivered, both because of what they’d already done to her and what they were going to do to her next—but her answer hadn’t changed. She wasn’t going to implicate Rhys, even if it was the last thing she did. “Go fuc—”
Without warning, a violent boom rolled through the night air—the sound of something combusting nearby.
Penny felt the wave travel through the ground beneath her.
A sudden burst of fire was visible from somewhere behind the shipping containers, its glow briefly lighting up the Thames beside them, illuminating a wet set of stone steps leading down to the river.
Chomsky’s eyes widened in harsh alarm. “Go check it out,” he said to Bielak. “Stay on comms.”
Bielak passed the end of her chain to Chomsky before jogging past, rounding the end of a storage container and out of sight.
With Chomsky’s focus still on the explosion, Penny saw an opening—and took it.
She rushed forward, hitting him in the gut with the hard edge of her shoulder. She was under no illusions; even if she hadn’t been injured, escaping from this situation was unlikely, but Penny couldn’t just accept it. She had to try, whatever it took.
While Chomsky’s eyes were averted, Penny tried.
She snatched her chain out of his hands and made a run for it, stumbling to her feet and heading for the Thames.
If Chomsky had his way, it would be where they would dump her body, but it also offered her a means of escape.
If she managed to jump into the Thames whilst still alive, she had a reasonable chance of getting away.
The lights on the far banks of the widening estuary had to be a mile off, but the lights around them only illuminated the river’s surface so far out.
If Penny could get beyond that point, she could let the current carry her along this bank.
Penny just hoped the tide was coming in; otherwise, it would be carrying her out to sea.
Every step sent vicious jolts through her ruined elbow, but she didn’t stop, even as Chomsky’s furious shout filled her with fear. Ten feet. Five feet. Three fe—
Chomsky tackled her from behind, hurling her head-first down the wet stone stairs and into the ominously dark water.
It was far, far colder than she’d expected, momentarily freezing the air in her lungs as hateful hands travelled up her body, preventing her from leaving.
She kicked out blindly, only managing to connect with the solid stone.
Just as Penny managed to lift her head above the water, Chomsky was there. “You devious little cunt,” he snarled, shoving her back under, her chain falling over her torso.
Instinct took over. Something shifted in her chest, and for the first time in her life Penny knew what it was to want to kill.
Instead of defending herself, Penny used what little breath she had to hook the chain over Chomsky’s neck and pull it tight.
Bubbles erupted from her mouth as she screamed beneath the water, borne of frustration and rage.
She wanted to kill him, to erase him from the earth for what he had done to her and so many others.
He deserved death.
But Chomsky shrugged off her attempt on his life so easily it was laughable. He was far stronger than she was, even if she had had the use of both hands. He shoved her arms above her head, holding her under with one arm whilst he unlooped the chain with the other.
As he pushed her deeper underwater, the Thames’s unescapable darkness sent her into a blind panic. She thrashed around in her watery shroud, desperate for light every bit as much as air.
I don’t want to die in darkness, she pleaded silently, her limbs becoming weaker by the second.
Penny closed her eyes as the ability to fight back left her. She didn’t want her last thoughts to be of the water closing in around her. She wanted them to be of her happiest memories.
And she had had so many happy memories recently, despite her troubles.
Memories that had been made beneath sparkling emerald lights, in the arms of a man with striking amber eyes.