Chapter 40 #2
I get out and let the cold slap me in the face.
The air down here smells like brine and oil, like old rope, like a story about a ship that never came back.
I tuck my hands into my coat sleeves and start walking the perimeter in a tight loop around the van, trying not to look like a man casing a place while also…
casing the place. The dock Jack’s pin marked is a wide, flat space with a single sodium light burning jaundiced at the far end.
Beyond that, black water knocks against wood in soft, regular hits.
There’s a stack of pallets on one side, a length of chain on another. A forklift sleeps outside a shed, its prongs hiked and crooked like a drunk deer. No people. Not yet. I don’t know if that’s better or worse.
I keep moving. Every sound is too loud—the scuff of my boots, the rattle of something loose in the van door when the wind shifts.
I imagine what they’ll do. Make me stand under the light.
Make me look at her to prove she’s there.
Ask for Jack. Ask for money. Ask for something I can’t give. Hurt her to make me hurry up.
The last thought nearly folds me in half. I swallow hard until the burn settles. “I’m coming,” I whisper, because I don’t have anything else to say that won’t break me.
Headlights turn onto the far end of the lane and crawl toward the dock, too slow to be a stranger lost. My heart spikes and then refuses to slow down.
I step back into the shadow of the van so I’m not a shape under the light and watch the car roll forward—dark sedan, plates salted white around the edges, one headlight a little hazier than the other.
It pulls up just past the lamp and kills its lights. The engine stays on. A door opens.
Two men get out. Coats zipped to the chin, beanies, and gloved hands.
They move like they know where their feet are—no hesitation.
One leans against the bonnet and lights a cigarette, the orange dot flaring and then dimming.
The other walks to the edge of the dock and looks out at the water like it might have an opinion.
No Amber.
The man with the cigarette looks around once, casually. His gaze skims over my van and slides off. They don’t look anxious. They look like people waiting for an Uber that will only come if you’ve been very bad first.
My phone buzzes silently against my sternum.
Jack: 10 mins. Don’t engage if you can help it.
I don’t text back: How exactly do I not engage when they have your daughter? When they have my…?
The thought won’t complete itself. I shut my eyes for a second and open them again before pictures start making themselves without my permission.
Another car. This one faster. It swings in too close to the edge and corrects in a little scream of tyre on grit. The driver’s door opens. A man gets out and waves an arm at the sedan like he’s late to his own idea. He’s on the phone and he’s angry into it. He paces a line shaped like a mistake.
No Amber.
Time slows down and doubles. I look at my watch and it’s ten to midnight.
I look again and it’s five to. The men keep smoking, keep pacing, keep looking like this is an irritation, not an escalation.
I want to scream at them from across the concrete to act like they’re holding a human life in their hands, but I don’t, because I want to see her first. I need to see her before I do anything that can’t be undone.
A van turns onto the lane—boxy, anonymous, the kind used for deliveries and other things that don’t want to be labelled. It trundles to the light and stops crooked. The back doors open from the inside.
My body moves before my brain does, a step forward out of the shadow, and I have to drag myself back, because if I run now to any van that opens, I’m done before I start. I force my hands flat against the cold side panel of my own van and push until my palms hurt.
A figure climbs down. Small. Hood up. Elbows pinched in tight like someone trying to keep heat in—or keep from taking up space. A hand grips her arm and guides—no, drags—her closer to the light.
My heart stops and starts again with a brutal kick.
Amber.
She’s upright. She’s walking. That’s the first fact I grab.
Her face is pale under the shadow of the hood; her mouth is a hard line I recognise from the cabin—the one she gets when she’s scared and doesn’t want the fear to be the only thing in the room.
Her hands are in front of her, together; for a terrible second, I think they’ve tied her wrists, but when she moves, I see a flash of skin—no rope. Just the way she’s holding herself.
The man holding her arm says something to the cigarette man, and he nods once, stubs the cigarette under his boot, then checks his phone. I can’t hear them. The wind carries words away and brings back only shapes.
My own phone buzzes again. I ignore it. The world has narrowed to the four people under the light and the fact that my person is among them.
“Okay,” I whisper, though I don’t know who I’m talking to. “Okay.”
I slide my fingers into my inner pocket and press the screen to take the call off mute. “I see her,” I say, voice a ghost. “Jack. I see her.”
“Keep me on,” he says. The sound of bikes—distant, angry—threads through his end of the line. “Tell me everythin’.”
“They’ve got her under the light,” I say. “She’s standing. She looks—she looks okay. No blood.” The word tastes like metal.
“What do they want?” he asks.
“I don’t know yet.” My mouth is dry. “They haven’t looked this way.”
“Don’t go to them,” he says. “Make ‘em come to you. If you walk into their circle, they control the ground.”
“I’m not walking anywhere yet,” I say, and it’s the most honest sentence I’ve said tonight.
The man with the phone pockets it and cups his hands around his mouth to shout. The words rip across the space and break against the water. “Van der Meer!”
My name hits me like a thrown stone.
He can’t see me. Not yet. But he knows I’m here. Of course he does. There’s nowhere else to go.
I step out from the shadow of my van because if I don’t, they’ll come and haul me out like trash. The light carves a line across the concrete, and I stop just at the edge of it, like I’m standing on a border I didn’t know existed until now.
“Right here,” I call back. My voice tries to shake, and I make it stop. “I’m here.”
Amber’s head jerks, her eyes finding me, and the look that crosses her face nearly takes me to my knees. Relief. Fear. A thousand unsaid things. I can’t say any of them back, so I lift a hand—the smallest, stupidest wave—and she flinches like she can feel it against her cheek.
“Good,” the man says, and it’s such a normal word it makes me want to hit him. “Let’s make this simple.”
There’s nothing simple about any of this.
I take a breath so deep it hurts, and for one beat in the middle of all this noise there’s a clear line in my head: the first time I saw Amber in her shop, hands in soil, brow furrowed, hair in her signature messy bun with ringlets around her face and nape, and the way she looked up at me like she was choosing whether to let me in.
Then Abel, small and fierce, the way he climbs into my lap and settles like he always belonged there.
Then Marieke, smiling as they wheeled her away, telling me to be ready—three points on a map that have led me here.
“Whatever you want,” I say, and my voice doesn’t sound like a stranger’s anymore—it sounds like mine. “Take it from me. But she leaves with me.”
The man smiles like I’ve said something funny. “That,” he says, “is not how this works.”
Behind him, Amber lifts her chin the tiniest bit, and I understand what she’s saying without any words at all: don’t fall apart. Not yet.
I don’t.
I shift my feet so they’re under me. I don’t have a plan, but I have this: I will not leave without her. I will not.
The phone is a warm square against my chest—Jack’s breathing ghosts in my ear. The water knocks the dock like a countdown.
Midnight isn’t here yet, but it’s close enough to smell.
“Okay,” I say again, and this time it’s a promise. “Let’s talk.”