3. Stephie
STEPHIE
It opens.
Relief showers over me as we walk into the little building. It’s not much to look at from the outside or in, but it’s almost empty, and it’s weatherproof.
“Hello?” Mr Bridger calls again, but there’s no answer, and I don’t think there will be. His voice isn’t as strong on the second call, and I glance up at him. His jaw is clenched, hard.
Adrenaline continues to flow through me, and snippets of the past ten minutes, hour, and day, flash in my eyes as I try to focus on the immediate circumstances.
And forget that two men I considered, if not my friends, then my colleagues, are now dead, and I’m stranded with my boss in the middle of nowhere. Northern, mountainous Scotland.
And it’s snowing.
And Volk seems to have tried to kill us.
I take a deep, steadying breath.
There’s one room, with an open fireplace.
No electricity. The floor is stone, but there are a few wooden chairs, and an old table.
A shelf holds a folder, a blue plastic box, and a pile of blankets.
Another has some tinned food with labels I recognise, firelighters, and a box of sticks I assume are kindling.
In the corner, there’s a stainless-steel sink with a single tap, and beside it a green-painted wooden door.
Mr Bridger strides over and opens it to reveal a toilet straight from the 1970s. Avocado-green. A stone floor. Cobwebs. It’s old, and basic. Hardly the level of luxury I associate with my boss.
“Civilisation,” Mr Bridger says dryly, and closes the door.
“This is great!”
He meets my gaze, and his expression says I’m over-enthusiastic. An opinion he frequently has about me.
“It’s dry, there’s a loo, and presumably water. And there must be some wood.” I point towards the fireplace.
“Are you feeling okay?” he asks abruptly. “Did Volk get to you too? Injuries? Your vision, is it clear?”
“Just because I appreciate plumbing doesn’t mean I’m drugged.”
He growls with irritation. “You haven’t got any symptoms?”
I do a quick mental check of my body and shake my head. “I don’t think so. I feel like I was in a helicopter crash and am at risk of freezing to death, but other than that, okay.”
He’s so serious and intent as he looks me over, brushing glass and snow from my shoulders. He’s swaying slightly though.
“Are you okay?” It’s not something that I usually ask Mr Bridger. He’s in control of every situation. He’s fourteen years older than me, powerful, and exudes charisma. “Did they get you—”
“I’m fine now,” he cuts me off, but there’s tension in the lines of his body as he straightens. “I’m going to get firewood.” He stomps back out of the cottage, effectively closing the conversation about whether he was poisoned.
But he said fine now? He’s recovered, but he was drugged. The fear of anything happening to him sits heavy in my stomach.
I glance around and the only thing that isn’t totally functional without any question of its use, is the folder. I pick it off the shelf and open it. A piece of white paper has been stuck to the front, and reads, Boulders Bothy.
I raise my eyebrows. Sounds like slang for toilet.
Opening it up, there’s a page of text.
Welcome to Boulders Bothy!
A bothy is the name for a Scottish cottage or croft house that is in a remote location and is unlocked and free to use.
There are grid references for where we are, notes about the emergency services (or lack thereof), and other useful information. Or it might be, if it weren’t snowing, and getting dark outside. It’s January in Scotland, and that means the sun goes down early.
The explosion makes me shriek. And jump.
In seconds, I’m at the door to the bothy, looking out at the blazing helicopter. Mr Bridger is stomping away, the fire behind him casting him into shadow. I stare in horror.
There were two men in that helicopter, and Mr Bridger is kicking his way through the snow like it’s nothing.
I’m trembling by the time he approaches. His silver eyes flash gold with the fire, and he scoops up a pile of logs from the doorstep.
“Get in.”
I scramble to obey, and he slams the door behind us.
“Why did you do that?” I whisper. Something about the brutality of burning the helicopter sits badly with me.
“Volk will send someone to check their plan worked. If they see the helicopter on fire, that’s more likely to convince them they don’t need to immediately come to finish us off.
The fire will mean they can’t check that we’re all in the helicopter, or get the black box.
With luck, by the time they look, our footprints in the snow will be covered over by more snow.
They were probably hoping we’d go down over the water, but this will at least slow them down. ”
“Oh.” I gulp and nod. “Do you think they’ll come after us?”
He dumps the wood beside the fireplace and smiles grimly. “Hopefully this, and the snow, has bought us time.”
We manage to light a fire. My boss’ contribution is to look at my carefully built pile of sticks with two firelighters and dump the rest of the firelighters on top. It’s undeniably effective.
He drags down the blankets from the shelf, finds a sheepskin, and dumps them onto the floor.
“Get up,” he orders as I’m tending the fire, and this is the Mr Bridger I know. Sighing inwardly, I rise to my feet, even though I’m only just beginning to thaw.
But then, he lays out the sheepskin carefully, then points down at it.
“But I should try to make some food,” I protest, indicating the tins on the shelf.
He shakes his head abruptly. “Your teeth are chattering. I’ll do it.”
I’m about to say I’m alright, but I really am cold.
“But you never cook. Do you even know how?” This is a man who I book five-star hotels and premium restaurants for. He does not eat from cans.
He barks with laughter. “Miss Oliver, do not mistake disinclination for inability. I was making food when you were in a cradle.”
Right.
Reluctantly, I lower myself to the floor. The sheepskin is undeniably fluffy and warm. My chin snaps up with surprise when Mr Bridger lays a blanket over my shoulders, tucking it around me.
He gives me a half-smile, then turns away.
It feels lazy allowing him to do this on his own, but my shivers become less frequent.
“Our options are limited. Leek and potato soup, or spam.” He’s moving tins on the shelf.
“You have a tin of emails from Nigerian Princes, offering us a lot of money to help them?”
He groans. “You don’t know what original spam is?”
Our gazes meet across the dark room, and I shake my head.
“You are so young, but I’m glad your generation is innocent of this crime against food. It’s the zombie apocalypse in meat form.”
I can’t help but laugh.
“It’s a type of minced meat,” he adds, then whistles. “Ohhhh, you’ll like this. There’s tea.”
That makes me perk up. “Really?”
“I wouldn’t tease you about something so important.” He waves a tin, and a blackened kettle I hadn’t noticed.
It takes us a minute to figure out how to put the kettle over the open fire to heat the water, and we sit in companionable silence as it heats.
With some magic I don’t know how it works, Mr Bridger uses a can opener that looks like it’s from 1932, and opens the selected tins.
When the water boils, he puts in a tea bag, then after a couple of minutes picks it out with his fingers and pours some pale gloopy liquid from one of the cans into a chipped mug passing it to me.
“Spam flavoured tea?” I joke.
“Condensed milk. It’ll be ferociously sweet.”
I take a cautious sip, almost burning my tongue, but then I taste it, and let out a moan of relief. It is exactly as Mr Bridger said. Sweet, and milky. But it’s got a hint of caramel, a bit like the creamer I had in tea when we visited America a few years ago.
I look up, and find my boss regarding me, shadows emphasising the hard lines of his face and his always messy black hair.
His stubble has grown out, and despite the rumpled suit, he looks unreasonably good.
He’s pulled his tie loose and undone his top button, and my lower stomach does an inappropriate flip at the sight of his throat and collarbones.
But his expression is… I’m not sure. I’ve never seen him look like that. Then it’s gone, and he’s drinking his cup of tea, and staring into the fire.
“How do you think they drugged the pilot?” I ask when I’ve drunk the whole mug and am feeling slightly more human. I don’t ask whether Mr Bridger is okay, but I do wonder. He seems unsteady, but unable to relinquish control.
“The pilot was fine. The rock bit us,” he deadpans.
“Vicious. Just came out of nowhere.” I join in, and for a moment it feels like when we’re across a table at a fancy restaurant when away on business. Just the two of us, joking and being serious by turn.
“I’m not sure how they did it,” he replies quietly. “They must have accessed the water.”
We’re tight on security when meeting other mafias, and as a rule, we don’t eat or drink except from supplies we brought with us around the actual contact. It’s only in other cities that Mr Bridger has me make dinner reservations for two, and we relax.
“Or the food,” I suggest. “I had the last cheese sandwich.” Mr Bridger insisted I take it. “Everyone else had meat.”
“Fuck,” he mutters. “Maybe. That’s a vulnerability. We’ll probably never know exactly how it happened, but it was Volk, and they meant for us all to die in a helicopter crash.”
A chill goes down my spine at how close we were to not walking away.
At how Dane could be dead right now, and I’d have never confessed to him that although he’s a demanding and sometimes impossible man, I love him more than anything in the world.
He’s been a better friend to me than anyone who more conventionally fits that role, and my heart patters happily whenever we’re together.
“They’re going to pay for this.” He nods, and the look in his eyes as he stares into the fire is almost scary. “We’re alive. Stranded. But alive.” He heaves a sigh and gives no explanation for his seemingly disconnected thoughts. “I’m sorry I brought you here.” Regret laces his words.