Chapter Twenty #2
“Standard surveillance hardware. High-end, but off the shelf. No audio pickup on any of the three boards.”
“Okay.” Hailey’s quiet for a moment, processing. “So we can actually talk.”
“We can actually talk.”
Something shifts between the three of us. The first crack in the cage.
“Before we get into any of that,” I say, “we should go through this place. Everything in it. Not checking locks this time.
I want to know what’s here that we can use.”
We spread out. It’s one room, so there’s no privacy to the search, but we’re thorough. To anyone watching the feeds, it looks
like three bored people killing time. Hailey opens kitchen cabinets like she’s looking for a snack. I check the bathroom like
I’m hunting for an extra towel. Liam browses the bookshelves, pulls open the junk drawer, pokes around under the bed.
Nobody takes anything out. Nobody lines anything up. We just look.
When we’ve all finished, we drift back to the windows. Stand close, faces to the glass, hands near our mouths like we’re warming
them against the cold.
“Kitchen,” Hailey says behind her fingers. “Steak knives, real ones. WD-40. Duct tape. Sewing kit with scissors. Under the
sink—bleach, ammonia, drain cleaner.”
“Bathroom,” I say. “Fire extinguisher under the sink. Still charged.”
“Junk drawer,” Liam adds. “Twine, matches, rubber bands. Nothing else useful on the shelves.”
We’re quiet for a moment, cataloging.
Liam tilts his head, thinking. “Fire extinguisher point-blank to the face buys you thirty seconds. Maybe more.”
Hailey’s still staring out at the snow. “Bleach and ammonia in a closed space would clear a room. As long as we’re not in
it.”
Liam and I both glance at her.
“What? I read.”
“Remind me never to piss you off,” Liam says.
She almost smiles. “None of this matters without a plan. Get out? Wait for someone to find us? Play along until we see an
opening?”
“Nobody knows we’re here,” I say. “Rescue isn’t coming.”
“Cole might figure it out,” Hailey says. “Eventually.”
“Eventually isn’t a plan. But if we could find a way to get a message to him, that’s different. He’s got the resources to
actually do something with it.”
Liam pulls a chair into the corner by the fireplace and angles it so his back is to the nearest camera. Hailey and I do the
same. Three people huddled in a dead zone, finally able to talk.
Yesterday we had nothing. Today we have knives, chemicals, blind spots, and silence.
It’s a start.
Every instinct I have is screaming at me to do something, fix something, solve the problem before it solves us.
“I’ll make breakfast,” Liam says, and I catch myself watching the way his shoulders move under his T-shirt before I force
my eyes away. “Eggs and toast. Maybe that fancy bacon I saw in the fridge.”
Hailey grabs her coffee and heads for the couch.
The morning crawls.
I try to pass some time and chill the fuck out. I really do. Push-ups on the rug in front of the fireplace. Forty. Fifty. Sixty. The burn in my arms drowns out some of the noise in my head, but not enough. Not nearly enough.
Liam moves through the kitchen, cracking eggs, laying bacon in a pan. Every cabinet closes with more force than necessary.
Every utensil hits the counter harder than it needs to. He’s wound just as tight as I am—he’s just better at hiding it.
Hailey curls up on the couch with her book, turning pages at a pace that tells me she’s not absorbing a single word. Her eyes
keep drifting toward the windows. Toward me. Toward Liam.
We’re all pretending to be calm and fooling no one.
Seventy. Eighty.
I catch Hailey watching me over the top of her book. Her gaze traces down my back, lingers somewhere around my hips, then
snaps away when she realizes I’ve noticed. Heat crawls up my neck.
Ninety. One hundred.
I switch to planks. Hold until my core trembles, until sweat drips off my forehead and darkens the rug beneath me. My body
screams for relief and I refuse to give it, because pain I can control is better than everything I can’t.
“You know,” Liam says from the kitchen, “there’s a fine line between working out and self-punishment.”
I drop out of the plank and flip onto my back, staring at the ceiling while my heart rate slowly returns to normal. Exposed
beams overhead. Wood and stone and glass. A prison designed to make prisoners comfortable.
“Feel better?” Liam asks.
“No.”
“Shocking.” He starts plating food. “Breakfast is ready.”
We eat in near-silence. The eggs are good, the bacon is perfect, and I can barely taste any of it. My eyes keep finding Hailey
across the table. The way she pushes food around her plate without eating. The way her fingers drum against her mug. The way
she very carefully doesn’t look at either of us for too long.
Liam notices too. I catch him watching her, and the look on his face isn’t casual. When Hailey reaches for the salt, Liam hands it to her before she gets there. Their fingers brush. She pulls back fast, but not fast enough.
The last time we were alone, I cooked her dinner at my apartment. She kissed me in my kitchen and I could still feel it days
later. Now she’s sitting three feet away from the man she used to share a bed with, and I’m supposed to act like that doesn’t
gut me.
“More coffee?” Liam asks her.
“I’m good.”
“You haven’t eaten.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You should eat.”
“Liam.” She gives him a look. “I’m fine.”
He backs off, but the familiarity of it stings. He knows she doesn’t eat when she’s stressed. Knows when to push and when
to stop. I’m learning those things about her in real time. He learned them years ago.
I stand up and take my plate to the sink. Wash it. Dry it. Put it away.
The afternoon is long. We go over the plan again in the blind spot, refining details, poking holes. Liam does pull-ups on
the doorframe, counting under his breath. Hailey goes back to her book. I check the windows again because I can’t help myself.
At one point, Hailey and I end up in the kitchen at the same time. She’s making tea. I’m getting water. The space is small
and we’re close, and when she turns around she almost walks into my chest.
“Sorry.” She steps back, but not far.
“You’re fine.”
We stand there. The kettle hisses behind her. Liam is across the room, doing something with the bookshelves, not looking at
us. Or pretending not to.
Hailey’s eyes come up to mine. I can see her trying to say something and not finding the words for it. Not here. Not with Liam ten feet away.
She opens her mouth. Closes it. Shakes her head like she’s arguing with herself, then takes her tea and walks back to the
couch without a word.
I stay in the kitchen longer than I need to.
By evening, the plan has been picked apart and put back together twice. We’ve run through every scenario we can think of and
most of them end badly. The wine comes out again because there’s nothing else to do with the hours between sundown and sleep.
But the ease of last night isn’t there. Liam tries to tell another story and it dies halfway through. Hailey stares into her
glass. I stare into the fire.
“I’m trying really hard to be positive. But I’m also afraid we’re trapped here,” she says, her voice quieter now. “For eight
more days. Maybe the rest of our lives, if Marlena has her way.”
The silence stretches. The fire sizzles. Outside, wind howls against the windows.
Liam looks at me. I look at Hailey. Hailey looks at both of us.
Nobody moves.
“I’m taking a shower,” she says flatly.
She stalks toward the bathroom. The door clicks shut behind her.
Liam and I stare at each other. The fire pops between us. I can still feel where Hailey almost touched me in the kitchen,
the ghost of a conversation we didn’t have.
“She’s struggling,” Liam says. Not to me, exactly. More like he’s thinking out loud. “She used to do this. Shut down when
she couldn’t fix things. Go quiet. I’d have to—”
“I know what she needs.”
Liam stops mid-sentence. Looks at me.
“Do you.” His eyes hold mine, and then something shifts in them. “You always did run toward things without thinking. Some
things never change.”
The barracks. The night before I shipped out. He’s not talking about the grenade and we both know it.
I don’t have an answer. I’ve never had an answer. That’s the whole problem—I want things I don’t know how to name, feel things
I don’t know how to express, and every time I get close to the edge I pull back because it’s safer than falling.
But safety hasn’t kept me alive. It’s just kept me lonely.
The water runs behind the wall. The fire continues to hiss. Liam watches me like he’s waiting, and the hell of it is I don’t
think he knows what for. I don’t think either of us does. I think he’s just here, the way he’s always just been here, planted
in my head even when he’s been gone for years.
There are words. Actual, specific words sitting right behind my teeth. They’d crack this whole thing open, and part of me
is desperate to let them out and part of me would rather walk into an active minefield.
The minefield would be simpler. The minefield has rules.
“I’m taking a shower,” I say abruptly.
Liam blinks. “She’s in there.”
“I know.”
He gets it. He gets exactly what I’m about to do, and for a second I think he’s going to say something. Stop me. Stake his
claim.
He doesn’t. He picks up his wine and turns back to the fire.