21. Emma
Emma
Sound reaches me before I fully regain consciousness: something heavy crashing in the distance, metal striking metal hard enough to roll through the building and come back as a faint echo.
Underneath it sits the steady hum of machinery, and closer than either, the heavy drum of my own pulse.
I lie in the dark for a few seconds trying to sort which parts belong to the room and which are only happening inside my skull.
My head feels like it was split open and put back together badly. When I swallow, my tongue drags against a mouth gone dry enough to hurt, blood on it too, stale and metallic, and when my lower lip pulls away from my teeth, the skin tears open again.
I try to lift my head. Nausea rolls through me hard enough that I stop.
The last thing I remember is the service alley behind Alex’s building. Bee twisting in my arms. A man I recognized from Alex’s security team was walking toward me, and the instant my body understood something was wrong before my mind caught up. Then the bag. Bee screaming. After that, nothing.
I force my eyes open. The room swims until I blink it still.
A man sits in front of me, close enough that for a moment I think my vision is failing again, because his face means nothing to me.
I search it anyway, dragging through every person I’ve ever seen around Alex, Pinehaven, Mel, even the handful of faces Mark once let into our lives when I was young.
Nothing. Dark hair. A heavy jaw. A faint, pale scar near his cheek.
He sits with his forearms braced on his thighs, studying me like he’s been waiting to see exactly when I’d wake.
His mouth curves. “Welcome back.”
I try to speak and produce little more than a rasp. He watches me struggle without offering water.
“You know, you cost me my job.”
I blink at him. The words take longer than they should to mean anything. “What?” Even that barely makes it out.
He rises and comes closer, and when I try to pull back, I discover the restraints for the first time, wrists tied behind the chair and crossed, bound tight enough that my fingers have already started to throb, more cord circling each ankle and pinning it to a chair leg.
Panic breaks through the fog. I pull once.
The cord bites into my skin, and he notices, whatever amusement was in his face going cold.
Mark. Mel. The movement she warned me about. The word comes out of me before I’ve decided whether saying it is a mistake.
“Accord.”
His brow draws together. I wet my lips and try again, forcing each syllable through a tongue that doesn’t feel entirely connected to me anymore. “Are you... part of Accord?”
“What was that?”
He steps into the pool of yellow light thrown by a work lamp beside us, bends, and catches my chin between two fingers. “Repeat it.”
His grip hurts. I try to focus on his face, but the room tilts behind him and my stomach turns again. “Are you—” I lose the rest of it.
His hand leaves my face, and before I understand why, the slap catches me across the mouth. My head snaps sideways, the chair legs shrieking over concrete, pain exploding along my cheek and through the cut at my hairline. My teeth catch the inside of my lip. Fresh blood floods my mouth.
For a few seconds all I can hear is my own breathing.
He crouches in front of me. “When I ask you a question, you answer.” I lift my head with effort, and his face finally stays still long enough for me to focus on. “Do you understand?”
I could nod. I don’t.
His fingers close around my jaw again. “Do you understand?”
This time I nod once.
“Good.” He releases me and stands, says something else that smears together before it reaches me; my vision already dimming at the edges.
None of it matters as much as the one thought that finally breaks through.
Liam. Did they find him too?
Fear punches straight through whatever they’ve put in me.
I try to think past it. Dante has people watching him.
Alex has people watching him too, two separate teams, neither relying on the other.
He is harder to reach right now than he has ever been in his life, and I cling to that fact like a rope.
If these men ask about him, I will say nothing. They can break every bone in my body before I hand them my brother.
Liam made it to eighteen. He made it to college. He has a scholarship and a future and a life where the most dangerous thing he has to think about is whether his fastball is behaving. That was the entire point of all of it, ten years of names and lies and moving and never once letting myself relax.
Him. Always him.
The room starts to fade. The last thought I manage to hold on to is simple enough that even whatever they’ve drugged me with can’t take it from me.
They do not get Liam.
Then the dark pulls me under again.
When I wake the second time, the man is gone.
I know it before I even open my eyes: no breathing near me, no scrape of shoes, no sense of being watched.
The warehouse has its own rhythm now: a distant engine, a clang somewhere beyond the wall, the occasional groan of steel settling under its own weight.
My head still throbs, but the drugged heaviness has eased enough that thought no longer slips away the second I reach for it.
I keep my eyes closed and take stock, the way Mel taught me years ago. Not because she ever expected this exactly, though maybe some part of her did and simply never said it out loud, but because panic wastes information.
Injuries first. My lower lip is split. A cut somewhere near my hairline, dried blood tugging at the skin every time I blink. My head hurts badly enough that a concussion seems likely. My shoulders ache from being pulled back for however long, though nothing feels broken.
Restraints next. Cord at both wrists, tight, my fingertips numb but still answering when I flex them. Each ankle was bound separately to a front chair leg.
Then the room.
I open my eyes. A caged work lamp throws an ugly yellow circle across the concrete a few feet away; past it, the building disappears into darkness.
Ribbed metal walls. Steel beams vanishing into a roof I can’t see.
Large rectangular shapes stacked farther out, tall enough in places to form narrow canyons between them.
Shipping containers. That explains the machinery, maybe, though it tells me nothing about where I actually am.
No windows, no signage, nothing with a company name on it.
I can’t smell enough salt to guess whether we’re near water, and the distant engines could belong to forklifts or trucks or anything else entirely.
I could still be outside of Dallas. I could be three states away.
I stop trying to solve what I have no way of knowing.
Liam comes back immediately, and this time I make myself think it through instead of surrendering to it whole.
He is not alone, and for once in my life I am grateful for every controlling order Alex ever gave where my brother was concerned.
If I had gone to see him, someone could have followed me there.
Alex’s name opens a wound I can’t afford to touch right now. Vanessa wearing his ring. His sweatshirt. His bed. Alex standing in my room telling me exactly what I was worth to him. I shut all of it away. If I get out of here, I can fall apart later. Right now I need my hands.
I test the chair. Heavy steel, old, rust roughening the joints, one rear leg shorter than the other three.
When I shift my weight, the front foot drags slightly toward a crack already splitting the concrete.
The cord at my wrists runs across the center brace behind me.
I rotate my left wrist, and pain bites immediately, but underneath it something rough catches against the cord.
I do it again. A burr in the metal snags one of the outer fibers.
My pulse quickens. I have no idea whether it will cut through before someone comes back, and I don’t need certainty. I need something to do besides wait.
I work the cord across the burred edge in small movements, slow enough not to scrape the chair any more than it already has. The first few passes feel useless. Then one strand roughens under my fingers, and I keep going.
My coat is still on, twisted awkwardly beneath the restraints.
My shoes too. Whoever searched me took my bag, my phone, my keys, and apparently saw no reason to look any further than that.
The locket rests against my chest, and I notice its weight only when I take a deeper breath and feel the small oval shift beneath my shirt.
I go back to the cord.
Ten years of doing exactly what I was told. Change the name. Change the hair. Never take the same route twice if a car lingers too long behind you. Never leave documents where someone else can find them. Always keep cash. Know the exits. Move when they tell you to move. Keep Liam safe.
I did all of it. I dyed the red out of my hair until brown stopped feeling temporary.
I answered to Emma until the name stopped feeling like a lie.
I learned to check windows for reflections instead of turning around.
I lied to good people, and I let Liam believe our life was ordinary, because no child should grow up in fear.
And after all of it, I am tied to a chair.
A laugh almost climbs my throat. It hurts too much to let out.
But Liam made it. That’s the only thing that has ever actually mattered.
He grew up. He reached college. He complains about classes and baseball, the ordinary complaints of an ordinary eighteen-year-old, and he makes plans now without asking me first whether they’re safe.
If those ten years bought him that, I would pay every one of them again.
I drag the cord across the rusted edge once, then again. One fiber gives, but not by much, enough to feel, and I keep working.
My thoughts drift to Bee no matter how many times I try to stop them. She got free. I saw her jump clear of my arms before they took me, heard her screaming as the bag came down. She was alive when I lost sight of her, and someone will find her. Frank, probably. Or Steven. Alex.
His name hurts again. I refuse to think about him.
Bee is difficult and loud. She survived the shelter I rescued her from. She can survive a Dallas alley long enough for somebody to find her.
“You’d better,” I whisper. My voice sounds wrecked. The cord catches again, and I reposition my hand.
Then I hear footsteps.
Not close, not at first. The warehouse magnifies sound enough that distance is hard to judge; several people moving somewhere beyond the containers, their steps overlapping until one set breaks away from the rest. The others fade. One keeps coming, steady, unhurried.
I keep sawing the cord, slower now. If the chair already gave me away, stopping now won’t undo it.
The footsteps stop outside the door. Metal scrapes. A locking bar lifts, and a bolt drags free. My stomach tightens. I keep my wrist pressed against the rough edge of the brace.
The door opens inward. White light spreads across the concrete until it reaches my shoes, and someone stands in the opening, only a silhouette against the glare at first. Tall.
Broad through the shoulders. Not the man who hit me; I know that immediately.
The proportions were wrong, the posture wrong, none of that first man’s casual arrogance in it at all.
This one barely seems to notice the room around him.
He steps inside. The door swings most of the way shut behind him, taking part of the glare with it, and I stop working the cord entirely.
There is something familiar in the way he walks. My mind reaches for it before I understand why. He takes one more step into the edge of the lamp’s glow, and everything, the pain, the dizziness, the restraints, even Liam, disappears for one stunned second as his face finally comes into the light.
Recognition arrives slowly because none of this makes any sense.
But I know him.
I know exactly who I am looking at.
I lift my head.
“I know you.”