Iris
It’s always warm. I don’t have a sheet or a blanket, but I don’t need one. The temperature rises through the day until it’s almost unbearable, and then it breaks to something more manageable in the dark.
The days all start the same way, with the light coming gray through the high, little window and my whole body aching like I fought a war in my sleep.
Maybe I did. I don't remember my dreams, only that I wake up with my hands in fists.
So I get up and stretch out the knots in my back, and I start paying attention.
The two men from the first day here aren't the only ones.
There's a third who comes with the morning food, older, heavier, with a gray mustache and the tired eyes of someone who has worked this exact job for a very long time and stopped finding it interesting a decade ago.
He doesn't look at me the way the younger one does.
He barely looks at me at all, actually, and there's something almost comforting about that.
I decide to call him Mustache, because I need names for these people even if they won't give me their own, and because giving them ridiculous names is the smallest possible way I can win.
The younger ones I've already named too.
The one who looked at me like I was something on a menu is Ken, because he has the same plastic, empty prettiness of a doll that's never been played with properly.
His friend, the one who laughed at my English like it was a party trick, is Vinny, because he seems like a Vinny, and also because it makes me want to laugh, and laughing feels like the only weapon I have left that they haven't managed to take from me yet.
Mustache sets down bread and something that might be a kind of ham and a bottle of water, and he says one word to me before he goes, short and clipped, gesturing at the plate.
"Mangia."
I’ve determined this means eat, and when I pluck a piece of bread from the small hunk and put it in my mouth, he nods and leaves.
I spend the morning at the bars, holding on and listening to the sounds beyond the locked door I can’t see.
The hallway beyond my cell is stone too, and voices carry strangely in stone, bouncing and flattening at the same time, so I catch fragments without ever getting the whole sentence.
I hear a name repeated. Ramunno. I hear it again, and again, always said with the kind of weight my brothers' names carry back home.
Like a gravity. Whoever Ramunno is, he's the one the rest of them seem to respect, or fear, I’m not quite sure.
I’ve heard other things, too. The tinny sound of a television, the braying laughs of the men, and the sweeping, keening sounds a woman makes when she should be with her husband but she is with Ken instead.
Ken is a sly dog. I almost let out a sarcastic whoop the first time I heard them. But I figured I shouldn’t give away the fact that I can hear as much as I am doing.
The other thing I’ve heard enough to understand that they know who I am. Orlov. Which means I'm not a random woman snatched off a street for sport. I'm a message. A chess piece. Somebody picked me on purpose.
The thought settles something in my chest, oddly. If I'm a message, that means someone is meant to receive me eventually. It means there's an endgame here, a reason to this that isn't just cruelty for its own sake. I can work with that. I can't work with chaos.
Around what I guess is midday, Ken and Vinny come back, and this time they bring a third man I haven't seen, younger even than them, nervous in a way the others aren't. He's carrying a phone, and he holds it up to the bars and takes a photograph of me without asking, the flash going off too bright in the dim room, and I flinch before I can stop myself.
"Hey," I snap, before I can think better of it. "A little warning would be nice."
They don't understand me, obviously, but Vinny laughs at the tone of it, delighted, like I'm a parrot that's learned a new phrase. He says something to Ken, who grins, and then Vinny and the younger guy leave, taking my photograph with them to wherever photographs of kidnapped women go.
Ken sits on the chair in the small space on the other side of the bars, knees splayed in arrogance, and watches me. Like I’m actually going to go anywhere.
The photo was proof of life, probably. Which means they’re in contact with my brothers.
I think of Liam's hands, always steady on the wheel, always steady on everything, and wonder if they're steady now.
I think of Killian's temper, the way it used to scare me when I was small and delights me now that I understand it's just love with nowhere else to go.
I think of Aidan's quiet math, the way he can look at a mess and see the solution before anyone else has finished panicking. I think of Rafferty, who doesn't say much but shows up anyway, every time, no matter what it costs him. I think of Connor, the brother who is about to become a father again and now his sister has been kidnapped. I hope he is okay. I hope Anya and the baby are okay. I have an entire new niece or nephew and I can’t celebrate because I’m stuck somewhere in Italy.
I think of Ma, but I have to stop thinking about Ma, because if I let myself go there, I won't come back from it today.
By the time the light through the window brightens fully, I've learned four more words. Silenzio. Vinny said it to me directly, hand raised, when I started humming to fill the silence, so that one's easy. Fame, which I think might mean hungry, because Mustache said it while pointing at my untouched dinner plate with something that might have been concern if I let myself believe it. Aspetta. Which I think means wait. This was Ken talking to a slinky, sexy woman wearing a bodycon dress as she was walking back through the door having come to look over what they were hiding down here. She paused in the doorway, turned back to look at him popping her ass as if to say ‘later.’ And troia, which Ken says every single time he looks at me, low and with his lips curled in disgust. I haven’t figured out the exact meaning, but just the way he says it makes it clear it’s derogatory and offensive.
Ken and I have managed to get into our own little routine when it’s his turn to watch me.
He calls me troia, I roll my eyes, he smacks the bars or spits into the cell, I look at him like he is disgusting.
He makes more vaguely threatening sounds in Italian.
I shake my head at him. He smirks and grabs his crotch.
It’s Moustache who looks after me. He brought me clothes on my second morning here. A T-shirt and leggings that actually fit, but weren’t new. He taught me how to say ‘thank you,’ in Italian. He looks remorseful whenever our eyes meet.
This morning I couldn’t help but reach out and touch his arm when he brought me my daily plate of food. Wanting to offer him comfort or reassurance that I’m okay. The contact was brief and as soon as he was gone I wondered what the hell I was doing.
These men took me from my home, moved me halfway across the world, but the minute one of them shows any sort of compassion I go into full Iris mode wanting him to feel better.
I need my head rinsing. That’s the only thing for it. Being snatched and held against my will has obviously affected my brain more than I’d realized.
“Troia,” Ken says at me, getting my attention.
“Si?” I respond.
He begins rattling at me, long sentences of gibberish I can’t ever hope to understand. I heave a sigh and wonder how long he has been knocking boots with the woman I’ve nicknamed Slinky.
Then something changes in the way he is looking at me, and dread creeps up my spine leaving a cold trail of goosebumps.
Fuck.
He snatches the keys up from the small table and begins unlocking the door to my cell.
“No,” I say, holding up my hand in front of me like that would be enough to stop him advancing on me with that look in his eyes.
I shake my head from side to side as he gets closer and closer and wonder if anyone will come if I scream.
That’s what I do. I scream so loud, let all the rage and fear and sadness I feel, fill it from the depths of my soul.
The sound startles him and he jumps back, wide-eyed. Only then he seems to panic, and he lunges at me. One hand at the back of my head and the other clamped tightly over my mouth.
Boots are thudding down the corridor. The door is thrown open hard enough that it makes a splintering, cracking sound when it smashes against the wall.
Then Moustache is behind Ken, fury pumping from him as he pulls Ken off me and throws him out of the cell, yelling words I don’t need to understand to know they are bad.
Ken spits near the old man’s boots, answers back with no regard or respect for the older man. Then Moustache says something that makes Ken go white, and I wonder if it’s in relation to Slinky.
After Ken storms out, Moustache turns to me.
“Mi dispiace, Signorina Orlova,” he says, and despite me knowing not a bloody jot of this language, I know he is apologizing.
“It’s okay,” I say, with a small smile. It’s all I can muster. “Grazie,” I add, hoping to lighten the tension in the small space.
But he doesn’t say “Prego,” like usual, in his gruff despondent tone. He just looks at me with big sad eyes like he regrets every decision in his life that brought him here.
“You have a daughter,” I say to him. “Bambino?”
He looks at me for a long moment, then leans back to look through the doorway that leads to the corridor beyond. He reaches behind him and pulls his phone out of his back pocket. After he unlocks it and swipes around the screen a few times, he turns it to me.
A picture of a woman about my age smiles out at the phone, holding a kid that could only be around three or four years old.
“Mia figlia, Marina,” he says, pointing at the woman and then pointing at me. I make him think of his daughter. “Mia nepote, Ginevra,” he adds, lowering his meaty finger to the little girl in Marina’s arms.
“Bella,” I say, wishing I knew more words. Since I don’t I settle for my hand on his arm again and repeat myself with a smile. “Bella.”
He smiles for a moment, then locks his phone back up and places it in his pocket.
I don't sleep so much as I surface and sink, over and over, all through the night.
Every sound outside the door yanks me up out of whatever thin rest I've managed, heart slamming, until I recognize it as nothing, as a door somewhere else, as a dog barking outside, as the ordinary noise of a house full of dangerous men going about their evening.
Somewhere in the black hours I catch myself doing the thing I do at home when the kitchen goes quiet and someone needs a distraction.
I start humming, low, under my breath, one of Ma's old songs, the one about a girl waiting by the water for a sailor who never learned to swim.
It's a stupid, sad little tune, and I don't even like it that much, but it's hers, and it's mine, and it's the only thing in this stone room that belongs to me.
Nobody comes to silence me this time. Maybe they're asleep. Maybe they've decided the crazy girl singing to herself in the dark isn't worth the walk down the hallway.
I sing it twice through, quiet, and somewhere in the second pass I stop shaking.
I press my forehead to my knees and I make myself a promise, the same one I've been circling for days now, except this time I let it sink all the way down.
If I get out of this, I stop waiting.
I stop scrolling through strangers looking for the version of a life I'm supposed to want. I stop being so good at making everyone else happy that I forget to go looking for my own. I stop letting people assume I'm fine because fine is easier for them to carry.
I don't know who's coming for me yet, whether it's my brothers with their guns and their fury, or something else entirely. But I know they're coming. I believe it the way I believe the tide, the way I believe blood.
And when they do, I'm not going to be the woman I was before.
I lift my head, and in the dark I can just make out the shape of the door, the bars, the shadow of the small table and chair, empty now because no one watches me at night. I suppose they think I sleep through.
The stars are just visible through the high window at this angle. That’s when I wonder if I can reach it. If I jump, I might be able to hold on and pull myself up.
A laugh escapes me at the thought. I’m not exactly the fittest or strongest female I know…
but I still find myself listening a little harder for the nearest guard.
When I don’t see one, I quickly get to my feet, upend the thankfully empty bucket and place it by the wall beneath the small rectangle of window.
My fingertips just brush the edge, so I lift onto my tip toes and claw my fingers around the flat stone edge, looking for purchase.
Once I have the steadiest grip I know I’ll ever manage, I tighten my hands and begin to scuffle my feet up the wall.
The first time, I immediately lose my grip and drop back down, scraping my stomach and tipping the bucket over in the process.
I listen carefully for any signs that I’ve been heard, but there’s nothing, thank God.
I try again, taking a heaving breath before managing a little leap off the bucket and scrabbling up the wall. This time I get a view of what’s beyond the window. Rows and rows of plants.
Vines?
I push my hand forward, reaching for anything to help pull me a little further through the tight gap, but there’s nothing.
That’s when I realise I’m touching a path that must surround the building. Which means the cell I’m in is partially underground.
An old wine cellar.
It’s a vineyard.
My arms finally give up and I slide back into the cell, crashing to the floor. The air is knocked out of me and I struggle for a minute to get my breath back.
But now I know I’m on a vineyard in Italy, near the sea.
That’s more than I knew before.