Sadie
Lev drives differently than Dmitri.
Dmitri drives the way Nick moves through a room, deliberate, aware of every car and corner.
Lev drives the way a man drives when he's been told to do a job but would rather be doing something else.
He takes the turns a little fast, checks his mirrors a little less, and when we pull up outside the clinic, he leaves the engine running and gives me a nod that says go rather than the steady eye contact Dmitri holds until I'm through the door.
I don't think much of it. Nick told me Dmitri would be with him today, something about a meeting that needed both of them.
He didn't give me details and I didn't ask, because that's our arrangement.
I get the mornings and the evenings. The hours in between belong to his world, and I've made peace with not looking too closely at what fills them.
"Thanks, Lev." I grab my bag from the back seat.
He lifts two fingers off the steering wheel. I close the door. The car pulls away before I've taken three steps.
I watch the taillights round the corner and disappear.
Dmitri never leaves until I'm inside. It's a small thing, a ten-second thing, but I notice its absence the way I notice a number on my meter that's a few points off. Close enough to be fine. Far enough to make my skin prickle.
I shake it off. I'm being paranoid. Three weeks of stability and my brain is inventing threats because it doesn't know what to do without them. I hitch my bag higher on my shoulder and walk toward the staff entrance.
The staff entrance is at the side of the building, down the narrow alley that runs between the clinic and the laundromat next door.
I've walked this alley every workday for weeks.
I know the dumpster against the clinic wall, the fire exit with the peeling paint, the puddle that forms at the low point after rain.
It's thirty steps from the sidewalk to the door. I've counted.
I'm on step twelve when I hear a van door slide open.
It's a white panel van. It was parked at the far end of the alley when I turned the corner and I registered it the way you register any parked vehicle, a glance, a classification, a dismissal. Delivery van. Laundromat. Normal.
Two men step out.
They're fast. Faster than Jason ever was.
The first one is behind me before I've fully processed the sound of the door, and his arm goes across my chest and pulls me backward into his body.
The second is in front of me, and he has something in his hand, a cloth, dark, damp, and the smell hits me before the fabric does.
Sweet and chemical and immediately, horribly familiar from a pharmacology module I took three years ago.
Chloroform. Or something close to it.
I fight.
I don't think about fighting. I just do it.
My elbow drives backward into the ribs of the man holding me and I feel the impact, feel him grunt, feel his arm loosen for half a second.
I twist sideways. My bag slides off my shoulder and hits the asphalt and my first thought, absurd and clinical and perfectly me, is that my insulin pen is in that bag.
The second man gets the cloth over my mouth and nose.
I hold my breath. I know to hold my breath because I know what this chemical does, how fast it works, how quickly it shuts down a conscious mind. I have maybe fifteen seconds of held breath before my lungs override my willpower and force me to inhale.
I use ten of them.
I bite. My teeth close on the hand behind the cloth and I feel skin give and the man swears in a language that isn't English. Russian. He's swearing in Russian and the word he uses is one I've heard Nick say under his breath when he is having a hard day.
The man behind me gets his arm back across my chest, tighter this time, and he lifts me off my feet. My shoes scrape the asphalt. I kick backward and connect with a shin and he swears too, but he doesn't let go.
My lungs are burning.
I try to scream but the cloth is pressed so tight against my mouth that the sound has nowhere to go. It comes out muffled, a strangled note that bounces off the alley walls and dies before it reaches the street.
I inhale.
The sweetness floods my mouth and nose and the edges of the alley soften immediately. I feel my legs stop kicking. I feel my hands, which were clawing at the arm across my chest, slow and then stop. The dumpster tilts sideways. The sky above the alley narrows to a bright strip and then dims.
I think about Nick.
I think about the fact that my insulin pen is in the bag on the ground and if these men don't know I'm diabetic, if they don't know what happens when a Type 1 goes without insulin, then the chloroform isn't the thing that's going to kill me.
The alley goes dark.
I come back once.
Just once, and not for long. I'm lying on a surface that's moving, vibrating, and the air is stale and warm and smells like rust and engine oil. The van. I'm in the van. My hands are behind my back, bound with something that bites into my wrists when I try to move them. My ankles are bound too.
My head is heavy. The chloroform is still in my system, dragging at the edges of my consciousness like hands pulling me back under. I turn my head and the movement sends a wave of nausea through me that I can't act on because my mouth is taped shut.
I breathe through my nose slowly. The controlled way I breathe when my sugar is crashing and I need to stay conscious long enough to get glucose into my body. Four seconds in. Six seconds out.
There are voices above me. Two men, speaking Russian. I can't understand the words but I can hear the tone. Businesslike. The tone of men doing a job, not men in a panic. They've done this before.
I try to think. My brain is sluggish, the thoughts swimming through chemical fog, but I force myself to pay attention, to make a mental note of things that might help me.
My insulin. I had my morning dose at breakfast. That was at seven.
I don't know what time it is now. If it's before noon, I have hours before the lack of insulin becomes critical.
If it's after noon, the window is smaller.
Without my long-acting dose tonight, my sugar will start climbing by morning.
Without any insulin at all, I have maybe twenty-four hours before I'm in diabetic ketoacidosis. After that, the math gets ugly.
My kit. My meter, my pen, my glucose tabs, my candy. All of it is in the bag on the alley floor. If Priya finds the bag, she'll know something is wrong. Priya knows I don't go anywhere without my kit. She'll call Mehta. Mehta will call Nick.
Nick will come.
The thought settles into me the way his arm settles across my waist in the mornings, heavy and warm and certain. He will come. He will find me. I don't know how and I don't know when, but I know this the way I know my own name.
The van makes a turn. My shoulder rolls against the floor and the pain in my bound wrists sharpens. The voices above me continue their businesslike murmur.
I close my eyes. Not because the chloroform is pulling me under again, but because I need to save my energy.
I need to be smart about this. Every minute I spend fighting the restraints is a minute I'm burning glucose I can't replace, and if I'm going to survive long enough for Nick to find me, I need to be still.
Be still, Sadie. Be still and breathe and count the minutes and stay alive.
I count.
I get to two hundred and sixteen before the van stops.
Doors open. Daylight hits my closed eyelids, bright and painful.
Hands grab my arms and pull me upright and then I'm over someone's shoulder.
I keep my eyes closed because I need them to think I'm unconscious.
I need every advantage I can get, and right now the only advantage I have is that they don't know what I know about my own body.
The air changes to a warmth that can only mean we’re indoors.
There’s the sound of a door closing behind us.
Footsteps on concrete, then on wood, then on carpet.
I'm set down on something solid. A chair.
My wrists are re-tied behind the back of it and my ankles are tied to the legs, and the tape stays on my mouth.
Footsteps recede. A door closes. A lock turns.
I open my eyes.
The room is small. Windowless. A single bulb overhead, the kind that hangs from a cord. Concrete walls, painted white a long time ago, now grey with age and damp. There's nothing in the room except the chair I'm sitting in and a table against the far wall with nothing on it.
I look down at my arms. My scrub top is pushed up on one side and I can see the faint bruises forming where the man gripped me. My watch is gone. They took it, which means I can't track time, which means I can't track my insulin window.
I breathe.
Four seconds in. Six seconds out.
I think about my meter reading this morning. One-sixteen. I had my full morning dose. I had toast and peanut butter and juice. My body has what it needs. The clock is running, but it hasn't run out.
I think about Priya finding my bag in the alley. I think about Mehta's face when she gets the call. I think about Dmitri, wherever he is, checking the camera feed from the clinic and seeing an empty frame where I should be.
I think about Nick.
I think about his hand on the back of my neck and his mouth on my forehead and the word he says every morning when I give him my number.
Good. I think about the way he looks at me when he thinks I'm not watching, the softening that's barely visible and gone before anyone else would catch it.
I think about what he told me on the sidewalk outside my old apartment, under the buzzing streetlight, with his knuckles against my jaw.
I'm a monster.
And I’m glad.
Because right now, sitting in a chair in a windowless room with my wrists bound and my insulin running out, a monster is exactly what I need.