CHAPTER 22
Tessa
The chair is metal and the room smells musty.
I’m in a broken-down cabin that we arrived at after traveling down a remote, single-access road.
Without my watch, time is difficult to gauge, but I’m guessing it took us at least three hours if not more to get this deep into the Cascades.
They chose this place for its isolation.
I also know that there’s no way they would have let me see where they were taking me if they hadn’t intended on me never leaving. The knowledge sits inside me hollowly, but I refuse to let sorrow creep in. Sadness for what I might be losing… life, experiences… Cole.
Instead, I keep reminding myself to keep my wits, because if anyone can find me, it’s Cole, and I know he won’t ever stop trying.
I was surprised Jason Pelham greeted us when we arrived.
I wouldn’t have thought the head of SAPG would dirty his hands with this, but apparently I was wrong.
Maybe it’s just because he has too much riding on this to entrust it to his underlings.
Regardless, Schwartz left as soon as he handed me over, because men like him don’t stay for what comes after.
They write the checks, look the other way, and let people like Pelham handle the rest.
My wrists are zip-tied in my lap, legs and feet left free.
Right now there’s just the chair in the room and the single overhead light with nothing but a bulb and a chain pull.
I can only see what’s in front of me and to the sides—a door, rough unfinished timbered walls, a window with blackout curtains.
Jason Pelham sits before me.
Despite his broad facial features and pockmarked skin from what looks like a horrible bout of acne as a teen, he’s actually handsome in a very unconventional way. He reminds me of Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive, and I have to wonder why I’m thinking such foolishness.
It’s so you don’t think about your impending death, Tessa.
Pelham’s wearing a dark fleece and tactical pants. He looks completely at ease, which is the most frightening thing about him.
He has a folding chair of his own that he’s turned backward, straddling it with his forearms resting on the top rail, watching me with the patient expression of someone who has done this before and found that the quiet before the storm is more frightening than the actual storm.
Two men stand behind him in the shadows. I gave them more than a cursory glance to memorize as many details as I could. Both large, both armed, both with deadened expressions that tell me they’re killers before they’re anything.
“Tessa.” Pelham says my name like we know each other. “Let’s talk about what Erik gave you.”
I keep my breathing even. “I don’t know what you mean.”
He smiles but it doesn’t extend to anything above his mouth. “The flash drive… the one he handed you in the parking garage approximately four seconds before my people ran him down.”
The matter-of-fact way he says ran him down—like it’s a line item on the invoice he billed to RainVest—sends a cold and clarifying ripple through me. I understand exactly what I’m dealing with, and I also understand that none of the normal rules apply here.
“I don’t have a flash drive,” I say.
“You did,” he says gently, which oddly comes across as threatening. “And you’ve had access to everything on it. So let’s skip the part where you deny that and move to the part where you tell me what you’ve done with it.”
“I’m a journalist,” I say. “I don’t reveal my sources or my methods.”
He tilts his head slightly, like he finds this mildly interesting.
“You’re not a journalist right now, Tessa.
Right now you’re merely a problem I’ve been tasked with solving, and I have considerable latitude in how I go about that.
” He pauses to let my imagination run wild with just what that might mean.
“What I need to know is simple… what was on the drive, who else has seen it and whether your article has already been filed with anyone who would retain a copy of your evidence after publication.” Another pause, a broad smile as he throws his arms wide.
“That’s all. Answer those questions honestly and this becomes a much more comfortable conversation. ”
The implication of what happens if I don’t answer him hangs in the air between us, so thick it’s almost choking.
I think about Cole and the timing of everything. I try to backtrack in my addled brain when he would have returned to Jameson, how long it would have taken to figure out I’d been abducted.
They’ll figure it out, I reassure myself. Cole will immediately notice I’m gone and then Josie will pull the cameras and they’ll find the rideshare and then—
And then what? They have no tracker signal. They have no phone ping. Possibly a general direction and a woman who walked willingly into a car and disappeared.
Will Josie and BOB be able to come up with some probabilities as to where I’ve been relocated? Will they come bursting through that door? Or will they be wandering around another part of the Cascades looking for me?
He’ll find you, some stubborn part of me insists. He’ll find you because he’s Cole. This is what he does and he will not stop.
I hold on to that with everything I have and use that burst of confidence to hold my ground. “I plead the Fifth.”
His expression shifts. Not anger—no, this is far more menacing, and so cold I suppress a full-body shiver.
“Wrong answer,” he says quietly and stands.
It happens fast after that.
The men move without any command from Pelham and then hands are hauling me up with a force that wrenches my shoulders, and the chair skitters backward across the bare wooden floor. I’m on my feet with no memory of standing.
“Wait—” I start.
Nobody waits.
They cut the zip ties only to drag my arms above my head. I’m being bound again at the wrists, this time with rope, then hoisted over a hook mounted in the ceiling beam. My heels leave the ground, and the full weight of my body drops into my shoulders. The pain is immediate and takes my breath.
I hang there and try to find purchase with my toes against the floor.
I can just reach… barely. Enough to take a fraction of the weight off my shoulders but not enough to actually stand, so I’m caught between hanging and standing, neither one sustainable.
The muscles in my arms and shoulders burn with a deeper, sharper ache in the joints.
Pelham walks a slow circle around me.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” he says, coming to a stop behind me where I can’t see him.
“We’re going to have a more productive conversation than the one we just had.
And you’re going to cooperate, because the alternative—” He lets that sit for a moment.
“The alternative involves letting my men have you and I’d personally prefer not to let that happen.
” He moves again, and his voice comes from my left now.
“I’m not a sadist, Tessa. I’m a businessman and I would genuinely like this to go quickly and cleanly for both of us.
But make no mistake… I will use whatever means at my disposal to get the information I want. ”
Fear surges within me so violently, vomit rises in my throat. I swallow it down, force out words of bravado. “I told you I don’t know anything and if you believe otherwise, fuck you.”
Pelham moves into my peripheral vision, the expression on his face like a father disappointed in his child for a bad grade. He looks to someone behind me and gives a subtle nod.
A hand grips the back of my blouse and I flinch hard, a full-body recoil that sends a wave of agony through my suspended shoulders.
“Easy,” one of the men says, almost gently, and then I hear the snick of a blade. My muscles turn to jelly, causing me to sag against the hook, but oddly, I don’t feel the pain in my shoulders anymore. I’m too scared to concentrate on that.
The fabric parts down the back and they peel my shirt off me like the husk on a cob of corn.
It’s cut free at the cuffs and drops to the floor.
My jeans go next. The knife is cold along my hip and the denim falls away.
It’s done so swiftly, with so much skill not to cut me, that I know they’ve done this before.
I’m left hanging in my bra and underwear in a room that is not warm, and the exposure is its own particular trauma.
I will not cry. I set that in concrete somewhere in the back of my mind. I will not give them that.
Pelham comes back around to face me fully. His expression hasn’t changed and he never looks down at my near-naked body. He looks at me the way he might look at a document he’s assessing for accuracy. Clinical. Dispassionate.
Then he holds up something in his hand and it’s with dread I let my focus go there. It’s small, black, with two metal prongs at one end. A stun device of some kind and he holds it long enough so I can make my own guesses as to what it does.
Pelham continues to stare at me, but it’s to his men he commands, “Get the thermal scope up on the perimeter. If they’re lucky enough to find us, I want to know about it before they get within a hundred yards.”
The men nod and exit the room, closing the door behind them.
Pelham takes a step closer to me. I refuse to look at the weapon in his hand and instead hold his stare.
“I’m going to give you a moment to reconsider your position.
I want you to think about the questions I asked you and really consider that giving me a complete and honest answer will be far less painful than if you don’t.
” He holds up the device, pushes a button to turn it on and it emits a short beep.
He moves around me again, coming to stand right behind me so I can’t see him.
My heart rate triples. “I want you to think about the fact that my men have been in the field for six days with very few comforts. And lastly, I want you to consider that I’ll eventually get the information I seek, and the only real unknown is how much pain and degradation you can handle before you give it up. ”
He lets that hit hard. The man is terrifying in his level of poise in delivering his threats. I brace, waiting for pain, but before it comes, my situation gets infinitely worse.
He pulls a hood over my head and the darkness is total.
The fabric is snug and smells of sweat. My world shrinks to only what I can hear, which is mostly my own labored breathing, and what I can feel, which is my heart about to burst from my chest. My toes find the floor and I push up and away, trying to put some sort of distance between me and Pelham, who stands at my back.
Nothing happens. My body twists and turns, unable to get balance hanging from the hook. My breath comes out in harsh pants and I force myself to stay still, opening my ears and trying to hear what Pelham is doing.
He has that device in his hand… is he going to use it on me? I have no clue because I can’t see and he’s being utterly silent, and that’s exactly the point. My heart hammers so hard I can feel it in my fingertips.
Cole.
I say it inside my head like a frequency, like if I concentrate hard enough it becomes a signal he can track.
Cole, I’m somewhere east of Monroe, I’m in a cabin and I’m running out of time, and I need you to find me.
Pelham’s voice comes from very close, right at my ear, and I jerk. “The article,” he says softly. “Has it been filed. Yes or no.”
I feel the cold prongs touch the outside of my thigh and I brace, every muscle locking involuntarily. I hold my breath and—
The current hits and it’s not like anything I have language for.
It’s not pain exactly. Not at first. It’s a sensation that predates pain, a warning to my nerves that something terrible is coming.
It lasts for a second, maybe two, and then every sensory ending in my body lights up all at once.
It’s hotter than fire, exquisitely sharp.
It feels like my muscles are tearing apart, my bones are shattering and my skin is peeling away.
I think I scream but I’m not sure, and then… it’s gone.
I’m gasping and shaking and my legs have stopped working. My full body weight hangs from my wrists now, but the pain in my shoulders is nothing to the agony I just felt.
“The article,” Pelham says again, patient as ever. “Has it been filed?”
“Yes,” I gasp, because that much they already know and it costs me nothing to confirm it. “It’s with my editor.”
“Does your editor have the evidence?”
“No,” I say, shaking my head emphatically. “Just the article.”
This is true. The evidence is with Cole. I hold that fact behind my teeth like a stone.
“Who else knows what was on the drive?”
“No one,” I gasp, once again trying to push up on my toes merely to make it look like I’m in some sort of control. “Just me.”
A pause, more silence. He’s weighing the truth of my words, but I don’t know if they hit the mark.
I can’t tell if he believes me because I can’t see his face.
I can’t see anything and I’m shaking from the current and from the cold and from the helpless terror of hanging hooded in the dark while a man who has already killed decides whether I’m telling the truth.
“That’s not quite right, is it,” he murmurs, and I know from the tone that we’ve arrived at the part of the conversation I can’t navigate my way through with half-truths.
The device touches my lower back, where he strokes it up my spine. Cold sweat breaks out all over.
I think about Cole’s hands. The specific weight of them. The way he said I’ve got you in the dark of the apartment three nights ago when I woke up from a nightmare and he pulled me back against his chest without a word and held on.
I’ve got you.
Find me, I think. Please find me. I can hold on if you find me.
The prongs touch the base of my neck, glide around to my throat and down in between my breasts. I brace again and wait for the pain.