Chapter 6 Aoife
Aoife
Dark.
That’s all there is. Dark and the smell of rubber and exhaust that coats the back of my throat. The trunk lining is rough underneath me. The car is moving. I can feel every bump, every turn, every gear change through my spine.
I can’t catch my breath. Each gasp comes quick and thin, sending pins through my fingertips and making my head spin in the darkness, like I’m drowning on dry land. My lungs strain against a cage that’s shrunk three sizes, ribs clamped around my chest like metal bands.
I’m in the trunk of a car.
The scream comes before I can stop it. It rips out of me and fills the tiny space and bounces off every surface until it’s just noise, shapeless and useless and swallowed by the engine underneath me.
I shove at the lid with my hands, palms flat, pushing until my arms shake.
It doesn’t move. I twist onto my back and drive my fists up into it, over and over.
My knuckles split against something hard, and I feel the sting, but it doesn’t register properly.
I claw at the lining, at the edges, looking for a latch, a release, anything.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
“Let me out!” I scream, over and over, like the words will punch through steel if I say them loud enough.
My fists hit the lid again. I don’t even feel the pain because my brain has left the building.
It’s somewhere back in that hotel corridor, standing next to my cleaning cart while my legs refused to move.
I haven’t frozen like that since... No. I’m not going there.
Not in the dark. Not now. But my body went there.
My body remembered, even if I’ve spent two years teaching myself to forget.
The same dead legs. The same locked chest. The same useless, pathetic stillness while something terrible happens around me.
But a gun? Turns out a gun changes the math on everything you think you are.
It all happened fast. Too fast. That’s what I keep replaying. The speed. He came through that doorway, his eyes landed on me, and his hand was on my arm before my legs even got the message to run.
The car takes a sharp turn, and I roll, my shoulder slamming into the side. I brace my hands against the walls and try to hold still, but the shaking won’t stop. Hands. Legs. Jaw. I can hear my teeth chattering, and I can’t make them stop.
Think. Come on. Think.
Something has been terribly fucked up, and I’m caught in the middle of it, completely innocent. Except for the ten euro note in my pocket… I shake my head as panic turns to absurdity. I wasn’t abducted over a tenner. The giant loomed over me like he knew me; grabbed me like I was his to take.
He thinks I’m someone else.
He’ll figure it out.
He’ll figure it out and let me go.
Right?
“Right,” I mutter and turn onto my side to kick the back of the trunk as hard as I can.
It’s not a hatchback. These aren’t seats that I can kick hard enough, and they will miraculously fall forward, giving me the opportunity to what? Crawl through and let myself out of the back door when he stops for a red light?
“Fuck, Aoife, stop spiraling,” I moan and breathe again.
My breathing is slowing. Not because I’m calm.
Because my body is running out of fuel. There’s a limit, apparently.
Your system floods and floods, and then it just levels.
The shaking eases to a tremor. My hands still hurt where I split the skin on the lid, but the pain feels distant now. Background noise.
The car hasn’t stopped. I don’t know how long we’ve been driving.
It could be ten minutes. It could be an hour.
Time doesn’t work properly in the dark. Every second stretches and then snaps back, and I can’t hold on to any of it.
I curl tighter on my side, knees to my chest, arms wrapped around myself because there’s nothing else to hold on to.
The car slows.
The car stops.
The engine cuts.
Silence.
I hold my breath. My fingers curl into fists against the trunk lining. I can hear my own heartbeat, thick and fast in my ears. A car door opens. Closes. Footsteps. Slow. Deliberate. Coming around to the back.
The lid swings open and light floods in, sunny and too bright after the darkness. I flinch so hard I nearly crack my skull off the side panel.
He moves, blocking the light from my face. He is enormous. He picked me up like I was a rag doll and slung me over his shoulder. There is no panic in him at all. Like stuffing women into car trunks is on his daily list between emails and murder.
I throw myself backward anyway. “Get the fuck away from me.”
His gaze drops over me once. Fast. Checking for damage, maybe. Checking I haven’t turned into somebody else in the last half hour. He holds his phone up, and I glare into it, seeing my face, tear-streaked and full of panic. I hadn’t even realized I’d started crying.
He steps back and taps the screen, then holds it to his ear.
“Fuck,” he growls. “Are you sure?”
His face goes harder as whoever replies. I should sit up and make a run for it. But something tells me, I wouldn’t make it two feet before he caught me, and noncompliance makes abductors tetchy.
So I hear from the movies.
He hangs up abruptly and looms over me again.
I feel sick.
“Why did you take me?” I whisper. “I don’t know anything, and I’m a nobody.”
“You might be a nobody, but you know more than you think,” he says and leans in to wrap his giant fist around my arm again.
“Don’t touch me!” I hiss, jerking back.
He lets go and holds his hands up. “I’m not going to hurt you, but you need to get out of there.”
“Why? So you can kill me in a field and leave me to rot in a ditch?”
He gives me an exasperated stare. “I literally just said I’m not going to hurt you.”
Oh, right. He did.
“As if I believe you,” I snap and sit up, climbing out of the trunk under my own steam. He takes another step back, which I find oddly reassuring.
“What’s your name?”
“What’s yours?” I retort, the words snapping out before I can stop them, just like when I told my last boss his tie looked like a strangled parakeet—right before my performance review.
He smirks. Smirks. “Nice try. Name. I’m not asking a third time.”
I hesitate again, calculating my odds if I lie to him.
They aren’t good.
“Aoife,” I whisper. “Aoife O’Leary.”
“And what were you doing at the hotel, Aoife?”
I gesture to my uniform. “Working. What does it look like?”
“Right,” he says.
Right? “Who were you expecting?”
“Not you.” He narrows his eyes. “Did you see anyone else earlier? A woman?”
I shake my head.
“Are you sure?” he presses.
“I came out of the room I was cleaning and saw a man running towards the stairs, and then whatever the hell happened after that. You grabbed me and then abducted me.”
“Did you see his face?”
“Whose?”
He sighs sharply. “The man who was running towards the stairs.”
I think about this for a second. I did. Briefly. He lunged out of the room and looked at me before he went the opposite way. “No.”
“You’re lying,” he says, moving closer again.
He is so enormous, I take a step back. My thighs hit the car. I have nowhere to go. “I’m not,” I say. My voice comes out thin enough to embarrass me. I clear it. “I’m not lying. I barely saw him.”
His eyes stay on mine. Cold. Focused. The kind that makes you feel your own pulse.
“Barely is not a no. Try again.”
“I didn’t see his face,” I stammer.
He closes the space between us by another half a step, not rushing it, which is somehow worse.
“I saw dark hair,” I say, because that much is true. “And a man running. That’s it.” I don’t know why I’m lying, but I feel like it’s important.
His stare intensifies for a second before it drops to my hands, taking in my bloody knuckles. “This car is armored. You hurt yourself.”
I curl my fingers into my palms so he can’t look at them anymore. I stare past him and see we are on the side of a country road somewhere that’s nowhere.
“This is a problem,” he says.
“I think it’s a you problem,” I counter. “Clearly, whoever you report to knows you got the wrong woman.”
“That makes it a you problem as well,” he says with that infuriating smirk again. “This is now an us problem, so get in the car, Aoife. I need to get you somewhere safe while I figure this out.”
I look back at the trunk, then at the hedge, which is a barrier between me and the field beyond.
“Run and see how far you get,” he says, his voice making goosebumps ripple over my skin.
“Fuck you,” I growl and climb back in the trunk with my head held high.