2. Two
I opened my eyes and squinted at a white ceiling. A fluorescent light buzzed somewhere nearby, the cheap kind that never shut off. I tried to lift my hand to block it, and my wrist caught hard on something that bit into the bone.
It was a handcuff. Steel, proper steel, not the shite toy kind you'd buy on the Royal Mile for a hen night.
It was bolted to a metal bed frame and locked tight enough around my right wrist that my pulse thudded against the cuff.
I turned my other wrist over. The medical bracelet was still there, warm against my skin.
So whoever had me either knew what it meant or hadn't bothered to strip me down. I'd take either.
My stomach rolled. The room tilted when I moved my head, and the shaking was already there, deep tremors that started in my bones and worked outward.
I was on the tail end of a crash, nauseous and weak, a metallic taste coating my tongue like I'd been sucking on pennies.
I'd been through it before. I knew the shape of it.
I just didn't know where I was.
The room was small and clean: white walls, white ceiling, white everywhere I looked.
A chair by the door held a man with his arms folded, big lad, watching me like I was a problem he'd been assigned.
He had the look. Broad shoulders crammed into a jacket that didn't fit him, too tight across the chest, off-the-rack and straining at the seams. The shoes were good leather, but he'd never touched them with polish. You could always tell.
I tried to sit up, and the room lurched. My stomach clenched, and I swallowed hard and waited for it to pass. The big lad stayed put.
"Last time I woke up in a situation like this," I said, "they bought me dinner first."
He gave me nothing. He just stared.
"Aye, all right. Strong silent type." I tugged the handcuff, and the bed frame rattled. "Any chance ye could tell me where I am? Or who ye are? Or maybe just get me a glass of water before I boak all over this lovely bed?"
He pulled out his phone and typed something.
"Brilliant. Ye're texting. That's grand. Tell whoever's in charge I'm gonnae need insulin within the hour, or this whole situation gets a lot messier for everybody."
He stood up without a word and left the room.
The door stayed open, showing a hallway and another door, nothing useful.
My head swam. I was too weak to do much more than lie there and take inventory.
The last thing I remembered was the warehouse.
The zip tie on my wrists. The Italians packing up around me, hauling boxes, shouting at each other in a language I'd stopped trying to understand months ago.
They'd left me cuffed to the radiator like I was part of the furniture they couldn't be arsed to move.
I'd been going low. The world had gone soft at the edges, and my thoughts had turned to soup.
Then nothing, and now this.
I pulled against the cuff, and the frame didn't budge.
The steel was solid, bolted to the floor.
Whoever owned this place had done this before.
The mattress was decent, though. Better than the warehouse floor.
Better than the radiator. I was developing a ranking system for the places people chained me up, and that was a thought I'd examine later, when I wasn't dying.
The big lad came back with another man. This one was shorter, leaner, with a medical kit in one hand and an expression that said he'd rather be anywhere else. He set the kit on the bed and opened it without looking at me.
"Insulin," I said. "Aye? Please tell me that's insulin."
He pulled a vial and a syringe from the kit. He grabbed my free arm and shoved my sleeve up, pinching the skin like he was about to jab it right there in the forearm.
"That's no how ye do it, pal. It goes in the belly or the thigh, no the arm. Have ye ever actually done this before?"
He ignored me, yanked my shirt up and jabbed the needle into the soft skin below my ribs. I'd had worse injections, and I'd had better. I let my head fall back and groaned.
"Oh, aye. That's the stuff. Right there. Dinnae stop."
The shorter one yanked the needle out and stepped back like I'd bitten him. The big lad by the door shifted his weight and looked at the wall. I closed my eyes and let out a long, theatrical sigh.
"Was it good for you? Because I have to say, the technique needs work, but the enthusiasm was there."
"Shut up," the shorter one said. His accent was thick, Russian by the sound of it. The Italians had traded me to the Russians. That was either a lateral move or a significant downgrade, and I didn't have enough information to know which.
"Ye could at least tell me yer name. I feel like we've shared something special."
He packed up the kit and left. The big lad settled back into his chair.
I lay there and waited for the insulin to do its work, the shaking easing by slow degrees, the nausea pulling back like a tide going out.
My head still pounded, but the worst of it was passing. I could think again. I could plan.
It was a new room with new captors, at least two and probably more.
The Italians had made me beg for insulin, sometimes for days, and these lot had brought it inside of ten minutes.
The handcuff was better quality. The bed was clean.
Somebody in this operation had thought ahead, and that was either very good for me or very bad.
I kept my mouth shut for once and conserved energy while I waited.
I didn't have to wait long.
The door opened, and everything about this place that I'd been filing away made sense.
The clean sheets, the decent mattress, the medical kit that came on time.
The two men I'd already dealt with were muscle, hired bulk, the kind of bodies you'd put in cheap suits and stand by a door.
The man who walked in was the reason they existed.
It was the clothes I clocked first because I always clocked the clothes first. Dark suit, well-fitted, not bespoke but close.
Someone had tailored it for him after purchase, taken in the waist and adjusted the shoulders.
The fabric was good, a fine wool that caught the fluorescent light without shining.
The shirt underneath was blue gray, chosen to match his eyes, and whoever made that call knew what they were doing, even if the man wearing it didn't.
The suit told me money. The tailoring told me someone in his life paid attention. But it was the gloves that told me who he was.
Leather driving gloves, dark brown, butter-soft even from across the room.
He wore them like they were part of his hands.
The stitching was hand-sewn, tight and even.
I could read it from the bed the way my da could read a seam from across a fitting room.
They were Italian, maybe, or French. Expensive either way, and worth every penny.
My da would've approved of those gloves, and my da didn't approve of much.
The rest of him matched what the clothes promised.
Tall, broad through the shoulders in a way that said use, not vanity.
He carried his weight forward, on the balls of his feet, and he stopped just inside the door to scan the room before he looked at anything else.
The face was lived in, lined at the eyes and mouth, late thirties or mid-forties depending on how hard the miles had been.
"You're awake," he said. He had an American accent, but something sat underneath it, Russian maybe, buried deep under years of Ohio or wherever he'd grown up.
"Aye, I'm awake. Cheers for the insulin. Yer man there has the bedside manner of a fucking vet, but I'm no dead, so I'll take it."
He pulled the chair closer to the bed and sat down. The big lad and the shorter one stayed by the door. This was the boss, then. I'd dressed enough of them to know the shape of authority when it walked into a room.
"You're Scottish," he said, like he was still working that out.
"Aye."
"I was told you might be Irish."
"Do I sound fucking Irish to ye?"
He studied me. He had blue eyes, cold as anything I'd ever looked into. I stared back. I'd spent six months staring at men who wanted to kill me. One more wasn't going to break me.
"Here's how this works," he said. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. The gloves creaked when he laced his fingers together. "The people who had you are gone. We took their warehouse. You were in it. That makes you ours until I decide otherwise. You understand?"
"Aye, I speak English. I know ye're struggling with the concept, but I do."
"You're useful to me as long as you're talking. You were inside their operation. You know what they were making, where they were shipping it, and who was buying. I want all of it."
"And when I've told ye everything?"
He let the silence answer. I was breathing on borrowed time, same as I had been for six months, and the only thing keeping me alive was whatever I could offer the man sitting in front of me.
I'd been here before. The accent was different, the suit was different, but the arithmetic was the same. Stay useful or stop breathing. The Italians had kept me alive because I could make things they couldn't. I just needed to figure out what this man wanted that he couldn't get anywhere else.
"Ye want to know about the operation," I said.
"I'll give ye the operation. But ye should know what ye're getting, because it's better than ye think.
" I pushed myself up against the headboard.
The room swam, but I held his eyes. "They were running knockoffs.
Luxury goods. Handbags, wallets, belts. The product looked good from across a room, but it fell apart if ye knew where to press. A bit like the Italians themselves."
The corner of his mouth tightened. I kept going.