Chapter Sixty-Four
Eliot
The pain registers before anything else. Layers of it. Pressure behind my eyes. A stale, copper taste at the back of my throat, a dull ache in my shoulders.
My throat burns with each swallow, and my arms…aren’t where I expect them to be.
They’re behind me, wrists lashed together with something hard that bites into my skin. Tight enough to feel my pulse against it.
I jerk on instinct, but that only makes the thick plastic bite harder. A solid metal pipe runs from the floor to the ceiling, and my wrists are locked on the other side of it.
The angle is wrong. It pulls at my shoulders, stretching skin that doesn’t give like that anymore. The graft along my collarbone sends sparks of pain racing down my arms every time I breathe.
My ass is numb, legs stretched out in front of me, and another thick zip tie cuts into the skin around my ankles.
I can see a faint outline of the door. The only light in the room comes from a battery-powered lantern. It spills across cardboard boxes stacked four feet high.
The air doesn’t move at all. It smells like dust with something faintly chemical underneath. Familiar, but I don’t know why.
Until my eyes adjust enough to read the side of one of the boxes.
Harris Middle School
Christ. I was here this afternoon.
I inspected this building. Marked it as unsafe for occupancy and went home.
Somebody brought me back.
Footsteps sound beyond the door. One set. Then another. Getting closer.
The door opens, and a man moves carefully around the boxes, like he hates the idea of letting anything in the room touch him.
A second man, taller and broader, stands in the doorway. I know the shape of him, even if it’s too dark to see his face. I can still feel the pressure of his arm against my throat.
“Mr. Flint.” The first man picks up the lantern, and once it’s closer to his face, I know exactly how much trouble I’m in.
“Senator Dines.” My voice is weak. Raspy. Every swallow hurts more than the last.
“Your girlfriend is quite remarkable.” He’s almost amused.
“A woman in law enforcement, and she actually thinks she can tell people what to do. She’s spent the past two days digging into my finances, and just an hour ago, had one of her colleagues serve my company with a warrant.
Righteous law-enforcement nonsense.” His smile doesn’t falter.
“A woman like that should know better than to stick her nose where it doesn’t belong. ”
If I could, I’d rip his tongue out for the way he’s talking about her. Like her mistake was believing she had the right to question him. He hasn’t even considered that she might have found something. That her instincts and insights were dead-on. She dared, and that’s enough for him to condemn her.
“I’ve had to make some…staffing cuts the past few weeks.
I have one more position to eliminate, but I’ll have that taken care of tomorrow.
” He considers me with all the passion of a man checking his calendar for the day.
“Kurt will be so distraught over what he did to you, it won’t be a surprise when he drinks himself to death. ”
“What he…did to me?”
The senator smiles, and the light reflects off his perfectly white teeth. “Well, yes. You threatened to expose him, and he panicked. He brought you here, made sure you couldn’t escape, and set the building on fire.”
He says it so matter-of-factly, that for a second, I wonder if Kurt has been in on the whole thing. Fuck. He was. The report on the fire that killed Zack. That stole my career. He knew why the building came down, and he let me spend the past seven goddamn years believing I could have saved Zack.
“It’s not personal, Mr. Flint. Well, it is, but not in the way you think.
I’m aware you discovered that the fire that ended your career was made so much worse by a building owner who preferred to pay me ninety thousand for a rubber-stamped inspection rather than spending two hundred thousand to bring his paper mill up to code. ”
Hearing him say it makes it real in a way it couldn’t be until this very second.
“You killed Zack McNaulty! He was twenty-two, you fuckin’ piece of shit!”
I lunge so hard and fast, I almost pull my shoulder out of the socket. The pipe scrapes against my wrists, but whatever’s holding me doesn’t give an inch.
“I didn’t do anything. Blame the builder. Blame the forklift driver who left a pallet of flammable ink right next to a frayed electrical cord.” The senator waves his hand, dismissing Zack’s death like an inconvenience he can brush away.
Something cold settles in my gut. He isn’t denying what happened. He’s denying that it matters.
“Men like you don’t stop, Flint. You know it. I know it. And from what I’ve been able to learn about your girlfriend, she won’t stop either.”
I know where this is going. The anger builds, rage consuming every rational thought until the senator smiles again.
“So I’ll give her what she wants. Someone to blame. Someone she can hate for the rest of her days. Of course, Kurt will be dead, but that’s of little consequence. It will occupy her long enough for me to pin all of Ridgeline’s actions on one of the board members.”
I blink up at him.
“I need her distracted for a bit, you see.” His expression doesn’t change. “Hence, your death.”
“If you think that’ll stop her, you don’t know her at all,” I grit out.
My arms are shaking. The strain from the pipe and the position are working against me. How long until I can’t even hold my head up?
“No,” Dines says. “I don’t think it will.”
He looks almost pleased with himself. If I could move at all, I’d rip the smile off his goddamn face with my bare hands.
“That’s why she gets to watch.”
The other man steps into the room and sets a small video camera encased in a thick plastic box on the floor just out of my reach.
I study it for a moment, then narrow my eyes at Dines.
“It’s rated up to a thousand degrees. The camera has a cellular chip in it that will stream the video to a secure location.” He nods at the damn thing. “It should last long enough.”
My mouth goes dry.
“No.”
Dines snaps his fingers, and the other man returns with a full-face respirator. Clear plastic, adjustable straps, and an oxygen tank connected by a thick hose.
No. God, no.
“Smoke inhalation is quick. You know that. Painless, mostly. You pass out before the flames ever reach you.”
Dines steps out of the way, and his henchman starts to fit the mask over my face.
I thrash, try to stop him, but there’s nowhere to go. He grabs a fistful of my hair and slams my skull against the pipe.
The fight drains out of me in an instant.
All I can do is blink.
He sets the mask in place, tightens the straps, and then steps behind me. Everything is moving in slow motion. I hear a metallic click. Then another.
When he’s done, the mask digs into my cheeks. He pulls a roll of duct tape from his pocket and secures the hose to my chest, covering it with layer after layer of tape until there’s no way I’ll be able to pull it out even if I did get my hands free.
“You’re a fucking monster!” I scream through the plastic. The words are so muffled, I doubt he can hear me at all.
“Enjoy the next hour,” Dines says after a quick glance at his watch. “There’s enough oxygen in there for twice that. But the fire will be here long before it runs out.”
He crouches slightly, peering at me through the clear plastic.
“Tomorrow, the video will show up in your girlfriend’s inbox. That way she can watch you burn alive again and again, and again.”
I pull against the restraints until my shoulders scream. Neither man moves to stop me. They don’t need to.
Dines strolls out of the room like he doesn’t have a care in the world, his muscle following. The door shuts, and the lock turns with a heavy thunk.
Then…nothing.
I know what this is going to feel like. I don’t have to imagine the pain the way another man might.
My body already knows. I remember the sound before the pain.
Seven years ago, I remember thinking that a person’s skin isn’t supposed to make noise.
Then being unable to forget the sound of burning alive.
I should have died back then.
Maybe that’s why I’m here. Maybe this is the Universe’s way of balancing the books.
If this is a debt coming due, there’s a part of me that understands why.
But underneath that, is something bigger. Something so much stronger.
Parker.
Her face this morning in the doorway. Her laugh. Her smile. Her heart.
The mask fogs and clears with every breath. I test the restraints again. Nothing gives.
How long until it starts? Until the smoke curls under the door. Until the heat becomes unbearable. Until the first flames find my skin, and all I can do is scream until the end?