Ariel
They didn't let me walk so much as aim me in a direction and keep a fist around my arm until I got there.
Keys moved fast, like the stairs annoyed him personally.
Upstairs hit like stepping into a different world.
Fluorescent lights that had no business being that bright, the smell of fryer oil and old smoke soaked into everything, metal surfaces that didn't belong in a place that was pretending to be a house.
My eyes adjusted fast. I needed them to.
Kitchen first. Dead stove, dented fridge, a metal prep table with a roll of paper towels sitting on it like someone had domesticity on their to-do list and never got around to it.
Two guys at the far counter, one with a radio, one with a clipboard, talking in that overly calm voice people used when they were trying to sound like they had everything under control.
I counted the doors without looking like I was counting.
Front door down a short hallway to my right.
Garage straight ahead. Basement behind me to the left.
Ten steps from the basement door to the garage threshold.
Two more to the mudroom cutout near the back.
Four men I could see. A fifth voice somewhere past the garage I couldn't place yet.
"Quit looking around," Keys said.
"I'm trying not to fall," I said. Which was true. My hands were still bound and my balance was terrible.
He hauled me through the kitchen and into what had been a garage before someone decided it was a workroom.
The roll-up door was halfway open, rain slipping in sideways across the concrete floor.
Pallets stacked with boxes. Some kind of charity logo stamped on the sides that I was pretty sure was fake.
A gas can in the corner. A generator that coughed once, thought about it, and gave up.
A bare bulb on a hook. Wet footprints tracked back and forth in the same pattern, in and out, in and out, like the floor had just learned the route.
That was when I saw her.
Near the far wall. Chained low to a pipe.
A blonde girl folded against the concrete like she'd just stopped having the energy to hold herself up.
Her hair was matted and dark with blood.
There was a tattoo along her collarbone.
A sun, the rays warped where bruising had swollen the skin around it.
One eye was shut and couldn't open. The other was open and somewhere far away.
Gauze half-taped at the corner of her mouth like someone had started to help and walked away.
I made myself keep moving.
I wanted to stop. Every part of me wanted to stop and do something and fix it. But stopping wasn't going to help her and it wasn't going to help anyone still in the basement, and I had a job to do right now and that job was to look at everything and carry it back down to Cap.
A guy shouldered past me with a crate. I caught leather and a patch under his jacket. Skull, wheel, crossed wrench. I didn't know enough about that world to know what it meant, so I filed it for later.
Keys steered me into the mudroom. Hooks full of coats, a rubber boot collapsed by the door, a mat with one curled corner that was absolutely going to trip someone at some point, rain tapping against a small window.
The back door right there with a simple twist latch.
I counted: six steps from the kitchen table to that door if you were moving fast, seven if you caught the mat.
Keys stopped. Clearly unhappy about it.
His radio crackled. Hold staging. Route's mud. Do not roll until green.
He ground his teeth. "Copy," he said, in the tone of someone who did not copy at all.
Process the guy first. Keep numbers clean.
He shoved me half a step like that would make the instructions different. "You want me to park her?" he radioed back, already irritated.
Clear the hall. Back downstairs. Guy first, no marks.
"Great," he muttered. "Field trip."
We went back through the garage. The blonde girl didn't lift her head. The chain twitched anyway, a small involuntary movement like even unconscious she was trying. Rain cut under the roll-up door and hit my face and I tasted it, cold and real, and I held onto that.
Back through the kitchen. I kept cataloguing without staring.
The guy with the limp that got worse when he thought no one was watching.
The one with clean hands who wanted credit for work he wasn't actually doing.
A tall one with a laugh that didn't fit his face.
Someone bumped a whiteboard and got barked at.
Another one was furious about tarps in a way that suggested this had been an ongoing conflict.
Eight men total. That was what I had.
At the basement door, Keys banged it open and light fell down the stairs in bars. I took them myself before he could drag me. One less thing he got to control. Downstairs was cold again the way basements were always colder than the floor above them, like they existed outside the rules.
Keys rattled my cage door, shoved me through, cut my wrist tie and replaced it with a fresh zip without a word. He didn't put the ankle chain back.
"Stay pretty," he said, and slammed the door.
I listened to his footsteps go back up the stairs until I couldn't hear them anymore. Above us someone laughed too loud and got told to knock it off. The radio clicked. Hold until green.
Cap was watching me when I turned around. Of course he was.
"You hurt?" he asked, quiet enough it stayed between us.
"No."
He breathed once, slow and deliberate, the kind of breath that meant he was setting something down carefully. "Tell me what you saw."
I closed my eyes so it would come out in order.
"Kitchen — two men at the counter, radio and clipboard.
Front door's down a short hall to the right.
Garage straight ahead, basement behind us on the left.
Mudroom is a little cutout near the back door.
Ten steps from the basement door to the garage threshold, two more to the mudroom.
I counted four men in the kitchen, heard a fifth I couldn't place, somewhere past the garage.
" I opened my eyes. "With Keys, the watcher, and tote-guy that puts us at eight that I know of.
The garage has pallets stacked shoulder high, some fake charity logo on the boxes, and the roll-up door is about halfway open.
I could hear diesel engines outside, more than one.
Rain on the eaves. One guy out there smoking.
" I paused, then pushed the last part out because he needed it.
"And there's a blonde girl chained to a pipe in the garage.
She's in bad shape, Cap. Sun tattoo on her collarbone. "
To my right, Sunshine made a sound like someone had taken the air right out of her. "A sun," she whispered. "Oh god. That's Maya."
I pressed my fingers through the seam until she could grab them. She did. Both hands, bone-light and shaking. "She's breathing," I said. "I watched her long enough to be sure. She's breathing."
"Okay," Sunshine said, in the voice of someone for whom nothing was okay. "Okay. Okay."
Cap had gone very still. Not the frozen kind of still. The deliberate kind, the kind where he was thinking faster than anyone in this room realized.
"Did anyone put their hands on you?" he asked. Low, even.
"No. Just Keys getting me up the stairs." I exhaled. "They want you first. The radio voice, the clean one, said no marks."
He nodded like that fit somewhere he'd already made room for it. Then he tilted his head until his forehead was against the wire, and mine was against the wire, and there was just the cold mesh between us.
"He didn't hurt you," he said. Not a question. Making sure.
"Not even a little."
"Good." He shifted his bound hands into the light between us, just enough that I could see, and turned his wrists the smallest amount. The zip tie gaped where it looked like it shouldn't.
My mouth opened. "How—"
"Later," he said, which I was learning meant right now, quietly.
He settled back against the base of the cage like he was just resting.
Anyone looking would have seen a man sitting still.
What was actually happening was something else entirely.
He worked the wire I'd passed him earlier between his fingers, set the bobby pin against the weld at the bottom seam, and started.
Patient, methodical, moving only when footsteps upstairs were loud enough to cover the sound of metal on metal.
When the house went quiet, he went still too.
Completely, instantly, like someone had hit a switch.
I could feel the focus coming off him. It was almost physical.
"Talk," he murmured. "I need the cover."
I understood immediately. "Front door's probably the worst option.
Two men, short hall, nowhere to move. Garage is better.
Roll-up's already half open and the rain means the sound outside is louder than it would be otherwise.
The back door in the mudroom is a twist latch, six steps from the kitchen table, but there's a mat on the floor that's half peeled up. Someone's going to catch it."
"Copy," he said softly, like he was logging it somewhere inside his head.
The weld made a small sound. Like a complaint.
Sunshine still had my hands locked in hers. Across the aisle, Juno had her eyes closed and was saying something low and rhythmic, a language I didn't recognize. Praying, I thought. Good. We could use it.
"Eight men," I said quietly. "How do we get past eight men?"
"We don't fight eight men," he said, not looking up from the seam. "We make them get in each other's way and then we walk through the gap."
"That's the plan?"
"That's the start of one."
"Incredibly comforting."
"I know."
I almost laughed. Almost.
Upstairs, Keys was complaining about the schedule to someone who clearly didn't care. The clean radio voice cut through: Hold until green. Process the vet first. The generator outside coughed and caught. Rain kept coming.
Cap leaned into the work. His shoulder pressed against the wire where my cheek was and I let myself lean into it from my side, the two of us separated by steel and about two inches of air.
"Hey," I said quietly, because there was something I needed to say out loud even if I couldn't make myself finish it. "If they come down here before you're ready—"
"They won't," he said. Before I could push it. Before I could make it into something awful.
"You don't know that."
"I know enough." He glanced up, just for a second. "I told you you're going home on the back of my bike. I meant it."
I looked at him through the wire and the bad light and all of it, and I believed him. Which was either the smartest thing I'd done since I got here or the most reckless, and I honestly couldn't tell which.
"Okay," I said.
He went back to the weld. Patient and mean and relentless, the way he was about most things that mattered.
A few more passes. A pause while boots crossed overhead. A few more.
Then came a soft pop, barely a sound at all, like a knuckle cracking on the first try.
We both went completely still.
The house kept doing what it was doing. Nobody came. The radio clicked about something unrelated. Keys was still mad about the schedule.
Cap set the screw in deeper, worked the wire alongside it, fed the bobby pin the last little bit under the lip of the frame. One more careful press.
The weld let go.
He didn't celebrate. Didn't make a face or a sound. He just lifted his wrists and let the half-cut zip tie fall away, and then he looked at me through the wire with those steady eyes of his.
"Ready," he said.
I thought about the basement and the blonde girl in the garage and Sunshine's grip on my hands and Tess, who had put herself between me and something bad without knowing my name.
"Ready," I said.