Chapter Seven #2
My body locks in disbelief. No. The word comes out ruined beneath the hand still crushing my mouth.
Cold spreads first. Then heat. Then a thick, horrible weakness that moves too fast to fight cleanly.
I try to drive my heel down. Try to throw myself sideways.
Try to do anything but sink. But my limbs are already turning distant, my nerves misfiring under the chemical flood.
The flashlight beam smears across mud, fencing, dark fabric, the lower half of a stranger’s face hidden behind black cloth.
“Got her,” someone says.
My mind catches on the words stupidly, as if they belong to some other woman in some other life.
No. No, no, no. I am dimly aware of being lifted, one arm under my knees, another across my back.
My head lolls against a hard chest that smells like damp canvas and gasoline.
Above me the sky is huge and unreal, all low cloud and fractured moonlight.
The animals are still screaming. That is the worst part. Briar Hollow sounds wounded.
I try to lift my head. Try to catch something useful.
A face. A plate. A direction. Anything. All I see is a dark SUV tucked near the outer fence line, not on the main drive but farther back where the trees thicken and the old service gate sits half hidden behind brush.
Clever. They know the property. This was planned.
That thought lands in my slowing mind with sick, delayed clarity. Someone chose me.
A vehicle door opens. I am shoved inside hard enough that my shoulder slams into metal. Cold vinyl. Mud. Oil. Old smoke. My wrists are dragged behind my back and bound with something rough and synthetic that bites into skin immediately.
“Careful,” one voice mutters. “Boss said alive.”
Boss. I fight to keep my eyes open.
Outside the vehicle, another man says, “What about the others?”
A pause.
Then, “Too late. Go.”
The engine roars to life. Tires tear through wet ground.
The vehicle lurches hard enough to throw me sideways, and the last thing I see of Briar Hollow is through the streaked rear window.
My porch light burns weak and gold in the distance.
The barn stands dark and wide. The land I fought for falls away behind me while the wolves keep howling into the night.
I come back to myself in pieces. Road noise first. Then pain.
A brutal ache pounds at the back of my head.
My shoulder throbs with hot, nauseating insistence.
Both hands are numb from the way they have been tied.
The drug still clings to my muscles and thoughts, making everything feel thick and slow, but the blackout is thinning into a grim, ugly awareness.
I keep my eyes closed. Listen. Men in the front.
Two voices, maybe three men total. One nasal and impatient.
One lower, flatter, the one giving instructions.
The heater spits stale hot air that smells faintly of mildew.
The road beneath us has changed. No longer smooth pavement.
Gravel now. Maybe dirt. More jostling. Less speed.
How long?
I try to count backward and fail. Long enough.
Far enough that cold has crept through the side panel beside my legs and left one knee aching.
I ease my eyes open a fraction. The interior is dark.
No overhead light. The windows are black with night.
I am crumpled on the floor behind the second row, wedged against a tool bag and some kind of plastic crate. My ankles are bound too. Wonderful.
Panic nudges at the base of my throat, but I crush it down.
Think. I test my wrists against the binding.
No give. Zip ties, maybe, or cord pulled brutally tight.
My phone is gone. My boots are still on.
My jacket too. I search the shadowed floor around me and realize with a sick drop in my stomach that they searched the inner pocket where I sometimes keep a folding blade. Empty. Of course.
The men up front keep talking.
“…said fifty out,” the nasal one mutters.
“Then fifty,” the other says. “Shut up.”
Fifty. Miles. Minutes. I do not know. I swallow against the chemical bitterness coating my tongue.
Outside, the darkness shifts again. Trees crowd closer now, branches striking the sides of the vehicle in dry, whipping scratches.
The kind of road no one takes by mistake.
Remote. Unmaintained. The world outside feels emptied of anything human.
My mind, traitorous and immediate, goes to Marius.
Not because I want it to. Because he knew.
You should worry. Just not about me. Liar.
Or perhaps worse, not a liar at all. There was danger beyond him after all, and now I am inside it, being hauled through the dark by men who call some unseen stranger boss.
Is this connected to him? Is this about the thing moved through my land?
Or did his arrival only expose me to people even worse?
I do not know. That ignorance gnaws harder than the rope, harder than the pain.
The vehicle slows. Turns sharply. Stops. Every muscle in my body goes rigid. Doors open. Cold air rushes in carrying pine, rot, wet earth, and the mineral scent of old wood soaked too many times by weather. Someone yanks the back door open and a flashlight beam slices across my face.
“She’s awake.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
Hands close around my arms and haul me out.
My legs barely obey at first. Gravel shifts under my boots.
Night presses close from every side, deep and enormous.
I force myself to look, to gather what I can.
Trees. Dense. Dark. Tall. No road lights.
No house lights. Nothing. And ahead of me, half swallowed by forest and neglect, stands an old ranger hut.
The building sags in the middle as though it has been holding its own ruin together out of habit alone.
One side of the roof has partially caved in over a leaning porch.
The windows are boarded or broken. The front door hangs crooked on its hinges, paint peeled nearly to bare wood.
Whatever agency once used this place is long gone. Abandoned. Remote. Chosen.
A wave of terror rolls through me so hard my knees buckle. The men drag me forward anyway.
“Up,” one snaps.
I force air into my lungs and stumble toward the porch.
My mind circles one impossible fact over and over, refusing to make it less real.
This is happening. I have been taken. No one knows where I am.
The porch groans under our combined weight.
One of the men kicks the door wider and shoves me inside.
The air smells of mold, old ash, and animal droppings.
Their flashlight beams sweep over a single main room with broken cabinets, a rusted stove, and the remains of a table collapsed against one wall.
A narrow hallway disappears deeper into the structure.
In one corner, supplies have already been stacked.
Water jugs. A lantern. Blankets. Duct tape.
A first aid kit. Prepared. Of course they were prepared.
They bring me to a wooden chair near the center of the room.
Not an interrogation chair. Nothing theatrical.
Just something old and solid enough to hold a body.
They force me down into it and retie my wrists behind the slats, tighter this time.
My ankles are secured to the chair legs.
One man crouches to check the knots while another lights a battery lantern that throws weak yellow light across the room and makes every shadow look diseased. My head pounds. I lift my chin anyway.
“Who are you?” I ask, and hate the shake in my voice.
No one answers. The shorter man strips off his gloves and jams them into a coat pocket. He leaves the ski mask on. Coward.
“What do you want?”
Still nothing.
The taller one finally looks at me, eyes flat through the slit in the fabric. “Quiet is smarter.”
I stare at him with every ounce of hatred I have. He stares back without interest. That chills me more than rage would have. This is not personal to them. I am not even a person in this room. I am leverage. A witness. A problem being stored until someone else decides what I become.
Somewhere far outside, an owl calls once through the trees.
I swallow hard. My shoulder screams where they wrenched it.
Blood has dried tacky in my hair near the base of my skull.
My hands are already going numb again. I test the chair once, subtly.
Solid hardwood. Old, but not weak enough to splinter easily.
The shorter man glances at the other. “How long?”
“Till morning, maybe longer.”
“And him?”
A pause.
Then, “We wait.”
Him. My pulse kicks hard. Not enough information. Not nearly enough. But enough to confirm this is not improvisation. Someone is coming. Or someone ordered this and will decide what happens next.
The shorter man steps toward me and crouches so suddenly I recoil on instinct. He smells like cigarettes and damp wool.
“You make noise out here,” he says softly, almost casually, “no one hears it.”
I say nothing.
He tilts his head. “You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
He rises and turns away. A minute later they retreat toward the far end of the cabin, speaking in low voices I cannot make out.
One remains somewhere in the hallway. The other goes outside, boots thudding across the porch before fading into the dark.
A third, if there is one, I cannot place now. Maybe only the driver. Maybe perimeter.
I sit bound in the lantern light, breathing through pain and cold and the crushing reality of the room around me.
Briar Hollow is fifty miles away. Maybe more.
My animals are there without me. Nora will notice by morning.
Maybe sooner. The sheriff too, eventually.
Someone will find the broken glass. The tracks.
The blood in the yard. Someone will know I did not leave willingly.
But night is long. And in the cold center of that abandoned ranger hut, with strange men moving just beyond the lantern glow and the woods pressing black against every wall, morning feels impossibly far away.
I close my eyes for one second only. Then open them again. No crying. No collapsing. No giving them that.
Outside, the wind moves through the trees with a sound like whispering. And somewhere many miles away, too late to stop any of it, a man named Marius is coming to an empty farm