Chapter 9
YARA
I need to keep it together.
Ignore the pain, the fear, the panic, the memories threatening to take over.
Just keep it together.
Hold my head high.
Hide my emotions.
Look this asshole Davis straight in the eye, making sure he knows that even though he might have the advantage physically, he can’t break me.
“Fucking bitch,” he hisses, right before he cocks his fist back and punches me in the stomach.
It knocks the wind out of me, and I gasp for air, sucking hard against the fabric stuffed in my mouth.
If I could respond, I’d tell him he needs to be more original. At last count, he’s called me fucking bitch six times, traitorous bitch four, and just plain bitch a whopping ten.
Why am I counting? Because it’s better than thinking about just how dire my situation is.
Davis grabs my face, his fingers digging into my jaw and cheeks. He leans in, so close I can see the faint acne scars pitting his forehead and smell the stale coffee on his breath. “Nothing to say?” he asks with a sneer. “Not going to defend yourself?”
I glare at him, letting my anger and defiance speak through my eyes. I can’t exactly tell him how furious I am, which he knows damn well, since he’s the one who gagged me.
He stares at me, his gaze narrowing as it meets mine. After a few long seconds, he spits, “It’s not going to work this time, Yaaaara,” he drawls out mockingly. “You think you’re so special. Like you can get whatever you want just because of how you look.”
I don’t think that. Not even close.
“I watched you,” he continues. “Flaunting your body. Flirting with all the men. Convincing them to give you special treatment. I’m sure you had sex with them to get what you wanted.”
Davis releases my face, shoving me backward as he lets go.
With my arms stretched above me, bound by a rope looped over one of the basement crossbeams, and my feet barely touching the floor, the movement sends me swinging.
The rope rubs against my already raw wrists, and a trickle of warm blood runs down my arm.
“You are pretty,” he concedes, his face twisting as he says it. “I’ll give you that. And your body—” His hand shoots out to grab my breast. He squeezes it experimentally, like he’s testing the firmness of an orange in the grocery store. “I can see why men would be tempted.”
My skin crawls from his touch, and I have to fight myself to keep from kicking out at him. I tried that already and ended up with two more broken fingers to show for it.
As he lets go of my breast, he shoves me again. “Not me, though,” he says. “You’re not going to drag me into your game.”
Another rivulet of blood runs down my arm, its heat almost searing against my chilled skin.
With my sweater hanging in torn shreds, it’s not much protection from the cool temperature in the basement.
Despite the adrenaline that should be keeping me warm, I’m covered in goosebumps. Tiny shivers wrack my body.
It’s the panic. That’s why. Whenever I have a panic attack, I get chills all over. If circumstances were normal, I’d grab my weighted blanket and use that to help me get through it. But here, there’s no relief. No reprieve from the triggers that keep coming.
The blood. The sticky feel of it. Its coppery smell.
The pain, especially around my wrists, reminding me of that horrible day when my life changed forever.
The knife Davis is wielding, the metal flashing whenever the fluorescent light hits it.
The helplessness.
The fear.
The memories crowd in, thick and poisonous and clinging. For a moment, my mind splits.
In one half, I’m in my basement, held hostage by a man I thought was an ally.
In the other, I’m back in Iran. In the chaos. Wells is on the ground, covered in blood. Kai is crouched over him, desperately trying to stem the bleeding. Saint and Ford are returning fire, attempting to provide cover.
I’m just getting into position to take a shot when something hard and heavy crashes into me. I’m knocked over. Stunned. Black edges in.
Then Malik shouts. Feeling as though I’m moving in slow motion, I turn my head to see him emerging from behind a tree with his hands in the air. There’s a rifle pointed at his head. His expression is grim. Resigned.
Someone grabs me, hauling me to my feet. Cool metal presses to the back of my neck.
Malik shouts to the rest of the team to retreat. To save themselves. Get Wells out of there before it’s too late.
Kai looks up, anguish all over his face. He doesn’t want to. None of my teammates do.
Understanding the inevitable, I meet Kai’s gaze and give him a tiny nod.
He has to go. It’s the only way.
Then I’m struck again. The darkness closes in. My last waking thought is that I’ll never see my teammates again.
Tears burn my eyes at the memory.
I didn’t know then that Wells was already dead.
I didn’t know Malik would meet the same fate only weeks later.
I didn’t know, back then, that the Yara I used to be died that day, too.
Just as I’m falling into the flashback, pain sears across my side.
It jerks me back to the present; back to Davis’s sneering face and the knife, now slick with fresh blood.
Keep it together, I tell myself firmly, while forcing the pain down deep. My only chance of getting out of this is to keep my shit together. Figure out a way to talk him out of this.
Davis holds up the knife—a Ka-bar, just like the one I have upstairs in my nightstand—and turns it both ways, so I can see it. “I’ve been dreaming of doing this for years, you know.” He stops. “Did you know, Yara? Did you know this kept me going whenever I thought about giving up?”
When I don’t answer, because, duh, I can’t, he slashes out with the blade again. This time it catches my arm, and a moment later, I hear the faint drip of blood on the floor. “Did you, Yara?” His voice rises. “Did you?”
Though I don’t want to respond to his madness at all, there’s a slight chance that by engaging with him, I might be able to convince him to remove my gag.
Unlikely, but if there’s even a sliver of a chance…
I just need to be able to talk to him. Find out why he’s doing this.
Because I can’t figure it out. I didn’t do anything to him.
I barely even talked to him. So why is he here, intent on torturing me?
Do you really think that’s all he’s planning to do? that obnoxious inner voice of logic asks. He’s going to break some fingers, knock you around a bit, and leave? You’re not stupid. You know there’s only one way this ends. And it’s not with him letting you go.
No, I refute silently. That’s not true. I escaped once. It can happen again.
Except I didn’t really escape, did I? I was rescued. By a Delta team sent on an undercover mission after the U.S. government received intel that I was still being held there, along with three other captives. All I really did was manage to stay alive until then.
“Answer me!” Davis barks. His face is mottled with anger. “Did you, Yara? Did you know that every time they tortured me, I thought about doing the same to you?”
Before the knife can strike me again, I shake my head. I can’t answer him any better than that.
Mollified, Davis lowers the blade. For now, at least. “No,” he says in a slightly calmer tone. “I bet you didn’t think about me at all. Just like you didn’t think about your teammate, either.”
The mention of Malik is a dagger straight through my heart. I still remember the day he was taken to a different holding facility—for the truly dangerous hostages, I was informed—and the words he said to me as they dragged him away.
“It’s going to be okay, Tink,” he told me. “Stay strong. I’ll see you soon.”
But he didn’t. Because not three weeks after that, he was dead. A fact my captors took great pleasure in informing me about, threatening that I’d be next if I didn’t keep in line.
“No, you didn’t think about anyone but yourself,” Davis adds. “You found a target, and played him so he’d give you special treatment. Arash, wasn’t it?”
I stare back at him, unsure if he wants me to respond.
“It was,” he answers for me. “Don’t think we didn’t all know what you were doing. Offering up your body so you’d get more food. An actual bed. Books, even.” He barks out a sharp laugh. “Books. I’m fucking getting beaten and you’re sitting in your cushy room, reading.”
I shake my head before I can stop myself.
It wasn’t like that. I was treated better than the other captives, but it wasn’t because of anything I did. I never played up to Arash. I certainly never offered my body in exchange for anything.
No, it was just a stroke of good luck in a shitstorm of bad.
Arash was one of the men in charge of the facility where I was held, and for some reason, he took a liking to me.
Maybe it was because I could speak Arabic, so we could communicate.
Maybe it was my name, which has a Persian origin.
Maybe it was because, despite the horrible things Arash did, there was a part of him that was reluctant to hurt a woman.
Whatever the reason, it probably kept me alive. It prevented me from being hurt worse than I was. But the special treatment, as Davis put it, never extended to letting me go, or any of the other captives there. Not when I was still the enemy.
Do I feel guilty about it? Yes.
Do I think it was my fault? No.
Does that make any sense? Not really. But that’s the thing about emotions. They don’t always make sense. They just are.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Davis says smugly. “I can see from your eyes you know what you did. Turning your back on your fellow soldiers so you could be comfortable. Turning your back on your own fucking teammate.”
He drags the edge of the knife down my cheek; not hard enough to break the skin, but close to it.
“I know you gave up secrets, too. Told that dirtbag Arash all sorts of things while you were in bed with him. What’s a little pillow talk between lovers, right?
What’s giving up a little top-secret intel when it means you get a mattress to sleep on instead of dirt? ”