Chapter 21
EMILY
Iwasn’t entirely sure how I ended up here.
It wasn’t a proper room. More like a sectioned-off space inside something larger, colder, and unfinished. The concrete walls gave that away immediately, as did the faint damp smell in the air and the way every small noise seemed to travel farther than it should.
A warehouse or some kind of industrial unit.
I touched the back of my head and winced. The ache there was deep and mean, the sort that promised memory would come back in broken flashes instead of a clean line. I forced myself to breathe through it and looked around again, slower this time, more carefully.
No obvious weapons.
That didn’t mean there was nothing useful.
A metal chair. A tray. A thin blanket. A table bolted badly enough to the floor that maybe, if I had time and leverage, I could loosen one leg.
My laptop was with me, which seemed like either arrogance or oversight, though the laptop was mostly useless without Wi-Fi.
I had already drafted an email for help and pressed send once on instinct, absurdly hoping for a miracle, but it sat there unsent and glaring.
Still, I wasn’t passive. I refused to be passive.
I remembered enough to know how this had happened.
I was on my way home, already thinking about Pietro and dinner and how ridiculous it was that I was smiling down on a sidewalk because of a man.
I had taken the alley to get home faster.
Then there was a sharp pain, a burst of white behind my eyes, and after that, nothing.
Now I was here, god knew how many hours later.
The battery on my device mattered now, so I forced myself not to waste it. No pointless opening and closing apps. No checking for signal every three minutes out of desperation alone. I needed to think like someone trying to survive, not someone waiting to be saved.
The sound of the door opening cut through my thoughts.
The man from yesterday came in carrying a tray, a bottle of water, and what looked like the world’s least appetizing sandwich.
I had tried suggesting it was drugged yesterday, refusing to eat or drink until he’d looked at me with something close to boredom and said in heavily accented English that if he wanted me dead, I would already be.
He slammed the tray onto the table with all the warmth of a prison guard finishing his shift.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
He muttered something under his breath in a language I didn’t recognize, the consonants hard and fast, maybe Slavic in origin. I looked at him more closely while he adjusted the bottle, trying to catalog everything I could. Build. Height. Scars. Tattoos.
The one on his neck caught my attention first.
A double-headed eagle.
Not Russian.
Not Slavic at all.
I looked back at his face. “You’re Albanian.”
His gaze snapped to mine.
“Eat,” he said flatly.
Then he turned and walked out, slamming the door hard enough to rattle the walls.
I stared after him, pulse climbing inconveniently.
Albanian.
That meant something. I just didn’t know what yet.
So I kept looking, cataloguing, forcing myself to think instead of spiraling.
After ten minutes of scraping at the table leg with the edge of the tray and worrying the screws with my fingertips, all I had really managed to do was skin myself. By the time I stopped, my fingers were raw and stung, small crescents of blood collecting around the nails.
Fine.
If I couldn’t make a weapon, then I needed an opening.
The man had come in three times already, always the same bored routine: food, water, tray, no conversation beyond a few barked commands. And every single time, for a handful of seconds, he left the door open behind him.
That was all I was going to get.
When I heard the lock again, I moved quickly. I smeared a little of the blood from my fingers at the corner of my mouth and under one eye, then slumped awkwardly in the chair and lowered my head as if I was trying very hard not to faint.
He came in carrying the tray and stopped when he saw me.
I let my breathing turn shallow and uneven, swallowed hard, and lifted my head just enough to look ill rather than theatrical.
“I’m sick,” I said.
He looked unimpressed.
I forced a weak breath and glanced at the sandwich. “Tuna,” I muttered. “I think…histamine poisoning. It can kill you.”
I had no idea whether he knew enough English or enough medicine to believe me, but the possibility of a dead captive must have been enough, because with a low curse he pulled his phone out and frowned down at it.
That was when I saw the hotspot symbol.
My laptop was already open on the table, useless without Wi-Fi and nearly out of battery, but desperation had made me ridiculous enough to cling to things that belonged more in television than real life.
I had no idea whether a failed attempt to connect could send any kind of signal out, no idea whether anyone was even looking for me closely enough to catch such a thing, but hope had become a very strange and stubborn force by then, and absurd as it was, I had to try.
I dragged the laptop closer with one hand, found the connection, and typed in a password I already knew had almost no chance of being right.
He looked down at his phone.
I used the distraction immediately. I pushed myself up as if I was about to collapse into him, one hand stretched out for balance, and the second he shifted instinctively to avoid me, I ran.
I ran as fast as I could, heart hammering against my ribs so hard it hurt, and for one wild, glorious moment I thought it might actually work.
Then I burst through the open doorway and found myself in the main room of a warehouse.
Half a dozen men looked up at once.
A soccer match played on a small television fixed crookedly to the wall.
Two men sat at a card table with guns lying openly between the ashtray and a pile of bills.
Another was smoking by a window streaked with dirt.
The whole room smelled of sweat, stale coffee, and something metallic that made my stomach turn.
The man behind me shouted something in Albanian I didn’t understand but was certain was not meant kindly, and before I could pivot or change direction or do anything useful at all, he caught me and slapped me so hard my head snapped to the side and blood flooded my mouth.
The room tilted.
Then I heard another voice, younger, louder, cutting through the noise.
One of the men had stood up. He was leaner than the others, younger too, maybe late twenties, light-haired and sharp-faced, something oddly familiar in his eyes that made my skin prick for reasons I couldn’t yet name.
He barked something back at the man who had hit me, fast and angry, and even without understanding the words I could tell at once that he was not speaking to me.
He was reprimanding him.
Protecting me?
The younger man crossed the room and crouched just enough to bring himself level with me. His English, when he spoke, was perfect, with no accent at all.
“You’re feistier than he said.”
I pressed my tongue to the inside of my cheek and tasted blood. “Who said?”
He smiled then, and there was something wrong about the expression. Too calm. Too entertained.
Instead of answering, he caught me by the arm and hauled me upright with a roughness just short of cruelty.
“Here,” he said, steering me toward the back of the room. “You stay with us now.”
Before I could twist free, he shoved me down onto an old, beaten sofa against the far wall.
“Quiet.”
I looked around quickly, forcing myself not to shrink even though every instinct in me wanted to make myself smaller.
The men had gone back to watching me rather than the game.
One was smiling in a way that made me want to claw his face.
Another had picked his cards back up but wasn’t looking at them.
The man who had slapped me stood off to the side, still glaring as if he hadn’t enjoyed being corrected in front of the others.
Good.
Let him be angry.
Anger made men careless.
I wiped the blood from my mouth with the back of my hand and sat up straighter.
Whoever the younger one was, he mattered.
And if he mattered, then he was either my best chance of staying alive or the worst thing in the room.
Maybe both.
The warehouse door flew open so hard it slammed against the wall.
“Besnik!”
The name cracked through the room like a gunshot, loud enough that the younger man beside me sprang to his feet at once.
Besnik.
I stored it immediately.
The man who stormed in was older, broad through the shoulders, graying at the temples, his face so red that the veins in his neck looked on the verge of bursting.
He strode straight toward Besnik and started shouting in Albanian, close enough to spit in his face, one hand jabbing in my direction with enough violence that I did not need to understand the words to know I was very much the subject of the argument.
Besnik looked at me once, raised an eyebrow as if this were merely inconvenient, and then turned back to the older man. He answered in a low, measured voice, the exact opposite of the other man’s fury, and that somehow made the scene more alarming, not less.
The older man broke away from him and took a step toward me.
“Tell me, doll face, are you dating his cousin?”
I recoiled so visibly that I couldn’t help it. “Are you really calling me that?”
He blinked.
No matter the situation, no matter the fact that I was very probably in serious danger, I could not quite contain the disgust on my face.
I looked back at Besnik. “Who’s your cousin?”
That made both men pause.
The older one turned toward Besnik with explosive, furious expectation.
Besnik sighed through his nose, as though the whole thing had become irritatingly beneath him.
“I can’t believe this,” the older man snapped, rounding on him again. His English was rougher than Besnik’s but still clear.
“I asked you, Alban. I promised to help him. He said his girl was dating a loser and disrespecting him. He said we needed to take her so she remembered who could actually keep her safe. You said yes.”