Chapter 1 #2
I twist fast and throw the blanket at her, giving her no time to react before I grab at her. She yelps in surprise, and before she can actually scream, I wrench the cuffs out of her hand and loop the chain around her throat, pulling her down onto the bed practically on top of me.
My hands lock behind her neck, squeezing just hard enough to make her choke.
“Don’t,” I snap. “Don’t you dare fucking move.”
She freezes in my grip, the cuffs clanging faintly in my hands against each other as I tighten them around her throat again.
The chain connecting them is pressed tight against her windpipe, not hard enough to kill her but enough to show her I’m dead serious.
Her stuttered breath is enough to tell me I’ve got her full, undivided attention.
“I want my son back. Do you hear me? I want to know where he is now and I want him back,” I hiss into her ear.
Suddenly, the door opens, the first nurse from before barreling in with a tray of fresh slop to feed me.
Only, she doesn’t get very far before the sight of us on the bed makes her freeze in her tracks.
Her eyes go wide, her lips parting with the faintest intake of breath before silence swallows the room.
The nurse in my hold lets out a strangled sound, one hand clawing weakly at the cuffs while the other lifts to reach out toward her colleague. I shake my head when the first nurse glances at her, tightening the chain enough to draw out a garbled groan from the second nurse.
My own breathing is ragged, my eyes darting between them with a wild kind of desperation I’ve never felt before. This must be what a caged animal feels like when they’ve been packed into a corner by a predator. I’m ready to do whatever it takes to get out of here and see my child again.
I wet my lips with a quick flick of my tongue. “You think I won’t do it? You think I’m bluffing? I will kill her if someone doesn’t start talking. Where. Is. My. Son.”
The first nurse swallows hard. The tray in her hand shakes visibly. When she speaks, her voice is barely above a whisper. “Do not be stupid. You hurt her, they punish you.”
“Let them,” I spit out between my teeth. “They’ve already taken everything else from me.”
The woman in my hold squirms again, a panicked cry catching in her throat.
Even if she can’t understand what I’m saying, my intentions alone speak for themselves.
She knows she’s going to be the sacrifice made if I don’t get what I want.
I tighten the chain just enough to feel her pulse stutter against the side of my hand again where it presses to her throat.
“Call Mikhail,” I say.
The first nurse hesitates, her eyes narrowing. “Please—”
“I said call him!” I snap.
For a second she looks like she might bolt, like she might throw the whole tray and run.
Instead, she exhales and sets it down with hands that tremble.
She moves slowly when she fingers the pocket of her scrubs.
They fumble to close around something hidden there, a comms unit, I realize, when she finally retrieves it.
When she lifts it to her mouth, her voice shakes.
Rapid Russian pours from her lips, urgent syllables I can’t understand, but I don’t need to.
Her eyes are broadcasting the translation—a frantic, pleading script written in the white of her gaze.
She stares at her colleague, to me, and back again.
Her hands tremble so badly, the comms unit practically vibrates against her palm.
Her bottom lip quivers when she pulls it away.
“You won’t kill her…” she begs, the English fragile and thick with her accent.
“Try me,” I reply, jerking the cuffs again. The nurse in my hold whimpers softly, her legs twisting together on the mattress to try and get enough traction to buck back against me. She’s too weak to do anything more than simply claw at her neck.
Finally, the comms crackle to life.
The sound is sudden and sharp, a loud burst of static that cuts through the silence harshly. It bleeds into the air, buzzing against my skull until my teeth are practically rattling. All of us jolt. Then a voice cuts through, cold and brutal.
“Let her die.”
My stomach drops. I know that voice all too well.
Mikhail.
He doesn’t shout or threaten the other nurse to subdue me. He doesn’t demand for one of the guards to bust down the down and draw their weapon. He just says it with a calm finality that sends a chill racing down my spine, almost like he’s reading off a grocery list.
It’s complete and total indifference.
“She’s replaceable,” he continues. “If she dies, that’s your fault and you will be punished. If she lives, she will be replaced for being stupid enough to get caught. Either way, I don’t negotiate with hostages.”
The line goes silent once more, making the room almost deafening.
The nurse in my arms breaks it first with a strangled sob, her body trembling against mine.
Hot tears stream down her face, dampening where my hands rests under her jawline.
She’s saying something to me in Russian, begging and pleading at me to let her go, no doubt.
For one horrible second, I want to keep going.
I want to squeeze tighter just to see if he’s bluffing.
Just to prove that even a man like Mikhail could flinch when a body drops at his command because no matter how battle hardened a person may be, innocent lives should never be caught in the crossfire.
But then my stomach twists horribly.
I can’t…
I can’t kill her.
Because if I do, if I feel the life go out of her under my arm, there won’t be a way back for me.
I will never be able to live with myself for taking someone’s life who didn’t deserve it.
Even if these people have been cruel to me, they aren’t the ones holding me hostage.
They are also at the mercy of the psychopath leading them.
The cuffs slip from my grip when I let her free.
She tumbles and collapses onto the floor in a heap, coughing violently, dragging greedy gulps of air into her lungs.
Her hands claw at her neck as though she can scrub the bruises away.
The other nurse is there instantly, grabbing her under the arms and hauling her upright.
Her glare burns into me, fury and disgust all mixed into one.
Neither of them says a word to me when they quickly scramble to the door. It’s slammed shut, the lock turning, final and merciless.
My body shakes as if I’m still holding the chain around the nurse’s neck. I sink onto the bed, my legs folding up to my chest as I curl my arms tightly around them.
He called my bluff. Worse—he meant it. That nurse was nothing to him. She was replaceable, just like I am.
Just like Leo is.
My stomach lurches violently, bile clawing up my throat. I press my hand to my mouth, fighting the urge to throw up.
This is the man holding my son hostage.
This is the man who holds his little life in his hands.
I don’t know how long I stay like that, folded in on myself, knees pressed to my chest like they might shield me from the walls around me closing in. The seconds crawl by, melting into minutes, maybe even hours. Time doesn’t make sense here without sunlight or clocks ticking.
No one comes back to chain me to the bed like usual. There are no footsteps outside the door pacing like the guards usually do, just the heavy silence of what I almost did punctuated by the sound of my own quiet, shallow breathing.
Maybe it’s not just Mikhail who is a monster. Maybe he’s turning me into one too.
Eventually, I force myself upright.
My body aches with every movement, still sore from my shower fall, but it isn’t enough to keep me from wrapping the thin blanket around me to pace around and circle the room, scouring every corner of this small hellhole I’ve been trapped inside like I haven’t already done a hundred times over by now.
I check the same useless things—the vent that’s too small for me to crawl through, the window that isn’t a window at all, just a layer of thick glass sealed into the wall with a light behind it to make it look like it is. It’s really just a tease with no latches and no weakness to exploit.
I run my fingers along every seam of the concrete around it, searching for even the smallest gap I could wedge my fingers into and use to pull out the frame of glass.
Maybe there’s something behind it like a two-way mirror or a doorway to an old storage closet that connects to a forgotten hallway.
Maybe I can use the metal frame to batter against the door sealing me inside this place.
But after a while, I realize it’s molded too well into the wall.
They built this room for one purpose, containment, and now I’ve proven I’m exactly the kind of someone they were afraid of getting out.
The kind who turns a pair of handcuffs into a weapon.
The kind who gets desperate enough to threaten to kill someone and actually mean it without ever having a murderous bone in their body before this.
The thought makes bile rise in my throat again.
I press my back against the wall near the fake window, breathing through the sting of my shoulder when it begins to throb in a dull, pulsing ache.
The pain radiates down my arm from where I slammed it, all the way to my fingertips.
My ribs still pinch a little with every deep inhale but thankfully, none of it is enough to slow me down.
I can still walk. I can still move, still think.
I didn’t fall hard enough to ruin my chances entirely, and that’s the only saving grace I have to hold onto right now.
They’ll have to come back and check on me eventually.
There’s no reason they’d starve me out after trying to keep me alive for this long.
So, I need to make the most of the time I’m left alone here to figure out my next moves. What can I use as a weapon?
My eyes sweep the room again, hunting.