Chapter 29 - Jade
The warehouse has a smell that gets into everything.
Machine oil and old concrete and something underneath both of those, something damp and organic that has been living in the walls for years.
The cold comes up through the floor and into my knees and shins where they press against it, a deep bone-level cold that has nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with the quality of a place that has never been meant for people to stay in.
My wrists ache where the binding cuts in.
My jaw throbs where the floor caught it when they threw me in the vehicle.
I think about Marcus.
Not the way I usually think about him, the flinching involuntary replay that ambushes me at odd moments.
I think about him deliberately, the way you press on a bruise to remind yourself it's there.
I think about the cabin and the firelight and the moment I understood what was about to happen, and I think about the woman I was in that moment, how terrified she was, how certain she was that terror was the only available response.
That woman survived.
So will this one.
Dominic leaves within the first hour, two guards taking up positions near the door with the bored efficiency of men doing a job they've done before.
They don't look at me the way Marcus looked at me, which is the only mercy in the room.
What they do instead is almost worse, the low-grade cruelty of men who have been told not to touch something and have found every way to make you feel that restraint as a threat rather than a protection.
The first one is broad across the shoulders with a thick neck and small eyes that slide over me when he thinks I'm not watching. The second is leaner, younger, with a mouth that seems to be in a permanent state of finding something funny that no one else can see.
The younger one gets a bottle of water from somewhere and drinks it slowly, watching me. When he's finished he walks over and upends what's left of it directly onto my lap. The cold hits all at once and I gasp before I can stop myself, and his face does the thing it's been waiting to do.
"Sorry about that," he says, not sorry at all.
I say nothing. I look at the wall past his shoulder and breathe through my nose and think about the binding on my wrists, the give in it, whether there's any angle I haven't tried yet.
"She doesn't say much," the younger one says to the other, drifting back toward the door.
"Boss said we can't touch her." The broader one doesn't look up from his phone. "Didn't say anything about later, though."
The younger one laughs. It bounces off the corrugated metal walls and comes back distorted, and I press my thumbnail into the rope at my wrists and work at it and say nothing and think about rage instead of fear.
Time passes in the elastic way it passes when you have nothing to measure it against. The light through the high warehouse windows doesn't change much.
My knees stop hurting and go numb and then start hurting again.
The guards rotate their conversation between their phones and occasional observations about me.
The younger one gets bored eventually. He pushes off the wall and saunters over, crouching down to my eye level with that permanent almost-smile. He’s close enough that I can smell cigarette smoke on his jacket.
He starts talking. Something about what Dominic plans to do with me once Phoenix doesn't show, his voice low and conversational, enjoying the sound of his own cruelty. I keep my eyes on his face and my breathing even and I wait, because I only get one shot at this and the timing has to be right.
He leans in.
I drive my forehead into his nose with everything I have.
The crack is immediate and dense and deeply satisfying.
His hands fly to his face and he rocks backward, the words coming out of him garbled and high-pitched, nothing like the voice he was using a second ago.
Blood pours through his fingers, fast and dark, hitting the concrete in a steady drip that echoes in the silence.
I'm already pulling at the binding, wrenching my wrists apart with everything I have, and for one suspended second I think I feel it giving, I think the rope is moving, I think this is actually going to work.
The broader one crosses the room in four strides.
The bigger guard moves before I can react.
His hand closes around my arm and the floor comes up fast, my cheek hitting concrete hard enough to send white sparks in my eyes.
He's saying something above me but the words don't register because his fist drives into my stomach and every molecule of air leaves my body at once.
I curl around the pain. It brings my face up just enough for the slap to land clean across my cheek, the crack of it ringing off the warehouse walls.
My ear goes high-pitched and useless. The taste of blood fills my mouth, warm and metallic, and I press my lips together and breathe through my nose and refuse to make a sound.
"Stupid," he says, very calmly, the way someone says a word they've used many times before. "Stupid girl."
Another punch. My ribs this time, and I hear the sound I make, something involuntary and terrible, and I hate that I made it. The younger one has stopped making noise and is watching now, one hand still pressed to his face, his eyes gone flat and mean above his fingers.
"You're going to pay for that," he says thickly, through the blood.
I press my head to the concrete and breathe and wait for it to stop, which it does, eventually, because Dominic told them not to mark me up and there are only so many places you can hit a person before the evidence becomes visible.
When the broader one steps back I stay where I am for a moment, taking inventory.
My ribs ache with each breath. My face feels swollen on the left side. My wrists are still bound.
The binding is looser than it was.
I file that away and don't move and focus on my breathing and wait.
Dominic returns sometime later. I hear his footsteps before I see him, that quiet rhythm I've memorized by now, and I push myself upright as he comes through the door because I will not be on the floor when he looks at me. The effort costs me and my ribs wail with pain.
He stops when he sees my face.
His pale gray eyes move from me to the broader guard and back again, and the temperature in the warehouse drops in a way that has nothing to do with the concrete floor. He doesn't raise his voice. That's almost the most frightening thing about him, the way his anger doesn't need volume.
"I told you not to mark her up." He says it quietly. "She needs to look presentable for the video."
The broader guard starts to explain. Dominic stops him with a look.
He crosses the room and crouches in front of me.
This close I can see the scar above his left eyebrow, the broken capillaries in the whites of his eyes.
His scent hits me, the same sharp smell from the sidewalk, and something in my stomach turns over at the recognition of it.
He takes my chin between his fingers without asking, tilting my face toward the light, and his touch is so impersonal that it's worse than roughness would have been.
Like I'm something he's inspecting. Like the bruise on my face is an inconvenience to him rather than a thing that was done to a person.
He examines the damage and releases my chin.
"Here's what's going to happen," he says. "You're going to record a message for Phoenix. On camera. You're going to tell him that if he doesn't confess publicly to murdering my brother, I'll send you back to him in pieces."
"I won't do that."
"You will." His voice carries no warmth. It's a statement of fact, the way you'd tell someone the weather. "You'll do it because the alternative is considerably worse, and because you're smart enough to understand that."
"He won't confess. He'll come for me instead."
Something shifts in his expression. The corners of his mouth move in a way that isn't quite a smile but is in the same neighborhood. "I know.”
The word lands wrong. I go still. Something cold moves through me that has nothing to do with the concrete floor or the water soaking my clothes, and I look at him, really look at him, past the controlled face and the eyes.
”You're using me as bait."
He doesn't confirm it. He doesn't need to. The almost-smile does it for him.
"This was never about the confession," I say. "You don't want a confession. You want him to walk through that door."
"Smart girl." He says it without inflection, a simple acknowledgment. "Phoenix will come rushing in to save you, exactly the way he did at the cabin. Impulsive. Emotional. Thinking with everything except his judgment." He pauses. "Only this time I'll be ready for him."
My stomach drops. "He's going to kill you. You understand that, right? Whatever you're planning, however many men you have in this building, Phoenix will find a way."
Dominic leans forward until his face is very close to mine, until I can see my own reflection in those colorless eyes. "Maybe," he says quietly. "But I'll take him down with me. And you'll be here to watch it happen."
He holds my gaze for one more moment, then stands and straightens his jacket with those precise mechanical movements. He looks at the two guards with an expression that makes the broader one take a small step backward.
"Get her cleaned up," he says. "We're recording in an hour."
Then he walks out and the door closes and I am alone again with two men and a concrete floor and the smell of machine oil.
I am not a hostage waiting to be rescued.
I am a trigger. A mechanism. The thing Dominic Webb has built this entire trap around.
My ribs grind when I breathe. My face throbs in time with my heartbeat. The binding on my wrists has a millimeter of give that wasn't there an hour ago.
I press my thumbnail into the rope and start working again, and underneath the fear, underneath the pain, underneath the image of Phoenix walking through that warehouse door into whatever Dominic has waiting for him, something else is burning.
Something that has been building since the parking lot and the hood over my head and the two gunshots that ended Torres.
I survived Marcus Webb.
I am not going to be the reason Phoenix doesn't survive this.