Chapter Seventeen
Seventeen
Exclamations of surprise and dismay come from the main salon at the sudden plunge into darkness. My eyes strain to adjust. Slowly, I begin to make out the city lights outside the window.
“Come,” Allard says, taking my hand again. “Let us get somewhere safe.” He pulls me toward another door. I push against him.
“No,” I say. “We’re done.”
“We are not quite done.” He uses a placating, gentle tone, and it feels grossly out of place given the way he’s pulling me.
“Tell me what you and Dane are going to do in Paris.” His face is illuminated enough to show a ghost of a smile on his lips.
“And don’t pretend there is a fictional romance between you two and you are only here to see the city.
If it was real, Seaver would never let you leave his side, but he let you go so easily. ”
I say nothing, desperate not to give away how true to the mark this feels.
He grins, and it stretches into something full and savage. He wedges my hand hard between his chest and his massive biceps. I pull it back, but he keeps it clamped. “Let us find some light, yes?”
“No,” I hiss, but we’re moving, through another door that leads farther from the general salon with everyone else.
I hope Dane is trying to find me, that he’s looking for me now.
Why didn’t we have an exit strategy in place when we made our plan for this evening?
Or worse—what if Dane is part of this? I can’t be certain of anything right now. I take in a deep gulp of air to scream.
Allard stops. “Make a noise and I will be forced to hurt you—and Zoe? I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Give me my hand back, then,” I snap, yanking. But the man’s damn biceps are made of steel, and I feel the ligaments in my wrist pull sharply.
“Pull it,” he says. “Go on. Break it.”
A shiver of fear threatens to overwhelm me.
I’m not going to break my own hand. But I look at the size of Alexandre Allard and consider it.
This can’t be real. He’ll let go. I give my arm a vicious yank, but his arm is unmovable and a horrid pop comes from my wrist, followed by a dark bloom of pain.
I yelp, but Allard’s hand has already clamped over my mouth, like he anticipated it.
He tsks. “Now, that’s not going to solve anything, is it? Don’t make a stupid mistake by making further noise. We don’t want to have to dislocate anything else.”
I’m shaking, my stomach turned upside down. We begin moving, out of the room and down a dark hall. Shards of agony bring tears to my eyes every time we take a step and my wrist is jostled.
Allard and Sophie obviously planned this with the book. I force myself to be as calm as possible, to find a way out of this, out of the vise clamp of his arm. Panic laces my heartbeat as I think of Delphine’s easy laughter and the way she said We are not worried.
At the far end of the hall, the lights come back on just as Allard opens a door to a set of black metal spiral stairs. He nods at them.
“You’ll have to be careful how we maneuver on these,” he advises. “I would not want your wrist to be in worse shape if we have to twist to fit.”
“You’re too goddamn big for both of us to fit,” I hiss. “Asshole.”
A disapproving cluck. “You have such a filthy mouth. I bet Dane likes that. Do you say nasty things for him in bed?”
“Fuck you,” I spit.
In response, Allard twists sharply, forcing me to slam against him to keep my wrist straight. It twists farther, and I feel something in my bones shift. I make a silent O of pain as he clomps down the steps. I am staggering, falling behind him. Tears stream down my face, but I refuse to cry out.
The stairs wind down for what feels like three or four floors.
At the bottom, the walls are made of rough, age-darkened stone, like the building is older down here.
But the door in front of us is modern, some kind of dark gray metal, and the keypad is high-tech looking.
It lights up and shimmers at his approach.
I expect biometrics of some kind—at least a retina scan—but he pokes out a code into a keypad.
The door clicks open, and then we’re through, down a cold passage made of that rough stone.
He opens another door and flicks on a light.
Instead of a torture chamber, it’s a wine cellar, and a nice one. There’s a little bistro table and two stools. A small ledger sits on the table with a pencil. The shelves are sturdy and clean, and the number of bottles must be in the hundreds. There’s not a cobweb in sight.
“Now.” Allard releases my wrist, and I hug it to myself. Because it was compressed by his body, it hasn’t swollen yet, but the release of blood makes it throb horribly. He shuts the door behind him. “Let us talk about your plans for Paris.”
I purse my lips, madly trying to think of a way out of this. I have my phone, of course, but somehow I’m pretty sure Allard isn’t going to sit here while I pull it out and call for help.
“Zoe,” Allard says softly, advancing a step. “Look at you. So helpless. So angry. It’ll go much easier for you if you simply tell me.”
“I’m here to see Paris. That’s it.”
He leans against the shelf. “See what, exactly?”
“Oh, you know. Sacré-C?ur. The Musée d’Orsay. The Louvre. Montparnasse.”
“And?”
“There is nothing else!” I yell. So much for keeping my cool.
He crosses those giant sequoia-size arms in front of his chest and sighs. “Please believe me when I say it hurts me to punish you.”
I snort a disbelieving laugh. “There’s. Nothing. Else.”
He moves too fast for someone of his size. He slams into me and propels me back against a rack. My spine crashes against glass, bottles digging painfully into my back. I give an involuntary grunt and sag a bit as the pain hits. My back stings, and I know there will be bruises.
“Zoe,” he says reproachfully, like it’s my fault.
My options are so limited. I don’t know if I should wait him out or knee him in the groin.
He grabs my tender wrist and slams it into the bottom of a wine bottle, and I gasp with pain.
He twists it, and something else pops in there.
Tears leak from my eyes now. Striking back will surely backfire given his size and strength advantage, but I’m so frustrated. No—I’m furious.
So I bring my knee up hard.
He gives an oof and rears back, enough for me to move out from under him. I’ve made it to the door when he catches me, ripping my other hand back and twisting my arm with sickening sharpness behind me. He spins me around and smacks me hard across the face. I feel my lip split.
“That was naughty,” he says, gasping, which pleases me because at least I got a shot in. He breathes through it and then says, “Now. We will behave, yes? Perhaps you need a moment to consider your options. You are lucky that I am a patient man.”
Where the hell is Dane? Has he noticed I’m gone? He’ll come looking. He has to.
“Answer me.” Allard’s strikes fast, grabbing my dislocated wrist and squeezing. I gasp in pain.
“Okay! All right! We’re here to see Dane’s friends.” The words come to me out of nowhere. He mentioned friends in his story about being trapped in a shipping container. “In Montparnasse. That’s all.”
Allard shakes his head as though he doesn’t believe a word of it.
I’m worried what he’ll do next. I’d like to think I’m one of those people with incredible mental strength who can withstand hours—days!
—of torture, but obviously I cannot stand a single second.
It’s an unpleasant thing to learn about myself.
He seems to see it too, because he says, “All you have to do is tell the truth. Once you do, I will open that door and you can walk right out. Simple, yes?”
I badly want to believe him, but that’s never how these things work.
I take a step back from him, away from the door.
He lets me. I take another step. I’m at the back of the room now.
But Allard stalks me. I keep moving. I don’t know what else to do.
I expect to hit the rough-hewn wall at my back, but there’s space—and I realize there’s a gap between the end of the shelf and the wall.
It’s me-size, and I step into it, into the shadowy sliver.
Allard is there in an instant. I move back and…he can’t reach me. His arm isn’t long enough. “Unwise, Dr. Wilder. There’s no place to go. Come out and I won’t break your wrist.”
“I’ll stay in here,” I say.
He stares at me in the gloom. Sweat trickles down my neck, between my breasts. It tickles, but I don’t dare move. He can stand there forever. I’ll wait him out.
“Perhaps you would like a puzzle.” His voice is low. Taunting.
I want nothing from him. I don’t acknowledge his words.
“All right,” he says, as though I said yes. “I will give you a cipher to solve, since you are so good at them. Since you are so smart, Dr. Wilder. Decode GHDG IDWKHU. How about that? A nice, short little ciphertext. Then you can walk out.” He spells out the letters slowly.
I blink at him. I don’t understand why he’s giving me a puzzle.
“Dr. Wilder. Solve the puzzle. Unless you can’t think that fast. You can’t do it.”
I’ve already solved it—it’s a ROT3 Caesar cipher, silly in its simplicity. Move the letters of the alphabet three places to the right. Normally I would need paper for this, but I memorized a three and five shifted alphabet years ago.
The plaintext is monstrous.
“Give me your answer, Dr. Wilder. Or I’ll tear this shelf apart. Shall I? It won’t take me long.”
I swallow against a dry throat. My legs are wobbly jelly. “DEAD.” My voice comes out as a croak. I try again. “It decodes to DEAD FATHER.”
I sense rather than see his grin. His delight. “You see? I know all about you. I know your father died. You were young, yes? So sad. Such a loss. A puzzle master, your father was. Come out now. You solved my little puzzle, so I will let you go.”
I can’t imagine how he knows about my dad. It’s chilling. What I do know is he’s not letting me go. I expect him to start taking apart the shelving, and I picture him taking me apart afterward, ripping off limbs like I’m a rag doll. But he moves away from the shelf.
“Maybe some time on your own here will help you change your mind about talking.”
I stare at him between the bottles, dumbfounded. Is he really leaving? It seems too easy.
But he slams the heavy cellar door behind him. A lock sounds. After several long minutes, I creep out and check the door anyway, my wrist screaming in protest.
I am locked in, alone. I kick at the door.
Yell. There’s not even an echo. This place is soundproof.
I fish my phone out, surprised he didn’t take it, but there’s no cell service down here and there are no Wi-Fi options when I check.
I scan the walls, but there are no outlets or anything in here.
I go back and stuff myself into the shelving hidey-hole in case he returns.
I sob for a moment in frustration and pain.
My wrist throbs. I hate the way this all happened so easily.
And where is Dane? Taking off to laugh and flirt with beautiful women?
I push myself to think, to come up with a plan.
I worry that if Allard comes back, it won’t take much for me to give in again.
That whole exchange wore me down pretty damn fast, and it couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes.
And there’s no doubt in my mind that he will come back.
I hear the lock click on the door. God, here we go. I tense and shrink against the wall again. The door opens, but it isn’t who I was expecting.