Chapter 43
Harper’s wrists stung where the guard had cut away the zip ties, rough enough to scrape skin, and her breath came too fast, fogging in the cold air heavy with damp and old sweat.
Beneath the ruin, it was clear the room had once been a boarding dormitory. The hooks along the wall sat too low for adults. Children had hung coats there. Tiny uniforms. Backpacks. Wet winter scarves.
Faded names were scratched into the wall and then crossed out, the plaster beneath gouged open. Four narrow metal bunk beds with thin mattresses against the wall.
One fluorescent strip buzzed overhead, flickering every few seconds as if deciding whether to die completely. The window had been painted over from the outside. A bucket sat in the corner beside a wardrobe with one hanging door.
Cold pressed through the walls in slow, relentless waves.
Harper swallowed against the thick burn in her throat.
The adrenaline that had carried her through the van ride was draining out of her bloodstream fast, leaving shaking muscles and nausea behind.
She slid down the wall to the floor. Her feet were bleeding.
Her body had been running on fear and adrenaline for days. One disaster falling into the next without enough time to think about any of it properly.
Now there was nothing. No immediate wound to treat or direction to run. No task demanding her hands and brain, or attention.
Just waiting. She was terrible at waiting.
“They brought another one.” A voice came from the dark corner of the lower bunk.
Russian. Female, worn hollow with exhaustion.
A woman sat wrapped in a blanket, half-hidden in shadow.
Mid-thirties. Dark smudges under her eyes.
Hands loose on her knees, scarred knuckles and broken nails.
She met Harper’s gaze the way people watched storms approaching across open ground—without hope, just an awareness that another thing had arrived that would need enduring.
Harper cleared her throat. “Hey.”
No answer.
Harper pushed on regardless. “How long have you been here?”
The woman shrugged. “Does it matter? The men outside don’t lose.”
The words landed beside everything already lodged inside Harper’s chest. Next to Pav with blood on his face and murder in his eyes, fighting barefoot outnumbered to reach her.
When he comes again, he won’t leave this compound.
Her throat closed and her body folded before she realized it was happening. She pressed both hands over her face as the first sob tore loose. Everything hit at once.
Days of terror and cold and adrenaline and wanting him too much, too fast, too deeply.
The sound ripped out of her before she could stop it.
Tears soaked through her fingers while her body bent tighter and tighter around itself, breath catching wrong in her chest, every attempt to control it making the next sob tear out harder.
The other woman said nothing, perhaps because she’d heard women break apart before. Eventually the crying wore itself out and Harper dragged both hands down her face until the friction burned.
What it left behind was harder.
Anger.
At herself for sitting here crying while Pav might be bleeding out or dead. They’d locked her in a room. Taken her clothes. Her shoes. Her freedom. They hadn’t taken the part of her that kept moving toward wounded people instead of away from them.
“I’m Harper.”
The woman studied her for a long moment. “Olga.”
Harper nodded. “Olga.”
The room settled back into silence. Hours slipped by, marked only by the buzz of the fluorescent light and the cold inching higher through Harper's bare feet.
Sound echoed distant through the building. A gunshot. Muffled, somewhere below them. Harper’s head snapped up so fast her neck hurt.
No. Don’t do that. Don’t start hoping.
Another shot. Closer this time.
Something’s happening.
Shouts and the grind of boots on dirty concrete in the corridor outside the room. Keys jangled. Harper pushed to her feet. Her pulse hammered against the raw skin on her wrists. Across the room Olga rose too, eyes keen now beneath the exhaustion.
The odds were terrible. Doing nothing was worse.
Harper pressed herself flat against the wall beside the door, her hands trembling so badly that she curled them into fists to steady them.
The key scraped into the lock and the handle turned. The guard shoved the door inward.
If this failed, he would shoot her.
Harper hit the door anyway, giving it everything she had. The edge slammed into the guard’s chest and clipped his jaw.
A window.
Harper darted through the gap.
The guard grunted, and his hand shot out, locking around her forearm. He yanked hard, and she crashed onto the corridor floor. Pain exploded through her knee and hip. Before she could recover, his grip shifted downward, fingers clamping around her wrist.
Harper twisted onto her back and drove the heel of her free foot straight into his face.
Crunch.
A scream ripped out of him instantly, his head jolting backward.
His grip released.
Blood streamed through the guard’s fingers.
Harper stared. Her foot still hurt from the impact. She’d felt bone and teeth give.
I did that.
The world narrowed and sound pulled thin and distant.
She’d never hurt anyone like that before.
Olga dropped beside the guard, stripping the keys from his belt and wrenching his handgun free from its holster in one fast, brutal motion.
She tore the radio from his shoulder, threw it down, and crushed it under her heel.
The moment shattered.
Move.
Harper scrambled upright, shaking so badly she could barely move her fingers. The guard writhed on the floor, making wet choking sounds behind his hands while Olga aimed the pistol at his face with terrifying steadiness. Whatever Olga had been before this place, fear hadn’t erased it completely.
“Get inside.” Olga motioned with the gun, and the guard crawled on his hands and knees, swearing, blood dripping onto the floor. She slammed the door behind him and locked it.
She tossed Harper the keys. “Go.”
Doors to her left and right. Peeling paint curled beneath old notices pinned crookedly to bulletin boards. A faded mural of children holding hands marched across one wall beneath water stains and grime, while alarms pulsed somewhere deeper in the building.
Harper fumbled through the keys for the one that fit the closest door. She got lucky on the third try. She unlocked the door and shouldered the heavy wood open. Inside, two women recoiled from the sudden light.
Somewhere below, another shot cracked. Plaster dust drifted from the ceiling. One woman whimpered and sank back from the doorway.
“It’s okay,” Harper said quickly in Russian. “You need to move. Now.”
She moved as fast as she could, her stomach a sickening knot, her lungs never seeming to fill completely.
The next lock resisted, the key jammed. Her palms were slick with sweat as metal ground against metal, and for one horrible second her fingers wouldn’t work. Her breath wheezed out of her when it finally turned.
On the other side, a girl who couldn’t have been more than seventeen, sitting on the floor with her back to the wall, her arms wrapped around a stuffed rabbit worn bald. She didn’t even look up when the door opened.
“Hey.” Harper crouched, keeping her voice with no urgency in it, even though urgency was the only thing in her body. “What’s your name?”
The girl looked up, her gaze nervous. “Lena.”
“Lena. I’m Harper. We’re leaving. Can you stand?”
Lena looked at the rabbit, then put her hand in Harper’s and didn’t let go.
Harper’s throat closed.
Don’t. Not now.
She pulled Lena upright and kept hold of her hand because Lena hadn’t released it and Harper wouldn’t be the one to let go first.
Olga helped her unlock the rest of the doors.
Women emerged into the corridor barefoot and shaking, wrapped in blankets or oversized sweaters, eyes huge with confusion and fear.
One crossed herself with trembling fingers.
Another whispered something in a language Harper didn’t recognize, over and over.
Eight women, not including her and Olga.
Harper counted them twice, Lena’s hand in hers.
“Stay together,” Harper said in Russian, then again in English for anyone who needed it. “We’re going to the stairs. Stay close to me.”
Gunfire echoed.
Closer now.
The women flinched as one. A few cried out, hands flying to their mouths, shoulders curling inward. Cold swept through Harper so fast it made her dizzy. Something bad was happening, but whatever it was, it was their only chance.
“Stairs,” Olga snapped.
Harper turned toward the far end of the corridor and started moving, the women behind her in a frightened, uneven cluster.
If Pav was here, this place was already bleeding.
“Stay close.” Harper took a breath and headed for the stairwell.