Chapter 1 #2
He had a strange look on his face, but I didn’t think about it much. I was too relieved at hearing that I wasn’t going to be tortured and murdered.
You see, I was still incredibly, stupidly na?ve. Even then, after having been kidnapped off the street. I actually felt better that they weren’t going to kill me, that I wasn’t in this room alone, that I had this strong, decent guy—one who seemed to know what he was doing—to help me through this.
My dad and I weren’t close, but he would definitely pay the ransom. I could get out of here and go back to my normal, sheltered life, surrounded by smiles and pretty things.
We tell ourselves stories—over and over again—about how help comes just in the nick of time, about how we get saved at the very last moment, about how the bomb is defused with only a few seconds left on the timer. I was still scared, but something inside me believed that would be my story too.
This was bad. It was really, really bad. But I would still somehow be okay.
Then I remembered I wasn’t the only one in this room. “What about you?” I asked, looking over at Gideon. He was slouched against the wall with his face turned in my direction, his eyes resting on my face.
He blinked. “What about me?”
“They’re going to kill you?”
“That’s generally what they do to people who betray them.”
I started to feel sick again because I didn’t want that to happen. I scrambled to my feet and ran over to the window. “Are you sure there’s no way out of here?” I tried to reach up toward the window even though there would be no way of getting through the bars.
The window was too high for me to reach.
“There’s no way,” Gideon said. “All the walls are reinforced, and there’s no way of getting out that window.” He walked over so he was behind me as I tried to get a foothold on the cement block wall.
He gently pulled my hands away and, in the process, showed me his. His fingers were bruised and bloody. He murmured, “I promise I tried.”
I drooped, believing the evidence of his damaged hands if nothing else.
I slid back down to the floor, this time beneath the window. He lowered himself to sit next to me again.
“I was supposed to check in with my handler a while back. They’ll know something is wrong. They’ll be looking for me.”
I felt a little surge of hope. “Do they know about this house?”
“They should. We know most of the property that belongs to this clan. The gang’s reach is spread out all over the city, but my guys will be looking. They know what they’re doing.”
I let out a deep sigh and relaxed back against the wall. “So we just wait?”
“We just wait.”
Neither of us spoke for a few minutes after that, but I felt like I knew Gideon somehow. I didn’t know anything about him except a few random details of his appearance and his job, but something at the core of him felt familiar to me, like his deepest nature spoke to what I held dear.
I’d always believed in men like him. He had put himself in real danger to do something good in the world. He was a warrior, even with gang tattoos and bare feet.
“Why don’t you have shoes on?”
“They took them. They didn’t want me to have anything that might turn into a weapon.”
And even that just affirmed my understanding of who this man was. He made me feel safe, even in this bleak, horrible room.
I looked down at my pretty designer ankle boots with three-inch heels. “You can have my boots if you need them. For a weapon, I mean.”
He gave a huff of sound that was almost a laugh. “Thank you. I might take you up on that.”
He wasn’t as much of a fool as I was. Looking back, I’m sure he wasn’t protecting himself with safe delusions like me. He must have known what could happen, what would most likely happen. To both of us. After all, he’d walked through life with these men for eight months.
But he could smile anyway, and it comforted me. It affirmed my artificial vision of what the world was really like. The reassuring lie that we would be saved.
“What do you do with antiques?” Gideon asked after another minute.
So I told him about my job and about where I’d gone to college and about how I spent half my life at flea markets and secondhand stores.
And he told me about growing up in Nebraska where his father had been a sheriff, and about how, when he used to go fishing, his dog would try to help and would end up pouncing every time he saw a fish under the water.
“Poor little dog,” I said, shivering a little since it was darker outside now and colder in the room. “He must have been so disappointed to never catch anything.”
“One day he did. I think it was an accident since he was never quick enough to grab the fish he’d aim for. But once he came out of the water with a fish flapping in his mouth. He was so proud of himself.”
I smiled and started to respond when another shiver ran through me, chattering my teeth.
“Come here,” Gideon said, stretching out his arm. “It’s getting cold in here.”
I went over to him because I trusted him now, and I huddled against his side, trying to get warm. He tightened his arm around me.
I don’t want you to misunderstand. It wasn’t any sort of cozy, romantic moment. I was still terrified and confused and uncomfortable and queasy, and the bruise on my face hurt horribly. This man beside me was a stranger, and we had nothing in common except the danger we were in.
It wasn’t a good moment. Nothing about the situation was good. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. But I was still holding on to hope, and I felt better because Gideon was strong and he was beside me.
We sat in silence for several minutes until my teeth stopped chattering. My face was pressed against his shirt.
Because we were physically so close, I heard myself asking, “Are you married?”
“No.”
“Girlfriend?”
“Nothing serious. Relationships are too hard to make work when you’re undercover.”
“I guess so.”
“You?”
“Nothing serious. I was going out with a guy for about six months, but we broke up a few weeks ago.”
“What was he like?”
It was a casual question—like all our other personal questions had been. A way to pass the time. A way to think about nicer things than what we were facing here. So I didn’t hesitate about answering. “He was a lawyer.”
“Ah, slick and smart. I should have known that was your type.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing. You just seem like a girl who would date white-collar types.”
It was true. It was absolutely true. Never in my life had I gotten close to a guy with tattoos and rough edges like Gideon.
“I guess…” I trailed off, thinking about that, about whether it was even in me to feel close to someone like him under normal circumstances. “I guess we just go with what we’re used to.”
There was a pause before he answered. “Yeah. I think that’s right.”
I heard the voices again outside the room, and it made my body clench in fear. Gideon was listening, and his arm got tighter around me.
But it relaxed again as the voices faded.
“What are they saying?”
“The guys who brought me here have been drinking.” Something about the terse words sounded ominous, and I shivered as I burrowed into his hard, warm body.
I don’t know why exactly, but I started to get scared again. I mean intensely scared, the way I’d been when I first got to the house, only without the fog in my mind. Maybe I sensed something in Gideon’s body although it wasn’t something I could clearly identify.
He stopped making casual conversation though.
We sat together for at least another hour, in mostly silence. Then the voices were close to the room again. I could hear them clearly through the door although I couldn’t understand the Albanian words.
Gideon shifted on the floor, his whole body tensing up. He rearranged us so that I was even closer to him than I’d been before.
My heart was hammering so hard I could feel it in my eyes and ears, and I could barely take a full breath. He was nervous. That much was clear. And if Gideon had reason to be nervous, then I was absolutely terrified.
The voices were loud again—like there was a heated argument right outside the door.
“What is it?” I whispered when I finally couldn’t stand any more.
“They’ve been drinking a lot.”
“What does that mean? What are they arguing about?”
“About…”
My teeth were chattering, but not with cold this time. I was clinging desperately to Gideon’s shirt, as if holding on to him would somehow keep me safe. “About what? Tell me.”
It was dark in the room. Not pitch black but with no light but what was coming in from the moonlight and streetlights outside. I could see his face enough to see how rigidly it was set. “About whether or not to come in here.”
I almost choked on a surge of fear. These men were ruthless, violent. And Gideon had betrayed them. They must hate him more than anything. “I thought they were waiting for the boss.”
“They are. They’re not talking about coming in here for me.”
I made a helpless gurgle as the words processed. “But you said…you said they weren’t supposed to hurt me. They had orders or something.”
“They do have orders. The main crew here doesn’t want to let the other guys in. That’s what the argument is about. About whether… whether it counts.”
I knew what “it” was. Of course I knew what he meant. I was stupid and sheltered and living with ridiculous, romanticized notions about how I would get through this, but I wasn’t completely clueless.
It felt like my blood had drained out of every part of my body except my heart, which was pounding everywhere, pounding with the whole world. “Oh, God, Gideon.” I clung to his shirt, twisting it in my hands. I was practically sobbing. “Please don’t let them hurt me.”
I know it was irrational, but instinct often drives us to such irrationalities.
There was no reason to believe Gideon was capable of stopping what might be coming—one unarmed man in the face of who knew how many—but I had to ask him to anyway.
I had to. He was stronger than me, and I needed strength.
My conscious will had no power to overcome the instinct.