Chapter 9 #2
He shifts again, trying to angle my hips.
Everything in me screams. I arch and buck and kick like an animal in a trap.
My heel catches his shin and he swears. He knees my thigh to make it stop.
It doesn’t. He clamps harder on my wrists.
Something in my shoulder grinds. I bite the mattress seam to stop the scream and taste someone else’s sweat.
I gag and swallow it because I will not give him a sound he can use later when he tells this story to someone who enjoys the same things.
“Say ‘sir,’” he says again, his voice pitched high and breathless. “Say ‘please.’ Say you want it, and I’ll make it easy.”
“Go to hell,” I tell him. It comes out thin, but it comes out.
He adjusts his grip to split my wrists into two hands—better control, he thinks—and that’s the opening I need. I yank my left free for half a beat and rake my nails across his face. I feel skin tear. He bellows and slams my cheek into the bed frame. The world flares white.
For a second I can’t see. I can only feel. His belt—metal on teeth. His zipper—a sound that makes bile punch up the back of my throat.
No.
A noise cracks the air like the room itself just tore.
For a half second my mind can’t make it fit the scene.
It’s too big, too sharp, too sudden. Then the smell hits—cordite, hot metal—and Danner’s body does something human and ugly: it reacts to sensation he didn’t expect.
His weight goes slack at the hip. He grunts a wordless, shocked sound and drops his grip on my left wrist. I roll by instinct, curling into myself.
A second sound—lighter, a clatter—his gun?
No, not his. The voice that follows doesn’t belong to him.
“I told him not to touch you.”
The sentence is flat and controlled, which makes it worse. The speaker isn’t out of breath. He isn’t excited. He sounds annoyed, like someone scuffed his shoe.
He actually tuts.
I roll to my knees, hand searching blindly under the bed for the screw that’s already gone. My fingers find dust and the edge of a bolt. I come up with nothing and make my empty hand a fist anyway.
The man in the doorway lowers a pistol a fraction. Smoke curls from the barrel like a filament. He wears a dark coat despite the heat of the metal box, a crisp shirt with neat cuffs at his wrists. His shoes are clean. His hair is neat in a way that has always had someone else’s hands styling it.
This man doesn’t belong on a freight ship, and the name Danner spoke earlier rings in my mind—The Broker. He belongs in a boardroom. The incongruity of seeing him here, so out of place, makes my skin crawl.
I squint through an eye already going puffy where Danner smacked me. I know him.
The recognition comes dimly, like a memory you can’t place. The lobby of the hotel. A flash of a profile near an elevator. The back of a head at a balcony above a charity auction. The glint of a signet at a handshake I watched from across a room. It won’t land, though, won’t take shape.
He doesn’t look at me for a long moment. He looks at Danner, his expression the same as if he were looking at a broken appliance.
“His mistake cost him,” he says, carefully polishing his handgun. Then his eyes lift and meet mine. They are very light. Very calm. “I hope you don’t make me hurt you, too, Ms. Jones.”
My last name in his mouth makes my heart pound so hard I feel my pulse in my teeth.
“Show me your hands, please,” the man says. “Slowly. I need to make sure you aren’t holding whatever you sliced him with.”
I lift my hands. They are shaking. I make my face blank, doing my best to hide my utter terror. My cheek throbs where it hit the frame. My ribs ache. One of my knees is going to be a riot of colors tomorrow if I get a tomorrow.
He takes two steps into the room without looking at the door, which tells me two things: he trusts whoever is behind him, and he is used to people making space for him in whatever room he enters.
He doesn’t point the gun at me now. He holds it near his thigh, steady, like part of his hand.
Blood has spattered the edge of his shoe.
He notices and flicks it off against the floor without looking down.
“Stand,” he says to me. “On your feet.”
Every part of my body says sit. Crawl. Bite. I stand. The ship hums, as if pleased with the obedience. It hurts to breathe but I inhale deeply anyway, wrap my arms around my waist, and hold that breath.
Hold myself.
The man studies me like a purchase—or a sale—he’s considering. It’s not a leer. It’s worse. A valuation. Like he’s measuring me for something or someone.
“You’ll walk,” he says. “You’ll keep your hands visible at all times. If you run, another of my men will shoot you in the leg. If you fight me, I will allow it once. Not twice.”
I don’t nod. I don’t speak. I look at the gun, then at Danner. Blood spreads under his hip, slick dark. The bullet took him somewhere ugly—pelvis, maybe. He’s dead, but that doesn’t seem to matter. The calm man has already moved him to the ‘write-off’ column in his ledger.
“Why should I go with you?” I hear my voice, proud that it’s even. “You shot him for breaking rules you set. That doesn’t make you a rescue for me. That makes you a manager.”
Something flickers in his eyes. Approval? Amusement? It smooths away.
“Because your alternative,” he says mildly, “is to test whether you can swim back to shore from here. Can you?”
Salt burns the back of my throat. Ocean flashes behind my eyes. The deck, the stacks, the horizon with no land in sight. I don’t look away.
I squeeze my eyes shut against the tears and shake my head once. “No.”
“Then we understand each other.” He gestures with the gun—not at me, but to the door. The muzzle never sweeps my body. That, somehow, is more unsettling. “After you, Ms. Jones.”
“I’m not turning my back on you.”
“Clever.” He inclines his head, a small show of respect that feels like a trick. “Walk beside me, then.”
I glance down at Danner’s body and wish that I had been the one to pull the trigger.
The man in the coat adjusts half a step to give me space to pass. He doesn’t crowd. He doesn’t threaten with his body. The threat is in his complete ease.
“Move,” he says, soft.
I move.
At the threshold I stop and reach back for the cup I left under the faucet. It’s half full now. A foolish thing to value. I take it anyway and drink, because owning my mouth in this room feels like a victory.
He lets me.
“Good,” he says. “You need to stay hydrated.”
We step into the corridor. Two men wait there with rifles held low. One of them is the man who was laughing from the deck, now very sober. They take me in with quick, trained glances and step aside when the man nods.
As we walk, he speaks as if he’s discussing a schedule. “There are rules aboard. Danner chose to test them. You will learn them without repetition. It will make this easier.”
“For who,” I ask.
“For everyone,” he says. Then he shrugs. “For you.”
We pass a stack of coils and a drum of something that smells like oil. The ship’s heartbeat moves through my feet into my bones.
I count my steps so I don’t fall apart between them. One. Two. Three. The screw is gone. My cheek throbs. My ribs ache. But I am upright, and I am unraped.
Yet.
I steal a look at him. His profile is clean. There is a shadow of a scar near his ear, old, thin. His mouth is a line. I know him. I cannot place him. The not-knowing scrapes like sandpaper against the inside of my skull.
“What’s your name,” I ask.
He smiles without showing teeth. “You’ll find out soon enough.”
I think of Conrad, of Atticus, of Maverick, of Storm—men who will pull maps apart until the lines fall in their hands. Men who do not stop. The thought of them sits warm and solid in my chest.
Hold on. However this goes, just keep holding on.
We pass the open door of a stairwell. Down, it leads to the dark I found earlier. Up, it goes toward light. He nudges me up. I take the first step and feel the ache in my legs like a ground truth. The man behind me is quiet. The men with the rifles are quieter.
I keep moving.