by Sofia Daniel
My heart froze, and ice ran through my veins. If anything happened to those cameras, they might never track me to this featureless room.
“I didn—” He released my hair and slammed his fist into my belly. Pain battered through my insides, and I doubled over with a groan.
He lowered his face to mine, his heavy, excited breaths tickling my ear. “I could go on all day, but something tells me you can take a beating.”
My heart slammed against my ribcage. If he threatened to cut my face or something equally as hideous, I might not be able to hold out until Tom and the interns found me. I gasped out a sob. Where were they?
“They tell me you’ve been fucking those three boys.” His large, calloused hand stroked my stinging cheek. “That true?”
“No,” I said through clenched teeth.
The janitor’s rough, thick-fingered hand skimmed my neck in a parody of a lover’s caress. Disgust rippled up and down my gullet, and I wanted to hurl the contents of my stomach into his face.
I jerked away, but he shuffled onto his backside, and wrapped an obscenely strong arm around my back, holding me in place.
My bound hands automatically rose, to cover my breasts with my forearms, but he slipped his fingers underneath them and wrenched at my nipples. I shuddered and tried shrinking away, but that arm tightened around me, bringing us closer.
“I’ve always wanted one of these model types,” he crooned.
“I’m Edward’s girlfriend.” Hysteria laced my voice, making my words so high pitched, they sounded like a scream. “Don’t you think he’d be upset with what you’re doing?”
“Mr. Edward didn’t lift a finger to help me when I was on the run from the cops, so he can go fuck himself.”
My eyes shuttered closed. Mr. Carbuncle must have outrun them the day we’d caught him with that red-haired girl in the year above. Tears stung the back of my eyes. How could the police have been so incompetent? If I didn’t think fast and talk my way out of this… I wouldn’t let my mind venture into such dark territory.
He ran his nose up and down my cheek in a sickening rhythm that dragged those rough, stinking bristles over my skin.
“S-sir, so far, you’ve just hit me,” I said. “That’s not a big deal. B-but if you go any further than this, you could get into a lot of trouble.”
His fingertips moved up to my collarbone.
“How about you tell me what evidence you handed over to the police, and I won’t smash your face in,” he growled.
My muscles tensed in anticipation of the inevitable blow. At any moment, he would hit me again, but he would do worse if I told him that I had given the Saturday Correspondent the recording of Alice’s accounts of what he did to girls. It was my fault he was blackmailed into setting up cameras, my fault there was so much evidence in his lodge against him, and my fault that Mr. Chaloner kicked down his door and let in the police.
“Th-that day, I’d just left Elder House, and I saw the police, Mr. Chaloner and Mr. Jenkins. I was curious, so I followed them. You saw the rest.”
“But you knew about my filing cabinet.”
“It was the only other piece of furniture in the room apart from your desk. I got curious, after seeing you with that girl. There’s nothing more to it.”
The hand stroking my collar bone wrapped itself around my neck. “That’s all?”
“Y-yes.”
He slammed me down onto the parquet, sending bolts of pain shooting from the back of my head. “Fucking lies!”
“N-no!” I cried out.
He slid his hand under my tank top, wafting cool air over my bare stomach and lifting my top to my armpits and exposing my bra. “I suppose I’ll have to fuck the truth out of you. I’ll bet those wet-behind-the-ears boys haven’t taken you up the arse yet.”
Panicked, I thrashed out with my bound arms. He jerked his head back. I kicked out with my bound legs and hit him in the shins.
“Little bitch!” he snarled.
“The only way you’ll get to touch me is after I’m dead.” Every word was a struggle, and I fought against the ache in my jaw and in my rapidly swelling lip to speak. “My dad will have you extradited to California, where they have the death penalty. Would you like that, Mr. Carbuncle?”
“Stop,” said a man with a cultured voice. He stood in the doorway with his back to us.
The janitor backed away. “Why do you care what happens to the trollop? She’s responsible for ruining both our lives.”
“We’re here for truth and money, not sex with little girls.” I strained to recognize his voice. He was older, but I couldn’t tell his age, and he spoke with the same kind of accent as most of the people in the school, except he wasn’t as overly posh as Duncan or Coates. “Back away from Miss Hobson.”
Mr. Carbuncle gave my left breast a hard squeeze before drawing back. “Fine.”
I wriggled, and with my bound arms, wrestled my tank top over my bra and most of my stomach. “Thank you.”
“Miss Hobson… Emilia,” he said without turning around. “Do you deny passing information to the press about the staff and students of Mercia Academy?”
“I—”
“Before you answer, listen to my theory. The leaks only started after you returned from a tumultuous first term during which you were framed for a crime you did not commit.”
I kept my face blank. Mr. Carbuncle crouched at my side on his haunches, his oversized forearms resting on his knees. He leaned forward with an ape-like intensity and examined my expression.
“Your stepfather owns a media company and might have in-roads with the Saturday Correspondent.” He chuckled. “The Trommel Group is a mass of subsidiaries and shell companies. Mr. Trommel might well own the newspaper. Who knows?”
My heart flipped. Whoever this man was, he had researched Rudolph but wasn’t an insider. I stared at his back, ignoring the ever-approaching Mr. Carbuncle.
“My final piece of evidence is the… Valentines Day Massacre, a cute way to phrase a mass character assassination. You distributed tickets within Mercia Academy, possibly inviting everyone who had wronged you to become drunk and make fools of themselves in front of the cameras.”
Realization hit me like Carbuncle’s fist to the gut. This had to be Mr. Frost, the sycophantic, drug-dealing Latin Master. How else would he have known the tickets had come from me? I’d even suspected he could be Charlotte’s older lover. I lowered my head.
Mr. Frost had masterminded Henry’s kidnapping and arranged for all the blame to fall on me if anything went wrong. According to Rita, he was extremely intelligent. The man had probably talked his way out of being charged for his crimes and had somehow recruited Mr. Carbuncle to beat me into submission.
There was no way to win against an opponent like him. Especially with my arms and legs tied.
I cleared my throat. “What do you want?”
“The truth,” he replied.
“A-alright.” I swallowed hard. “I’ll tell you everything I know.”
Chapter 14
Mr. Carbuncle drew back several inches but remained firmly in my line of sight. Even when crouched, the man’s hulking form took up my entire vision. His shoulders quivered with impatience, and he ran a glistening, pink tongue along the underside of that bushy, walrus mustache. His excited breaths echoed in my ears, sending tremors of disgust across my gut. Tendrils of panic twined around my lungs and coiled up my windpipe, tightening with each passing second.
Dots appeared before my eyes, and the edges of the empty room spun. With my wrists still bound by tight ropes, I clutched at my neck and tried to suck in deep breaths, but they stuck in the back of my throat.
“Carbuncle,” said the man at the door. “Get the girl a glass of water.”
“But she’s faking—”
“Do it!”
He swooped forward, and muttered a tobacco-scented, “You’d better not be planning anything.”
A cold wave of fear and panic and revulsion seized my musc
les, and a pained whimper reverberated in the back of my throat. Would he make one last, defiant snatch of my neck to make his point?
He drew back, taking away his stench, and stood. I kept my gaze on the herringbone pattern of the parquet floor until his footsteps receded through the room. It was only when I spied him shuffling through the doorway that the tightness around my lungs loosened, and I could finally exhale.
“He won’t be gone long,” said the man at the doorway. His brown hair and broad back offered no clues as to his identity, and neither did the navy blazer he wore with black slacks.
“Where am I?” I asked again for the benefit of the hidden cameras.
“An apartment whose owners will be overseas for the next three months. If you ever want to leave here alive, you’ll cooperate with us and answer our questions.”
I swallowed hard. Everything throbbed. Even speaking with one side of my lips was a painful effort. “When I tell you the truth, Mr. Carbuncle hits me.”
He huffed a laugh. “That hardly seems fair, does it?”
I would have clenched my jaw with frustration if it wasn’t already swollen and aching, but blood pounded in my ears. This man treated my situation as a big joke, and the worst part was that I couldn’t confirm his identity. I turned my head, hoping that the one remaining camera in my hair might pick up a little footage that could give the reporters a clue about my location. I still didn’t understand why they hadn’t already gotten the police to kick down the door.
The room was empty, save the paint-stained dust sheet underneath me. It reminded me of a show about a forensics expert and serial killer who was meticulously careful about not leaving his victims’ DNA in crime scenes. I shook those thoughts away and focused on what I knew. The mystery man had to be affected badly enough by the leaks to have gotten involved with an abduction, so he was either Mr. Chaloner, our headmaster or Mr. Frost, our Latin master.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“The only person standing between you and Carbuncle’s wrath.”
I squinted my good eye and whizzed through my options. The police had arrested the headmaster. Last term, I’d seen him in cuffs, being bundled into the back of a police car. And Mr. Weaver from the Board of Governors had said he was facing charges of fraud and money laundering. Would they let someone with links to organized crime out on bail? I would have thought they would try to keep him in custody, so he wouldn’t use his Swiss Bank Account money to leave the country.
Maybe it wasn’t Mr. Frost. He was more than capable of an abduction like this, but his hair was red and thinning, not thick and dark. But if I were going to commit a crime and didn’t want to be identified, I would wear a wig.
I knew two things for sure. One, he didn’t want me to see his face in case I recognized him, which meant I might go free at some point. And two, he had collaborated with Charlotte, who had told me about the party and had probably left that fake invitation lying about in the hallway for me to find.
My tongue darted out to lick my lips. “What are you going to do to me?”
“You’ll remain here until your stepfather pays a ransom of a million pounds.”
All hope of leaving the empty apartment alive drained away with my plummeting stomach. Rudolph only cared about maintaining his reputation. He wouldn’t care about something as trivial as a dead stepdaughter. “W-what if he doesn’t?”
“According to the article in the Saturday Correspondent, he paid that amount to clear your name after the Bourneville kidnapping that never was.”
I gulped. “That was to prevent a scandal for himself.”
With a chuckle, the man turned his head to the side a fraction. “What kind of stepfather wouldn’t pay the ransom of a seventeen-year-old girl? The longer we keep you here, the more injured and debauched you’ll become. I’ll issue daily pictures to the press, showing your degradation over time. Rudolph Trommel will not allow the world to know him as a heartless bastard.”
My blood turned cold. He’d just given me an important clue. He probably wasn’t as affected by the leaks as Mr. Carbuncle but had used it as an excuse to let the janitor attack me. This opened up the possibility of culprits to anyone associated with Charlotte or Elder House. A million-pound ransom had universal appeal, and anyone with a bit of ingenuity could have lured me to the fake party.
But one word stuck in my memory like a skewer.
“Debauched?” I rasped.
“You saw Carbuncle. He can’t wait to get his hands on your pretty flesh.”
Chills spread across the surface of my skin, and I curled my knees into my chest. “H-have you sent the first ransom note?”
“We’ll upload it and a few photos as soon as your bruises turn purple.”
I stared down at the ropes encasing my wrists and grimaced at the sheer number of undecipherable knots. They weren’t taking any chances. Someone must have told Mr. Carbuncle and the mystery man that I had once freed myself from duct tape.
Mr. Carbuncle returned with an opened can of Diet Coke and placed it by my feet. “Your water’s in there. Drink.”
Holding up my bound wrists, I said, “I can’t pick it up.”
“I thought I told you not to bind her arms too tightly,” said the man from the doorway.
“She’s faking.” Mr. Carbuncle stepped closer and cupped his crotch. “Pick it up or I’ll give you something else to drink.”
Before I could scramble down to reach the can, Mr. Carbuncle nudged it with the tip of his boot along the floor to my hip. I stretched out my fingers, picked up the half-empty can, and pretended to drink. Neither of them had asked me any questions yet, and they didn’t seem to like each other much. But if I could get them to argue, maybe I could find an opening and escape.
“Go on then,” said the janitor. “Talk.”
I coughed a few times and gathered my thoughts. “That day the police raided your lodge, we found bank statements with monthly payments from the Saturday Correspondent.”
“Those were planted,” spat Mr. Carbuncle. “By you, most likely.”
“No.” I shook my head. Clearly, the janitor was in denial about having succumbed to blackmail, as he had put the incriminating evidence in the filing cabinet himself. “They were real enough to convince the people in the room. But there were a few checks written out to you that you didn’t cash, which proves you might have been involved with the paper against your will.”
Mr. Carbuncle didn’t answer for several moments, but he continued t heavy, excited breaths that make me cringe. Eventually, he said, “A reporter cornered me at the start of the spring term.”
“This is the first I’m hearing of your involvement with the press,” said the man at the door.
“You know what reporters are like.” I let my voice carry. “They probably found out Mr. Carbuncle had a criminal record and blackmailed him.”
“I’ve never been inside,” snapped the janitor.
“Oh.” I paused. “Then someone must have told them about what you do with school girls.”
Mr. Carbuncle swooped down and snatched my neck with such ferocity, he cut off my supply of oxygen. “Shut your fucking mouth!”
A scream caught in the base of my throat, and my eyes bulged. I batted at his hand with my bound hands and kicked at his legs with my bound feet. Tepid water, presumably from the spilled can, seeped into the fabric of my jeans. I’d hit a nerve, but if I couldn’t get him to release his strangling grip, I’d die of asphyxiation.
“Get off her,” said the man. “Now!”
“You keep quiet,” Mr. Carbuncle snarled through clenched teeth, splattering droplets of spittle onto my face. “Keep quiet, or I’ll snap your neck.” He lowered his face to mine and gripped harder. His harsh tone implied he would snap my neck later, whether I kept his secret or not.
My eyes bulged, and I tried to move my lips, but no sound came out. With my gaze locked onto his crazed, bloodshot eyes, I nodded.
The janitor released his grip and shoved me so
hard, my head bounced on the parquet floor.
“I mean it, Carbuncle,” said the man. “If you touch her again today, we’ll cut you out of the deal, and you’ll get no share in the ransom.”
My breaths came in labored pants, and my sore throat convulsed with relief. The man at the door had a business partner. Charlotte, most likely, who had lured me to the apartment building in the first place. But what if he wasn’t the headmaster or Mr. Frost? What if he was the man who had paid for Charlotte’s academy fees and cosmetic surgeries?
Mr. Carbuncle stepped back, but his scuffed boots remained in my line of sight.
I rolled up to a sitting position and shuffled out from the dust sheet and propped myself up against the wall. If they were going to kill me, they could leave DNA evidence and get themselves caught.
“You were saying, Miss Hobson?” asked the man. “What exactly does Mr. Carbuncle do with girls?”
My gaze flickered to the janitor, who stiffened.
Trepidation skittered down my spine and settled into my roiling stomach. Would the threat of not getting his share of the money be enough to stave off his violent impulses? Did it matter, if the man would allow Mr. Carbuncle to do worse with each passing day Rudolph didn’t pay the ransom?
I gulped in several deep breaths to steady myself and spoke. “W-when Mr. Chaloner kicked down the door to his lodge, we found him face-down between the legs of an upper-sixth former. That’s the bribe he takes from the girls. M-mostly with Ch-Charlotte Underwood and her friends.”
The room went silent, and I flinched. When the blows didn’t arrive, I peeked up through my lashes. Perhaps the unknown man wanted me intact for the first round of photos, so he could show a daily progression of additional beatings and force Rudolph’s hand.
“Charlotte,” said the man, his voice laden with menace.
Mr. Carbuncle shot me a venomous look. His hands curled into fists and he jerked forward. “She’s lying.”