by Laura Carter
I stare at the barrel before she raises her hand and crashes the gun across my cheek and temple, sending me and the chair slamming against the concrete floor. My shoulder burns. My head rings.
“You said we weren’t going to hurt her.”
Feet. Converse. Combat trousers. I blink, trying to refocus, and watch Trina’s scuffed shoes storm out of the room. My breathing is erratic as the new feet move around the table towards me.
He grunts as he lifts both me and the chair back upright. Then Stuart Culliton sits onto the edge of the table, looking at my head. I can feel myself bleeding before a crimson bead rolls down my cheek.
My body trembles. Shocked. Cold. Terrified.
He rubs his hands harshly across his face and those familiar brown eyes are full of despair when he stops.
“Are you thirsty?”
I feel my brows furrow as I process the absurd question. Of all the things, that’s what he says. I nod, trying to understand how this boy, who’s shown moments of true sweetness, has come to sit before me now, taking a role in my kidnapping, messed up with Katrina Martin.
He reaches for a bottle of water behind him on the table. “Put your head back.”
I lean back, uncertain, but I open my mouth. He holds my chin as he carefully drips water into my mouth and I look into those eyes again.
“This is not you,” I whisper, not knowing whether he should be helping me, or who is behind that mirror.
He squeezes his eyes shut and when they reopen, they’re black. “You don’t know me.” He takes the water and leaves.
* * *
I don’t know how long I’m alone. I don’t know how long they’ve had me here. Rain continues to pour outside. The night is still dark. Wind blows in through the open window and whirls freezing cold air around my body.
“Gregory.” His name carries as a whisper in the room, drowned by the wind. I know he can’t hear me.
Tears mount behind my eyes. I close my lids to stop them from falling. They’re out there, watching me, and they won’t see me break. Gregory will be doing everything he can to find me. Jackson will have his team on this. I know it.
I won’t give him up. I won’t.
But as time passes and I don’t stop shivering uncontrollably, I wonder whether giving myself up is the only way to end this. Give Katrina Martin more than she bargained for. Give her the win she so desperately wants.
My teeth chatter and my head drops against my chest. My eyes close but I won’t sleep. My body wants to shut down but it can’t. They’re out there.
* * *
The door opens with the sound of metal grinding against concrete, making me lift my head up from my chest. Stuart takes off his coat and wraps it around my shoulders, still warm. I could cry out with delight but my throat is dry, my entire body aches. Tears don’t come. The heat of the coat sifts into my ice cold skin.
“Would you undo my hands?” I croak.
He stands on the opposite side of the table, looking at me with eyes full of pity, but he doesn’t move.
“Please.”
He doesn’t glance back at the mirror, which tells me we’re here alone. He moves to my back and unfastens the cuffs. I yell in pain as I move my arms from behind me, my shoulders burning through the change of position. I bite down on my lip, raising my numb arms until I’m able to rub my aching muscles.
“Thank you.”
He moves the chair forward from the wall where Trina left it and takes a seat opposite me. There’s nowhere for me to go. I don’t have any strength to fight and he knows it. Even if I tried to run, he’d catch me.
He rubs his face. He looks young. Helpless and lost.
“Why?”
My question doesn’t induce a reply but there’s a subtle change in him. Recognition? Regret?
“Why?” I ask again, louder this time.
“It’s not about you. It’s about him.”
Stuart’s head is down, his chin angled to the floor. He mumbles as he speaks.
“What did he ever do to you?”
His Zimbabwean twang is thick. “Men like him. Men who have everything. He has everything.”
“Christ, Stuart, she’s brainwashing you. You don’t know anything about Gregory and the shit he’s been through.”
“He worked hard for what he has, right? Don’t feed me bull, Scarlett, you’re better than that. I know what tough really is. I know what it’s like to grow up with nothing. No one.”
“He’s dealt with more than you know and he’s been nothing but nice to you.”
“He’s got a fuckin’ funny way of showing it.”
“He took you on.” I run a hand down my throat, trying to ease the pain as I speak. “That’s not something he’d do if he didn’t like you, if he didn’t see potential in you, if he didn’t want to get to know you.”
His body seems to soften and I allow myself to hope that I’m getting through to him.
“We both like you, Stuart. This is not you. We can walk out of here together.”
He stands, anger raging from him as he snatches the metal cuffs from the table.
“In front. Please,” I beg.
He cuffs me roughly, yanking my arms forward so they’re locked around the leg of the table. I’m alone again and the coat doesn’t hold off the cold for long. My muscles shiver and my head is increasingly weary.
Think. Find a way.
He grew up alone. That’s what he’s talking about. He told us in the first meeting we had with him that he didn’t know his parents, that he’d never met them.
I laugh internally. He swore on his mother’s life he wasn’t involved. Of course he did. He’s never met her. How could we have missed that?
What else am I missing? What do I know? Trina wants a confession that Gregory and D.I. Barnes were involved in bribery. Stuart wants what and why? Moreover, how in the hell do they think they’re going to get what they want?
Chapter Twenty-Five
At some point, I surrender. Whether it’s sleep, exhaustion or something else, I don’t know, but when my forehead rolls on the cold metal table and my eyes open, the sky is charcoal, not black, and the rain has stopped.
The living nightmare continues. I swallow, trying to soothe my dry throat, and push myself back, sitting as straight as my cuffed wrists allow, my back cracking as I rise.
I feel the presence in the room before I see the figure sitting opposite me. His tousled, dirty-blond hair looks dry, messy compared to his slick appearance at Thursday’s gala. Steely greys are focussed on me. His usually clean-shaven face is sketched with stubble and the remnants of a bruise I suspect Gregory made. He wears a thick, warm, duffle coat, fastened to the neck, making his shoulders look even broader than they are. His hands rest in the pockets of his coat.
“Scarlett, so thrilled you’re awake. And, if you don’t mind me saying so, looking significantly less smug than usual.”
I stare at the missing piece of the puzzle. Nick Henshaw.
He leans his head to one side. “Nothing to say for yourself today?”
“Why am I here?”
“Speak up now, Scarlett.”
“Why am I here?” My effort to raise my voice is lost in the gruff of my words.
He stands, moving slowly towards me. “Well, because you just.” His fist locks around my hair and yanks my head towards him as he grates his words into my ear. “Keep. Getting. In. My. Way.”
He releases my hair, pushing my head away from him, then pulls his chair around the table so it’s next to me, rather than opposite. He straddles the seat, leaning onto the back, his face so close to mine I can feel his hot, liquor laced breath. “You’re the brains of everything. Aren’t you, princess? So good. You excel at so many things, Scarlett.” He taps my nose w
ith the tip of his finger the way he might torment a child. “Including getting yourself kidnapped.” Now he laughs, rocking back and forth on his chair.
“So you intend to kill me, Nick? Wind up behind bars for life. Is that your plan?”
He laughs harder now, throwing his head back on a chortle then rocking forward, thumping his hand on the metal table and making me jump. “Ah, she’s funny. You kill me. No. I don’t intend to kill you, princess. That would be a waste of such a pretty little thing.” He twirls a finger in my hair and I lift my shoulder fast, pushing him away. “Oops. Gutsy. Perhaps I’ll change my mind. My new friend—I think you’ve met her, Katrina Martin?—she tells me anyone can pay their way out of a murder charge these days.”
“If you don’t want to kill me, what do you want?”
“Oh, sweetheart, you’re just a pawn in a big boys’ game. There’s something that means a lot more to me than your life. Or Gregory’s. Or putting both your bodies into the ground.” He sits upright, drumming his fingertips on the metal frame of his chair. “The thing is, you keep taking it from me. First, you take my company when it was starting to turn a profit again. All those years of putting sweat and blood and money into my company, then you and the mighty CEO, try to take that all away from me. Then, you force me to resign and I think you forgot to write my goodbye handshake into that resignation letter, princess, didn’t you?”
He stands from his chair and starts to pace the floor behind me. I watch him move in the mirror, my body tense, waiting for a blow.
“My wife left me.” His face contorts in a strange mix of, I think, anger and tears. He swipes the back of his hand under his nose as he snorts. “She’s the only fucking reason I signed your letter. That bastard used her against me and she fucking left me anyway.”
“Maybe you should have thought about that before you fucked someone behind her back,” I snipe.
“Maybe you should have thought about that before you fucked someone behind her back.” He mimics my words like a puppet, then grabs my hair and yanks my head up so I’m staring at the scene in the mirror. “So fucking clever.” The veins in his neck and temples are fat. His face is red with rage.
“Third!” He releases my hair and his reflection holds up three fingers on a sadistic smile. “Third, you ruin my plan. AGAIN!”
“Black Diamonds,” I say, watching him move so his back is leaning against the mirror and he’s staring right at me.
“Fucking Black Diamonds. I was supposed to get a payout. The game for three million.” He folds his arms across his chest. “Poof! Like magic, there you were again, fucking up my plan. First, you convince Gregory not to pay what the game’s worth. But he screws up, he offers us an in, lets Stuart take a position on the inside where he can see your next move. And I know the market, so I start registering the game that I own. But there you were again.”
Finally, all the pieces fit together. “This is your new plan. You want a ransom.”
“Ding! Ding! Ding!” He rattles his hands in the air with an enormous fake smile. “Jackpot! And from where I’m standing, it looks like you can’t fuck this one up.”
“I’ve got to hand it to you, Nick, you’ve played a good game.”
He takes a theatrical bow. “Why thank you, although, I already knew that.”
“So call him, tell him where you are, ask him for what you want.”
He smiles, leaning his head to one side and pointing a swirling finger at me. “Oh, I’m going to, princess. But for now, I’m going to let him sweat. He can wonder whether he’s going to get you back, whether he’s going to get what he wants. You’ve been gone all night. He’ll be damn near broken.” He sniggers, his eyes rising to the sky, his hands forming prayer. “Then I win two times.”
He lunges towards me, grabbing my throat, digging his fingers and thumb into my flesh, hard. I try to breathe but I can’t draw air. My legs kick, desperate for oxygen.
He releases me and my head falls forward as I gasp.
“Don’t get up,” he says, laughing as he leaves me in the room alone.
Chapter Twenty-Six
I squeeze my eyes shut, telling myself repeatedly that I don’t need to cry.
Why haven’t you found me?
A sob leaves my chest as a tremor runs the length of my body. I hang my head and drag air through my teeth.
“Dad, if you’re there, please help me.”
Dawn descends outside, the sky now a lighter shade of grey. It’s the only guide I have as to how long I’ve been here. My guess is twelve, maybe thirteen hours. I’m freezing. It’s hard to tell which part is producing the most pain. My head throbs. My arms and back are ablaze. Even my fingertips and my toes are stinging. I try to rotate my wrists in the cuffs but there’s no give and being chained to the table stops me from sitting upright.
When Nick grabbed my throat, I lost Stuart’s coat and I’m back to my black skirt and cream blouse—the clothes I wore expecting a day in my office.
I need a way out. Gregory hasn’t found me yet, which means there aren’t enough clues. If there were, he’d have found them. He’d be here, with Jackson, saving me.
Nick wants money and Gregory will give it to him. But when? At what cost? His life? I have to get to him first. I could confess to Trina. Then what would happen? Would she let me go?
My best chance. My only chance, is Stuart.
He feels alone. He never met his parents. I can empathise. My mother left.
I wait. Hoping he’ll come. Willing him to come. If nothing else, I need a drink. My body is weak and if I weren’t sitting, I don’t think I’d be conscious. I need water.
I watch the sky turn lighter still, grey in the dull winter weather, but day. There’s something about the new day that makes me hope, lets me find the faith I lost in the dark.
He’ll come for me.
* * *
I brace myself as the metal door screeches against the floor and when Stuart appears, I raise my eyes to the ceiling and thank my father for his help.
Stuart stalks towards me. “Put your head back.”
I choke on the water, my body rejecting the cool sensation on my throat. He retrieves his coat from the floor and hangs it back around my shoulders. Then he takes a banana from the side pocket of his combat trousers and peels.
“Please let my hands go.” I wince as the words leave my throat.
He unlocks the cuffs and releases one hand so I can slump back in the chair. He offers the banana to me and I want it but my arms are numb. I open my mouth and he nods, snapping pieces and placing them on my tongue. It’s funny, I’ve never noticed how sweet bananas are but now I feel like I can taste every fragment of sugar as my jaw moves slowly, chewing and swallowing like I’ve never had solid food. When I’m done, I’m able to lift my arm for water and I gulp down the rest of the bottle, placing the empty on the table.
Something’s changed. He doesn’t have venom or fight. It’s just Stuart. Soft eyed, dark haired, young.
“My mother left me when I was a child,” I say. “I was five. She took me to school one day and never came to pick me up. She walked out on my father and me.”
He shuffles on the table’s edge, moving to the side then back where it started. He folds his arms, then moves his hands to his lap. Finally, he moves his hands to either side of his hips and grips the lip of the table.
“Did she love you?”
“I think so. She said so.” I shrug. “I ask myself that question a lot. If she loved me, would she really have left? If she loved me, why didn’t she ever come back or try to contact me?”
I don’t know if it’s working. He focusses on an invisible spot on the concrete floor. I wait. Like Gregory would, I leave space for Stuart to fill the silence. Eventually, he does.
“At least you knew her. I’ll never know whe
re I really came from.”
“You were adopted?”
“I was in the system for years.” His face twists with a look that’s full of disgust. “A delinquent, they called me. Then I got foster parents. Time and again, new parents. Apparently, my mother gave me to a family she knew at first. I think they thought one day she’d take me back. I don’t know.” He exhales, still fixed on the same spot of concrete. “She never did. She killed herself.”
“I’m sorry.”
He lets out a short puff that rocks his body, then lifts his head to look at me. His browns are wide. Beautiful.
“I’m not even from Zimbabwe.” He laughs again, though the sound is drenched in sadness.
“Where are you from?”
He looks to the window now as if he’s wondering whether he wants to talk at all. “She had money. She was middle-class. The family who had me at first, they say she killed herself because she was forced to give me up. They say she was too young and I would have brought shame on her and her parents.”
“I’m sorry.” I say it again because I don’t know what else to say. Those two words have so little meaning.
He makes a noise somewhere between anger and pain, and rubs his hands over his face. “See, the kicker is, my mother, she had a younger brother. He’s alive.”
He walks to the window and turns to face me, dropping his back against the wall and lifting one foot flat against the surface behind him.
“She gave me up but they never did anything to hurt him. They never made him want to kill himself. They went on with their lives. Playing happy families.” His square jaw tightens and the look on his face, those familiar eyes, makes my stomach sink. “By the time I turned eighteen, I’d spent so many years hiding in my room, messing with computers, I was a tech whiz. I could hack anything, create software that no other kid of eighteen could create. I used that. I tracked down her family.”
I hold my breath now and I think I’m more terrified than I’ve been in the entirety of the last fifteen hours.