I remembered seeing the look of dismay on Aunt Sarah’s face, how she’d tried to grab for me, to restrain me, perhaps, or try to comfort me. But I’d yanked away from her and continued to scream, bashing at my head with my hands. I must have looked crazy. I knew I’d felt crazy in that moment. A handful of my dad’s old colleagues were there. The ones decent enough to show up, even though he’d died in disgrace. I’d seen how they’d looked at me as well, distaste mixed with pity. I didn’t care in that moment, but their expressions had haunted me since.
I’d run back to the house, where the wake would be taking place, and stolen a bottle of vodka. I’d shut myself in my room and drank neat from the neck of the bottle, swigs that burned my throat, but felt good. I didn’t think it had taken more than a few mouthfuls before I was good and drunk, and the booze combined with my emotional exhaustion had the result of me passing out on the bed.
Aunt Sarah woke me a few hours later to tell me everyone had been and gone already. I’d missed the whole thing.
The memory caused my stomach to churn, turning inside of me like a bad meal. I wished I could go back and change things. Be responsible. Make my dad proud. But fourteen-year-old me and twenty-year-old me were miles apart, and such a thing was impossible.
I had to live with what I’d done, though for all I knew, it wouldn’t be for much longer.
A horrifying thought came to me. What if something happened to the men, and no one else knew I was down here? If I couldn’t get the door open, I would starve to death. I had water from the bathroom, but there was nothing to eat. It would be a long, painful death, and the thought of it scared me far more than the anger of any of the five men did.
With my heart racing, I ran back up the stairs and pounded my fists against the door.
“Hey! You’ve got to let me out! Please! I haven’t done anything wrong. You might even have the wrong girl, for all you know. Come on, just let me out. I’ll be good, I promise.”
Unbidden tears sprang from my eyes and spilled down my cheeks. I wasn’t a big crier, and I hated feeling sorry for myself, but I couldn’t help it. I hated feeling so helpless.
“Alex,” I pleaded. “Kingsley? Clay? Are you out there? Can you hear me? I’ve been good, haven’t I? Isaac scared me. I’m sorry about what I did. Come on, guys. Please!”
I paused again, listening. My hitching breath was the only thing that broke up the silence. Could they hear me? Were they all sitting around a table, looking at each other and wondering what to do, feeling bad for keeping me here and hearing me cry? Or did they not give a shit? Were they in another part of the property, drinking beer and laughing it up, not caring about the woman they had locked in the basement?
Why did that hurt me more than the idea of them sitting around a table feeling bad about what they’d done to me? Was I harboring some pathetic idea that these men—well, maybe not Isaac, but the others—actually gave a crap about what happened to me? Just because they’d shown me a few moments of kindness didn’t mean they cared.
I’d read about this somewhere. Wasn’t it a type of syndrome, where the captive fell for the captor? The name came to me. Stockholm syndrome. It was some kind of survival mechanism where the person who’d been taken captive aligned themselves with the captor in order to get through the experience. But that wasn’t me, surely? It had only been a couple of days now, and I was too smart to fall for something like that, wasn’t I?
No, I wouldn’t let it be me. These men were the enemies, no matter what.
I took my anger and wiped away my tears.
“Hey! You’ll pay for this, you sons of bitches! I’ll kill every last one of you, if I get the chance. You think getting cut was bad? Next time it will be your throat. You hear me, Isaac?” I pounded my fists against the door, hard enough to hurt. My hands would be red and bruised the next day. “You hear me, you sick son of a bitch? You won’t get away with this!”
I screamed at the shut door in rage and frustration, shrieked until my throat hurt. Desperate for a release for my anger, I ran down the stairs, jumping the final few, and ran into the bathroom. Breathing hard in the dark, I felt around and picked up the bottles of shampoo and body wash and hurled them at the wall, kicking out at them when they bounced off and slid near me again. I ripped the toilet roll off the wall and shredded the paper with my clawed fingers, so tiny pieces floated down around me like snow. Leaving the bathroom, I felt my way to the dresser and yanked out the drawers as far as they would come then grabbed handfuls of clothing and threw them to the floor. With another yell of frustration, I tried to push over the dresser, but it was too heavy, and all I could do was beat my fists against it. All I wanted was destruction, to make the tiny, confined world around me reflect what was going on inside both my head and heart.
Had they hoped to break me by keeping me locked up, thinking I would turn into some compliant wreck willing to do whatever they wanted? Because I wouldn’t do that. They’d picked the wrong girl.
Panting and exhausted, I slumped onto the floor and put my head in my hands. They weren’t listening. They didn’t care how much noise I made. There was no one around for miles, though I had no idea where we were. We’d driven for hours to get here, and I hadn’t heard any sounds of traffic. We could literally be in the middle of nowhere.
All I could do was what they’d told me to—behave myself and wait for whatever plan they had for me next.
Chapter Thirteen
Eventually, I gave up and fell asleep, curled up under the stairs, wrapped in the sheets from the bed.
When I woke from a sleep that was plagued with nightmares, my whole body hurt. The stinging from the cuts on my arms had dulled to a throb, and the bruising only hurt if I pressed on it. But my muscles ached as though I’d done a ten-mile run, and no amount of stretching seemed to loosen the knots. My escape attempt had been harder on my body than I’d thought, and I figured sleeping on the cold floor rather than the bed wouldn’t have helped things either.
My mind went to home, wishing desperately that I was in my own bedroom.
Would Aunt Sarah be losing hope by now? How many hours was it supposed to be that were the most crucial in finding a missing person. Twenty-four? Forty-eight? I didn’t know, but I was sure my time down here was well past it now. This was my third day, and I could visualize my previous days held captive. Strangely, they were in a different timeline than the rest of my past, as though being taken had reset things. I could no longer see my future. My vision of it stopped on the here and now, the moment I currently existed in. Unlike others who viewed things the way I did, I’d never been someone who was meticulously organized and into planning, but I’d always had structure—birthdays, holidays, job interviews, and even school events, when I’d taken part in such a thing. Now there was nothing.
Would Isaac come down to me today? Or would he leave me to stew for longer, perhaps hoping to break my spirit? I wished he’d never come here, and I’d been left with the four other guys. I felt sure I would have been able to work my way around them, but Isaac put things into a whole new category. No wonder the others had all been told to wait until he’d arrived before speaking to me.
I untangled myself from the sheets and went to the bathroom, patting my way around in the dark so I didn’t trip over anything I’d thrown around during my freak-out the previous evening. I stuck my mouth under the faucet and turned it on, gulping down the cool water. I was dehydrated from yesterday, my throat sore from screaming, and my mouth dry from all the adrenaline that had been surging around my body. The water sloshed uneasily in my stomach. It was the only thing in there, my meal of bacon, toast, and fruit from yesterday long digested. I took a couple of deep breaths, not wanting to throw the water back up again.
The click of the door made me freeze, and I glanced over my shoulder. The light in the room had changed. Someone had opened the door.
My heart beat harder, and I squeezed my fists together to contain my emotions. As much as I wanted to throw myself at Is
aac and claw his eyes out, it was smarter to stay calm. I didn’t want to die down in this hole, and I felt sure that was what would happen if I didn’t keep my shit together.
I turned around and poked my head out of the bathroom door and looked in the direction of the stairs.
My stomach sank.
Isaac stood at the bottom of the stairs wearing a suit identical to the one he’d been wearing the day before. The one I’d ruined. He was also alone. I wished one of the other men was with him.
He spotted me peeping out at him and offered me a slow nod.
“Hello again, Darcy. I hope we can start on a better foot today.”
I didn’t reply, and instead pressed my lips together, my nostrils flaring. I was worried what would come out of my mouth would only get me in more trouble. But I stepped out of the bathroom, coming to face him. I didn’t want him to think I was hiding away.
“You’ve been on my mind all night,” he continued, taking a few paces toward me, his eyes glued to my face. “It bothers me how this has all turned out. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, and there would be some blurred lines about what was right and wrong, but I’d never intended for you to get hurt.”
“Well, I did,” I snapped.
His mouth tightened, and he gave an almost imperceptible nod. “Yes, you’ve been hurt, but none of us has hurt you. I hope you can see that.”
My jaw dropped. “You kidnapped me!”
He held my gaze, unflinching. “That was done to protect you.”
“Protect me? From who?”
“The same men who killed Michael Sullivan—your father.”
I felt as though he had punched me in the gut. My breath expelled from my lungs, and I pressed my hand to my chest as though I could prevent my emotions from bursting from my ribcage. “What the hell are you talking about?”
He gestured into the air between us, his fingers spread wide to highlight his point. “Try to stop thinking of us as the bad guys, just for a moment, okay, and listen to what I have to say with a clear head.”
“You are the bad guys!” I cried. “You steal women off the street!”
He shook his head. “Not women. Only you.”
I lifted my eyebrows in disbelief. “Only me? Am I supposed to be thankful?”
“No, I just wanted you to know the truth. We’re not necessarily the ones you should be afraid of.”
“You sure about that? The others shot people. I saw them!”
“They did that for you.”
I couldn’t stop the laughter bursting from my mouth. “You have got to be kidding me right now.”
“Those agents wanted something from you, Darcy.”
I locked eyes with him. “You want something from me, too. How does that make you any different?”
He placed a hooked finger against his lips, as though thinking about his answer. “We haven’t hurt you, have we?”
“When Alex, Clay, and the others took me, they tied me up. They frightened me.”
He rubbed the back of his neck with his whole palm, as though he’d suddenly developed a muscle spasm. “Yes, and I’m sorry for that. But they never did anything more than necessary. And you’re right, we do want the same thing, but for a different reason. They would do something bad with it.”
I scoffed. “They’re the FBI. They’re the good guys. They used to work with my dad.”
“And yet Michael Sullivan took something from them. They made out like he was the bad guy, too. Had it ever occurred to you that your dad took the memory stick in order to get it out of the wrong hands?”
My teeth dug into my lower lip, biting hard enough to hurt. “I don’t know why my dad took it. He was killed before he could tell me anything.”
Isaac’s head tilted to one side as he regarded me, a wolf assessing whether he should bother slaughtering the lamb. “And the people who killed him also took the flash drive?”
I nodded, but my mind was working fast, trying to piece together exactly what he was telling me. “Yeah, and?”
“The same people who first picked you up, planning to take you down to the headquarters because you let it slip that your dad told you something before he died.”
I frowned, confused. “But he didn’t. He was barely conscious. That’s the saddest part of all this, that he couldn’t even tell me he loved me as he died. All he did was repeat a bunch of numbers over and over.”
Understanding crashed upon me, and I faltered, blinking hard. The room suddenly felt dizzyingly distant. Blood rushed through my ears, drowning out all other sound, and I took a hitching breath, trying to bring myself back to the moment. The past threatened to open up and swallow me whole.
“You know what those numbers mean, don’t you, Isaac?” I managed to say.
He nodded. “Yes. You never mentioned them to anyone before?”
My fingers laced through my hair, tugging hard on the strands. “I didn’t think to. It was all a blur, and all I could think about was the blood, and how I was all alone in the world now. Honestly, I didn’t give a shit about some flash drive that had been taken or the reasons behind it. I only thought about how I was going to survive. Where I’d live. I can’t remember if anyone even asked me if he’d told me anything before he died. Maybe they did, and I told them I didn’t remember. I have no idea.”
His eyebrows drew together, lines appearing between them in his gravity. “The number your father told you is the code to get access to the information on that drive.”
“The code?” Numbers flashed up before me in a firework display of figures.
He nodded. “Yes. Without it, the drive is useless, and the only man who knows how to access it is dead. Almost a week ago, you met with a reporter, and that reporter asked you a very important question. He asked you if your father said anything to you before he died. You told him it had been rubbish, a bunch of numbers that didn’t make sense.”
“Did someone send the reporter?”
He shook his head. “No, it was pure bad luck. But people have been keeping a close eye on you, Darcy. Always wondering if you knew more than you’d let on. Why did you never tell the FBI that your father had told you a number sequence when he was dying?”
“I didn’t know it was a number sequence. Back then, it had just been a blur. I was fourteen. My dad had just died. Why would I have ever thought they were something important? I was just a kid who’d lost her only parent.”
His jaw tightened. “We need that code, Darcy.”
No, if they wanted something from me, then I wanted information from them, too. “What’s on the flash drive?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
His expression hardened. “I just can’t. That knowledge will put you in danger.”
I laughed out loud at that. “Don’t you think I’m already in enough danger? Your men kidnapped me off the street. People were shot.”
“I already told you, you were never in any danger from us. We took you from the men who would have hurt you. But we need that number now, Darcy.”
My muscles tightened. “Why?”
“Because we need to access what’s on that drive.”
“I thought you didn’t even have the drive?”
A muscle beside his left eye twitched. “We don’t. Not yet. But we will.”
“I already told you, my dad just said a jumble of numbers. It was six years ago. How the hell do you expect me to remember?”
“It’ll be in your head somewhere. We just need to figure out how to get at them.”
I shook my head. “This is crazy.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s necessary. If we don’t get those numbers, someone else will find you and take them from you themselves.”
I raised my eyebrows in expectation. “And if something happens to me?”
“Then they’ll be gone forever, and no one will get access to it.”
“My dad took that drive. Maybe he didn’t want anyone to have it. Maybe it would be best if somethi
ng did happen to me!”
“No!” His voice hit me like a blast of fire. “Think about it, Darcy. If your dad didn’t want anyone to have access to the contents, why would he have told you the numbers? He told you with his dying breath. Does that sound like the actions of a man who didn’t want anyone to know what was on it?”
Righteous anger roiled up inside of me, and I straightened my back and lifted my chin. “Yes, he wanted me to know what was on it. Not you.”
Isaac didn’t break his gaze on me, not even for a fraction of a second. “We’re the ones who need to know.”
“It doesn’t matter, anyway,” I said sullenly. “I already told you, it was a long time ago. I don’t even remember them.”
He reached out, and I flinched. He paused for a moment, until he knew I was going to hold still, and then leaned in and tapped my temple. “It will be in there somewhere. Something as important as your father’s final words won’t have left your subconscious so easily, even if you think they have.”
I didn’t care what he said. I had no intention of ever letting this man have that code. Not that I knew what it was, anyway. What Isaac wasn’t considering was that I might not have forgotten the numbers ...
Maybe I had never heard them at all.
“And how do you plan on getting it?” I asked. “It’s not like you can open up my head and look inside.”
His teeth dug into his lower lip as he regarded me. “No, but there are ways. Your memories aren’t stored as we’d imagine, in order, like volumes of encyclopedias on a shelf. They’re more like a jigsaw puzzle which is linked together by certain recollections or associations. Sometimes, something as simple as a certain smell can take us back to a childhood memory we were sure we’d forgotten. Only it had never been forgotten, it had simply been stashed away in the long term storage, and then when the scent reminds you, the memory is brought forward into short term, or your working memory. We can try regression, or recall ... hypnosis, even. That memory is in there, Darcy, and I intend to get to it.”
Hacking Darkness: A Reverse Harem Romance (Dark Codes Book 1) Page 9