Chapter 2
The man who walked in was not what I expected, though I couldn't have told you what I expected anymore. He was tall, in a dark coat over clothing far too elegant for an abandoned warehouse at midnight. Black hair pushed back from a face of severe, deliberate features, the kind of face that had stopped bothering to arrange itself into anything reassuring a long time ago. He carried a small flashlight, sweeping it across the room with practiced efficiency, corner to corner, the way someone checks a space they expect to be dangerous.
He found me. He stopped.
He looked at me the way a doctor looks at a wound, not with feeling, but with the specific attention of someone cataloging facts. I looked back at him and understood, somewhere in the frozen part of my mind still running calculations, that I should have been more afraid of this stranger than I was of the dark. But fear, at a certain depth, becomes very democratic. It stops distinguishing between the things that have already hurt you and the things that might hurt you next.
"Who are you?" I asked. My voice came out wrong, too thin, too slow. The cold was doing something to my words that I didn't like.
He crossed the room in four steps and crouched in front of me, the flashlight beam dropping to the floor between us so it wouldn't blind me. Up close his eyes were dark and unreadable, but they moved over the zip ties, my wrist, the blue tint already starting at my lips, with a speed that told me he was doing triage, not sightseeing.
"Someone who wasn't supposed to find you alive," he said.
The words landed strange in my chest, half relief and half a new kind of fear, because if I wasn't supposed to be found alive, that meant someone had expected me not to be. He must have seen that thought cross my face, because he shook his head once, sharp. "Not by me. By them. I was told this room would be empty by tonight." His jaw tightened. "They lied to me about the timeline."
Somewhere beyond the wall, footsteps started, unhurried, the particular rhythm of men who don't yet know their plans have gone wrong. He heard it half a second before I did, and something in his posture changed, went from controlled to coiled.
He shrugged out of his coat in one motion and settled it around my shoulders, the fabric still warm from his own body heat, heavier than anything I'd been wearing in three hours. "Stay awake," he said, kneeling beside me, his hands finding the zip ties at my wrists. "I'm getting you out."
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The plastic gave way under something small and sharp he produced from his sleeve, a blade so quick I only understood it had happened when my arms finally, agonizingly, came down in front of me. Blood rushed back into my hands like fire.
"Who are they," I whispered, my voice cracking. "Why did they take me?"
