So she knew less than she’d been making out.
I thought about filling her in at least a little, but I really didn’t like her sneaky way of trying to get information before.
I smirked at her. “Like you said, it’s been tough lately.”
She looked pissed, but she just nodded. “Well, if it won’t help to talk about it any further, maybe we should take our minds off it entirely. There’s this great place I like to go to pick up… um, really nice second-hand clothes.”
Caroline did not look like she had ever deigned to wear second-hand clothes, but maybe she meant outfits that had been worn once on some catwalk or something. I shrugged and let her lead me down a series of streets and then back lanes I had never even realised were there. It must have been a really trendy place to be so buried.
Soon we were walking down a lane so narrow I couldn’t see anything ahead of Caroline as she led the way, but I could see how clearly her footprints stood out in the filth on the cobblestones.
“Caroline, are you sure you’ve got the right place? Doesn’t seem like anyone has been down this way in a long time.”
Caroline stopped as the way ahead widened again, turning to me. Peering past her I saw a few doors that might even have had signs on them, but they looked most likely to be the rear entries into pubs. “I haven’t been here in a while myself, so I guess it might have closed down? We’ll see in a moment.”
She suddenly started groping around at the little pockets in her brushed wool jacket. “Oh, shit, I think I’ve dropped my wallet somewhere. I’ll just go check it’s not in the laneway, okay? If I can’t find it I guess we’ll have to head back to the car.”
She pushed past me and was gone before I could catch her arm to slow her. “Wait, Caroline, don’t leave—” Well, I could make sure this shop of hers wasn’t somewhere around, and then we wouldn’t have to go back. Maybe it was my tendency towards agoraphobia speaking, but this really did not feel like the sort of place one or even two women should be running around alone.
There were three doors in the little courtyard space created by the surrounding buildings coming together in a strange, presumably unplanned way. With two of the doors, it was clear they had not been opened in a long time—maybe the past decade. The handles looked rusted-over and misshapen.
I paused at the third, which seemed to have dust kicked onto the cobblestones from nearer to the doorway. There was no sign, but this could be Caroline’s missing shop.
The door opened while I was still considering it, and I had just enough time to consider the fact that the stranger revealed was wearing a mask before they had my ring hand in a crushing grip.
Were they going to rob me? I tried to tug away, my mouth already wide open and screaming.
I was yanked against a firm body. There was something familiar about their scent that froze me for a moment… then I remembered myself and started struggling, but there was a hand over my mouth, and all my kicks might as well have been directed towards stone as someone else slammed the door.
“Shut up,” growled the masked man who was holding me. The other, also masked, prowled off further into the room, which seemed to be a very decrepit kitchen. “All the screaming in the world is not going to bring someone to find you.”
“That’s not true, my friend—”
But I didn’t really need his skeptical look to understand what was happening. Caroline, so eager to get me to go out with her, come down this dodgy little laneway to a shop that had clearly never existed. Finding an excuse to run off for a moment so she could say with complete honesty she had no idea where I’d gone, what had happened…
If I made it out of this, maybe she would tell me she thought I’d just run off. In my mental state, and all. She was a few steps ahead of me already, because I’d had no idea she meant me harm. Even now, I couldn’t think why—except that it must have something to do with Devin’s mother. Maybe Angel’s visit earlier had been a warning… a farewell.
The men who had taken me probably knew more than I did, but as I turned my attention to them with the thought of trying to weasel out some information, I became distracted by my awareness of how th
is man held me, compared to Devin when he had kidnapped me before. Devin was careful, precise… like he’d said, he didn’t give me more than he thought I needed. This man seemed to be enjoying crushing me to him so that it would be painful and disturbing, putting his hands on me in a way that suggested they might slip even further and truly violate me.
That was what made me realise. I knew this man… those hands. That complete disregard for my wishes.
Caroline had played at being my friend and handed me over to the kidnapper who had intended to rape me.
He breathed in my ear with glee he didn’t bother trying to disguise. “We’ll be delivering you to our client tomorrow… but for tonight, you’ll stay here with us. And maybe you won’t be so uptight as you used to be, now you’ve been in big bully man O’Hare’s bed for a couple weeks.”
My skin was trying to climb out of his grasp and I was almost hyperventilating myself into a state of collapse, but I knew I couldn’t let myself give in to my fear.
Surely after you’d been kidnapped enough times, you started to get a knack for it. And I’d done pretty well the first two times. Ended up getting myself released in short order… even scored an engagement out of it.
That ring, twisted uncomfortably on my finger. I had to focus on that, on getting out of this so I could get back to Devin and work this situation out. I wasn’t going to let his bitch relatives play me so that I died or disappeared not even knowing what I wanted for my future.
As my masked captors bundled me off into another room: a mattress on the floor, my stomach curdling—I kept my thoughts on Devin as a talisman that probably carried a not insignificant weight here. Yes: he’d punished one of these men in a way that was supposed to show. It shouldn’t be hard to remind him why he needed to leave me alone.
“You’re not going to be so smug when Devin catches up to you. He’ll make sure you can never even touch a woman again without remembering how you were a very, very bad boy.”
Those shameless hands tightened on me. “So you do remember us.” His companion had been there that night too, then.