“They really roughed you up,” he says with sympathy, handing me a small package of baby wipes from his breast pocket. I open them and gently blot the facial injuries.
“Nothing compared to what Stellan, Blaine and John are about to do to Lindsay. They won’t just kill her, Mark. You know that, right? You know.” My voice rises. “You know they’ll torment her like a cat with a captive mouse. They’ll wring every bit of sick pleasure from torturing her, and then they’ll do the worst thing imaginable.”
“Kill her,” he whispers.
“No. They’ll force her to live.” The idea of Lindsay in pain, wondering where I am, left to suffer by those jackals shoves my blood faster through me, making all my injuries throb. I’m a live wire with nowhere for the electricity to go.
He gives me a pained look, then his face goes blank, his long sigh the sound of determination. “I have a contact.”
“Good of you to think about that now.” I can hear the snarl in my voice. Don’t care.
Lindsay. Oh, God, Lindsay. What are they doing to you right now?
“It’s my dad.”
“Your dad’s dead.”
“No – this is my biological father.”
I squint. It hurts. “Your biological what?”
He shakes his head. “Remember Galt?”
Galt. Galt. Oh, yeah. Mark’s biodad. Deep undercover CIA. Whatever they did to me involved too many blows to the head. My thoughts feel like scrambled eggs.
So do my balls.
Mark continues. “Bottom line: I’ll have to go way, way outside the law to get you out. And if it doesn’t work, we both end up in prison.”
“If I can’t get to Lindsay, I might as well die.” I pull myself up and stretch, inventorying. My right shoulder’s been wrenched hard, a tendon screaming as I rotate the joint. I taste blood no matter how many times I swallow, and I’m stripped down to underwear. I don’t care.
Get me out.
The words turn into a non-stop thought that won’t let go. Getmeoutgetmeoutgetmeout.
“I wish I could say no one’s dying on my watch, Drew, but I can’t.”
When you spend days in a war-torn region in the desert, hours of monotony and boredom sprinkled in between minutes of terror and chaos, you learn to look at people differently. No shell. No walls. The look Mark and I exchange says thousands of words in seconds.
He’s pretty sure he can’t save Lindsay.
And I’m damn fucking sure I will.
“And I wish I could say I trust you with the GPS tracking system for Lindsay, but here’s the deal, Mark – get me the fuck out of here and I’ll give you that information.”
“She could die in the meantime.”
“She could die if the wrong people get that information. It’s the only way I can save her.”
“You really don’t trust me.”
“If the roles were reversed, would you trust me?” I wince as my eyes widen with emphasis, the skin tender and paper-thin. Compartmentalizing the pain is key now. Pretending it’s not there is how I survive.
It’s how I find Lindsay.
“Fuck.”
He spins on his heel and slams the door shut.
Funny. I would have answered the same way, too.
Chapter 2
Lindsay
“Okay,” I concede. “You win. Why me? Why are you doing this?” It takes so much control not to cry, or whine. The slight shake in my voice is pretty damn understandable, given the circumstances. Every muscle I have, including my lungs, keeps tightening, as if making them smaller will make me less likely to be hurt.
Not possible.
John shrugs. Shrugs.
“It’s nothing personal.”
I cough, choking on a universe-sized dose of incredulity. Nothing personal? This is nothing personal? A thousand responses flood my mind but I’m not rational, so none of them come out.
“Don’t you have a game or something? I thought baseball players didn’t get days off during the season.”
He pretends his shoulder hurts, rubbing it while pursing his lips in a pretend pout. “Perfectly-timed injury,” he says, adding a smile that doesn’t meet his eyes. “I have three days with nothing to do.” He leans in, his hand stroking my jaw. I close my eyes but don’t jerk away. “I get to do you,” he whispers, his breath filled with moisture, like he’s licking my face although it’s just air.
My ribs cave in on themselves, tensing so hard I’m afraid they’ll crack, my belly clenching.
I can’t let go. Can’t relax. I start to shiver. I can’t control it. My bladder threatens to let go. Suddenly, I’m ten feet away from my body, because really, what else can my caged mind do?
I’m in hell.
People do whatever it takes not to be in hell. We have a biological drive to survive. It goes beyond the body.
Speaking of the body, I remember the microchip. A whimper comes out of my nose. Tears fill the back of my throat, hot and salty, thickening. I nearly gag but control myself, a sob trying to work its way out.
If nothing else, they’ll find my body. Drew’s chip gives me that relief.
Unless they cut my hand off.
The helicopter cuts a sharp right, angling down, and because they didn’t buckle me in, I roll into the door. John thumps against me, his hip digging into my butt. His body is tight and physically radiates heat that makes me nauseated. I can’t stand having him breathing in my hair, his hands on my ribs as the helicopter rights and he pretends to need to touch me to sit up.
Why pretend? I have no power. He can do anything he wants to me right now.
The thought makes the world go wavy, white dots filling my vision.
Oh, no.
No, no, no.
I will not black out. I will not faint. Every one of my wits needs to be sharp, because Drew is going to find me. He will. I damn well know it. The pinch of the cut on my hand is a blessed pain. It makes me remember how much he cared, even when he wasn’t sure about me. Back at Jane’s place, I thought he was crazy but went along with it because he’s my crazy. Mine.
I know I’ve blown hot and cold since I’ve been home from the Island. I had to.
Until the moment Drew cut me open and put that chip in me, I didn’t know.