That forced me to stand. “What?”
He slid backward on his feet, trying to not make a noise, and stopped me before I looked out the bars for what had him so excited. “The boat has been slowing for the last hour, and now it’s stopped.”
“How do you know?” Nothing seemed different to me.
He lifted a finger over his lips, telling me to be quiet.
“Listen,” he whispered. “There’s no hum of the engine and our movements aren’t as pronounced.”
I stopped breathing so it wouldn’t interfere with the noises around me and listened hard. “Oh.”
The engine had become a part of the background noise, and I’d apparently learned to block out the sounds. Cyrus was right. It was now quiet.
That didn’t solve our biggest problem, though. We’re still locked together in a cage with a dried puddle of pee in the corner. I did not know how that got us any closer to escape, but Cyrus practically vibrated with energy at the new development.
“Don’t you understand? We have to be near land. They can’t kill m… us,” he said, correcting his words and including me in his safety net. I wasn’t so sure they didn’t plan to kill me or something worse.
I wanted to ask him about his change in the sentence, but sometimes a girl needed a little positivity after being kidnapped, so I didn’t.
We both froze as a noise came from the other end of the large space at the boat’s bottom. With no other noises from the boat, we easily heard the far door opening. With one hand, Cyrus pushed me back, putting his body in front of mine as he walked up to the bars.
“Trust me, okay?” he said, glancing back at me quickly.
He pled with his eyes, but it was difficult to agree. In ways, I did trust him. With everything. He was the only person I could even possibly consider trusting. But even as much as we talked the last two days, I’d learned nothing significant about Cyrus. Was it part of this plan? Did he bring me here to win me over for whatever purposes he had?
To make me a willing victim.
But his lips were as dry and chapped as mine. His eyes were baggy and tired. His hair was no longer perfect on his head. If he was part of whoever took me, he definitely played the role well. Too well.
“Yes, okay,” I said, and he released a breath.
A large man, the width of his shoulders twice the size of any regular person, stepped up to the opening and pressed his face against the bars.
“Hey, darlin’. It’s time to get to work,” he said, looking directly at me and ignored Cyrus.
I took three steps back to put myself in the farthest corner away from him as possible. He didn’t clarify what work they wanted me to do, but it wasn’t hard to figure out. I had two particular skill sets they might be interested in: nursing or the simple fact I was a woman. I didn’t want to use either of them.
I huddled in the back, not making a sound. It was a long shot, but a part of me hoped he’d give up and go away.
No such luck.
Instead, the man got right up against the bars, his face pushed up against the metal as the bars pulled his skin in weird directions. He resembled the father fromThe Shinningright before he broke through the door. This man looked at me as if I was a caged animal and he planned to take me out to play.
Probably because that was exactly what he wanted.
“Don’t make me come in there,” he said, shoving the end of his gun through the small gap between the metal bars.
Cyrus hesitated, staring down the large man as if he alone could make him run and hide, but Cyrus didn’t have a gun. At the last second, right when I thought they would have a showdown, Cyrus turned and looked at me with the same pleading expression I used earlier. “It’s okay, Imogen. Trust me.”
What?
It wasn’t okay. Nothing about the situation was okay. My breath came in short pants and my heart thundered in my chest as if I’d finished running a race even though I hadn’t moved. I’d never been so scared in my life.
Cyrus asked me to trust him, but did I? Was he the world’s worst liar, or did he really have a plan? If I walked out of this cage, would I ever see him again?
The gun tapped back and forth between two bars, which stopped it from coming further into the cage. “Come on, darlin’. We’ve got a gunshot injury you need to patch up.”
So it was the nursing skills. Better than the other but still unwanted. They left me in this sickening cage to rot and now wanted me to heal someone? How long did they wait? Who knew the shape of the person they expected me to fix?
