"Touch her," I snarl from the floor, my voice dropping into the deadly calm that used to send my SAS unit scrambling for cover, "and you won't live to see morning. I'll kill you with my bare hands."
"Empty threats from a bound man." But I can see the uncertainty in his eyes. He's done his homework. He knows whoI am. Knows my record. Knows how many men I've killed. The question is whether he's smart enough to be afraid.
Jordan is still coughing, trying to catch her breath. She rolls onto her side, and our eyes meet across the room. Blood runs from her split lip, and her cheek is already swelling, but she's smiling.
Smiling.
My wife is battered and bleeding and bound, and she's looking at me like she just won.
"Did the message get out?" she rasps.
"Before I cut the feed? Yes. But it won't matter. We'll find them all." The leader kicks her in the ribs, and the sound of boot meeting flesh sends me past reason.
The chair is solid wood, but fury gives me leverage. I thrash against my bindings until something cracks. The chair back splinters. One of the legs breaks.
The guards are on me in seconds, weapons trained at my head, shouting in Arabic. One of them presses the barrel of his rifle against my temple, and the cold metal brings me back to something resembling sanity.
"Separate them," the leader orders, his voice tight with anger. "And this time, make sure Captain Fitzwallace understands that any further resistance means his wife loses fingers. One at a time."
They're dragging me from the room, hauling me up by my arms while I'm still bound to the remnants of the broken chair. Jordan is trying to sit up, one hand pressed to her ribs where he kicked her, the crimson fabric of her dress clinging to her skin.
"Fitz!" she calls, and I hear the fear in her voice now, the adrenaline crash hitting.
"I'm coming back for you," I promise, my voice deadly calm despite the fury coursing through my veins. "I'm coming back, and everyone who touched you dies. Everyone."
The guard shoves his rifle harder against my head. "Move."
They haul me out, down a different corridor than the one we came through. The resort's beautiful facade is gone now. We're in the service areas, concrete walls and fluorescent lights and the smell of industrial cleaning supplies. They take me past the kitchen, past storage rooms, into what looks like a maintenance area in the basement.
The room is small and cold, filled with pipes and electrical panels. They shove me inside, cut away the remains of the broken chair, then retie my wrists with fresh zip ties. These ones are doubled, one set on top of the other, and they pull them so tight that my hands start to tingle within seconds.
"Stay," one of them says in heavily accented English, then slams the door.
The lock clicks. Footsteps retreat down the hallway. Voices fade.
I'm alone in the dark, my wrists screaming, my wife beaten and bleeding somewhere above me. I give them thirty seconds to get comfortable with the idea that I'm secured.
Then I get to work.
The zip ties are professional grade, the kind we used in the SAS for prisoner restraint. Thick plastic, double-locking mechanism, rated for over two hundred kilograms of tensile strength. Whoever tied them knows what they're doing or at least knows enough to be dangerous.
But they made one crucial mistake.
They didn't check my pockets thoroughly enough. They took my phone, my wallet, my wedding ring—that one hurts more than it should, seeing it stripped from my finger—but theymissed the thin piece of spring steel sewn into the waistband of my trousers.
It's a trick I learned from an operator in Hereford who'd spent six months in a Taliban prison before escaping. "Always have a way out," he'd told me. "Always have something they miss."
I'd thought he was paranoid. Now I'm grateful.
The problem is that the spring steel is sewn into the back of my waistband, and my hands are bound behind me. I need to get my fingers to the small opening in the seam, work the steel free, then use it to pick the locking mechanism on the zip ties. With my hands going numb and my wrists already damaged.
The first two minutes are the worst. I have to arch my back, twisting my spine in ways that send fire shooting up my vertebrae. My shoulders scream in protest. The zip ties bite deeper with every movement, and fresh warmth runs down my palms.
But I find the opening in the seam.
My fingers are slippery now, and I can barely feel the stitching. I have to work by touch alone, feeling for the small channel where the spring steel is hidden. The metal is thin—barely two millimeters wide—and I nearly lose it twice as I work it free.
Five minutes. That's how long it takes to extract the steel from its hiding place.
