It galvanizes me.
I drive my knee into him, aiming for the groin. I miss by inches—his thigh takes most of it. He grunts and punishes me for the attempt with a fist to the side of my head. Stars pop and slide.My ears ring. He jerks my arms behind me and wrenches both wrists into one hand. He bends me over the foot of the bed, his breath in my hair, his forearm across my shoulders like a bar. The leather cuff swings and taps my cheek with every shake of the frame.
He’s stronger. The truth lands like a weight.He is stronger than I am.
But he’s not careful. And he’s not patient.
I let my legs go out from under me instead of bracing, a dead-weight drop. It almost takes him with me—he stumbles, swears, shifts, regains. I roll hard to the side and he follows, keeping my wrists trapped. The fall knocks the wind out of both of us. We hit the floor, the edge of the bed biting my ribs. Pain blackens the room for a blink. When it clears there are tears in my eyes that have nothing to do with feeling and everything to do with the body being a stupid machine.
“Stop fighting,” he pants into my ear, voice gone rough. “You’ll like me better if you stop.”
“I’ll like you best dead,” I rasp.
He laughs, chest hitting my back. “That can be arranged later.”
He shifts again, trying to angle my hips. Everything in me screams. I arch and buck and kick like an animal in a trap. My heel catches his shin and he swears. He knees my thigh to make it stop. It doesn’t. He clamps harder on my wrists. Something in my shoulder grinds. I bite the mattress seam to stop the scream and taste someone else’s sweat. I gag and swallow it because I will not give him a sound he can use later when he tells this story to someone who enjoys the same things.
“Say ‘sir,’” he says again, his voice pitched high and breathless. “Say ‘please.’ Say you want it, and I’ll make it easy.”
“Go to hell,” I tell him. It comes out thin, but it comes out.
He adjusts his grip to split my wrists into two hands—better control, he thinks—and that’s the opening I need. I yank my left free for half a beat and rake my nails across his face. I feel skin tear. He bellows and slams my cheek into the bed frame. The world flares white.
For a second I can’t see. I can only feel. His belt—metal on teeth. His zipper—a sound that makes bile punch up the back of my throat.
No.
A noise cracks the air like the room itself just tore.
For a half second my mind can’t make it fit the scene. It’s too big, too sharp, too sudden. Then the smell hits—cordite, hot metal—and Danner’s body does something human and ugly: it reacts to sensation he didn’t expect. His weight goes slack at the hip. He grunts a wordless, shocked sound and drops his grip on my left wrist. I roll by instinct, curling into myself. A second sound—lighter, a clatter—his gun? No, not his. The voice that follows doesn’t belong to him.
“I told him not to touch you.”
The sentence is flat and controlled, which makes it worse. The speaker isn’t out of breath. He isn’t excited. He sounds annoyed, like someone scuffed his shoe.
He actuallytuts.
I roll to my knees, hand searching blindly under the bed for the screw that’s already gone. My fingers find dust and the edge of a bolt. I come up with nothing and make my empty hand a fist anyway.
The man in the doorway lowers a pistol a fraction. Smoke curls from the barrel like a filament. He wears a dark coat despite the heat of the metal box, a crisp shirt with neat cuffs at his wrists. His shoes are clean. His hair is neat in a way that has always had someone else’s hands styling it.
This man doesn’t belong on a freight ship, and the name Danner spoke earlier rings in my mind—The Broker. He belongs in a boardroom. The incongruity of seeing him here, so out of place, makes my skin crawl.
I squint through an eye already going puffy where Danner smacked me.I know him.
The recognition comes dimly, like a memory you can’t place. The lobby of the hotel. A flash of a profile near an elevator. The back of a head at a balcony above a charity auction. The glint of a signet at a handshake I watched from across a room. It won’t land, though, won’t take shape.
He doesn’t look at me for a long moment. He looks at Danner, his expression the same as if he were looking at a broken appliance.
“His mistake cost him,” he says, carefully polishing his handgun. Then his eyes lift and meet mine. They are very light. Very calm. “I hope you don’t make me hurt you, too, Ms. Jones.”
My last name in his mouth makes my heart pound so hard I feel my pulse in my teeth.
“Show me your hands, please,” the man says. “Slowly. I need to make sure you aren’t holding whatever you sliced him with.”
I lift my hands. They are shaking. I make my face blank, doing my best to hide my utter terror. My cheek throbs where it hit the frame. My ribs ache. One of my knees is going to be a riot of colors tomorrow if I get a tomorrow.
He takes two steps into the room without looking at the door, which tells me two things: he trusts whoever is behind him, and he is used to people making space for him in whatever room he enters. He doesn’t point the gun at me now. He holds it near his thigh, steady, like part of his hand. Blood has spattered the edge of his shoe. He notices and flicks it off against the floor without looking down.
