I inched closer, my foot finding a creaking board in the floor.
At the noise, the head turned to profile. Straight nose. Gray electrical tape across mouth, one wild eye.
It was Marisa.
44
Marisa leaned into a moaning scream behind the tape, pulling for all she was worth against bindings at her wrists and ankles.
She couldn’t see who stood behind her, only that someone lurked there. The chair she was secured to scraped against the floor, threatening to topple as she panicked and thrashed.
I rushed into the room. “What is goingon? Are you—?”
I was on my knees, reaching for the bindings. She collapsed against my shoulder, shaking and heaving.
“What ishappening?” But she couldn’t answer me.
The bands on her wrists were tight. I pushed her head off me and found a loose corner on the tape across her face.
Under the tape, her lips were chapped and the skin around her mouth red, lashed with welts from the adhesive.
She was crying too hard to speak. I could picture that truck out in the alley, still running.
Still running.
“We need to get out of here,” I said. I plucked and pulled at the straps on her wrists, wishing, desperately this time, for one of Oona’s knives.
“I thought I was going to die here,” Marisa said. Her voice had a pack-a-day rasp. “I thought they were going to kill me. I thought…”
“We have to be quick.” I tugged at the nearest wrist binding. I had so many questions. “Who put you here?”
“I don’t know who they are,” Marisa said. “A man. A young man.”
I finally had loosened the knot, and pulled that hand free. “Work on your other hand, while I get your ankles. A young guy?”
I was thinking about Joey, dead in the alley.Hadhe been mixed up in something bad?
Marisa’s attempts at releasing her other hand weren’t going well. Her fingers were stiff, and she was shaking violently.
“Have you seen him today?” I asked.
“Not today.”
“Recently?”
“I don’t know,” she said, her voice pitching upward again. “I don’t know what day it is. I’ve been here… four? Four nights? I think? He let me see his face. That’s not— He would only let me see his face if they were going to kill me, right? I have to get out of here. Dahlia, I have to…” She pulled at her tethered hand until it was turning red, purple.
“Calm down.Stop.I’m getting you out of here. See?” I had one of her ankles loose, and showed her the tie as a confidence booster. “They? You saidthey. Who else? A young guy and who else? A woman? Edith Maxwell?”
“Edith?” Marisa said breathlessly. But she had stopped thrashing. Her hair hung across her face. “She’s working for terrible people, Dahlia. They’re capable of anything. You can’t get mixed up with them, or Alex—whatever you do—”
“I won’t let Alex sell the pub to her,” I said. “This guy at the pub told me…”
I tore at the other ankle binding, silenced as another thought snapped into place.
Quinwas another young man, wasn’t he?
A young guy hanging around a pub all day, nursing a beer untilit was long warm. Sneaking off for phone calls every day, just out of view of the security camera. He could be some kind of lookout for the people lifting the floorboards downstairs. But to keep Marisa trapped here—what was it all for?
