“What do you want us to do with her?” someone asks, his tone apologetic.
“Get rid of her. Make it look like an accident, or make sure she’s never found. I don’t care. Just take her ID, anything she might be identified with, and burn it all. I don’t want my son to find her and connect the dots back to me.”
“Understood.”
My head lolls, bringing one of my captors into view, but he doesn’t notice as he frowns, the phone held near his mouth.
“And, Dino, if you screw it up again, you can consider our ceasefire terminated.”
The line goes dead, and the two men hovering over me share a look from behind their ski masks.
One of them speaks, but the world around me is losing focus, and as I cling to consciousness, I feel myself slipping into darkness once more.
Then I’m being lifted again, arms dangling, head rolling limply forward against my chest.
The scent of gasoline lingers in the air, and the heat at my back would suggest a fire.
Panic surges through my chest until I realize wherever we’re going, it’s away from the flames.
Night air whips across my face, and the pain in my head is like ice searing straight into my brain.
“She’ll sink,” one mutters. “Nobody’ll find her.”
“You'd better be right, or we’ll all be dead.”
They count—one, two, three—then I’m falling, terrifyingly weightless for what feels like an eternity.
And when I finally stop, I would give anything to feel that gut-wrenching freefall once more.
Because the shock of the cold steals every thought and ounce of oxygen from my body.
Water floods my ears, my nose, my throat.
I kick weakly, instinct fighting against the weight dragging me down.
But my vision fades quickly, darkening at the edges.
Until blackness swallows me whole.
I don’t know how long I’m unconscious.
But somewhere, through the muffled roar of the river, I hear a man’s voice in the distance.
“Hey! Are you okay? Can you hear me?”
Fingers brush my arm. I think I see dark eyes, frantic, desperate. Then, with no small amount of effort, strong hands grip me, hauling my water-logged body over the nose of a plastic boat kayak.
“Christ,” the man breathes, his salt-and-pepper beard the only thing I can bring into focus as he turns my head to inspect me. “That’s a nasty cut you got there. What’s your name?”
I know the answer now, but in the dream, my mind is a blank canvas, and my vision is starting to darken once more.
“Just stay with me,” the man says, his kind voice fading. “I’ll get you some help…”
I jolt awake, my eyes flying open as my mind starts stitching together pieces I didn’t realize were still missing.
Don Augusta never meant to kill me.
Those men were just supposed to scare me.
