Tentatively, I reach up and remove the blindfold.
The light is dim, a single bare bulb overhead, and I squint against even that after the total darkness of the van. My eyes water. I blink until the room comes into focus.
It's small. Maybe ten feet by twelve. Concrete floor, concrete walls, no windows. The ceiling is low, maybe seven feet, with exposed pipes running along one side. The bulb hangs from a wire in the center.
There's a mattress against the far wall. Beside it, a single toilet. There’s a case of bottled water, shrink-wrapped, twenty-four pack and boxes of energy bars stacked on top of each other.
My stomach drops.
I pull my hands in front of me and look at my wrists. The zip ties have left deep red grooves in the skin. My left ankle is bare, the skin underneath where the monitor sat pale and indented.
They're not going to kill me. Not yet. You don't leave water and food for someone you're planning to kill in the next few hours. You don't give them a mattress.
This room was prepared. The supplies were bought and carried in before I arrived. The mattress was dragged down here and positioned.
The toilet tells me that this is a place people are kept. I’m not going to be the first person who was kept down here.
I count the water bottles. Twenty-four. If I ration to two litres a day, that's twelve days. The energy bars are harder to estimate without opening the boxes but they look like standard packs of twelve. Two boxes, twenty-four bars. At three a day, eight days.
They're expecting this to last at least a week. Maybe longer, if they plan to resupply.
Nausea rolls through me, slow and heavy, and I don't know if it's the pregnancy or the fear or the aftermath of whatever they injected me with.
Dom will know I'm gone by now and he’ll be tearing the building apart.
But the van drove for an hour at highway speed and I don't know which direction.
And the men who took me weren't amateurs. They knew about the monitor. They knew which door to knock on. They knew when to come, which means they knew that Dom would downstairs dealing with the ring and not with me.
I pull my knees up to my chest. The concrete is cold through my jeans. The bare bulb hums above me. The room smells like damp and dust.
I'm alone. For the first time in over a month, there's no ankle monitor, no locked door with a keypad, no casino humming beneath me, no cedar-and-whiskey scent seeping through the walls. I should feel free. I've been wanting to be out of that building since the night Viktor marched me into it.
Instead, all I feel is his absence.
I open the first box of energy bars and I eat one because my body needs fuel. I drink half a bottle of water because dehydration will kill me faster than anything else. I put the rest back and I lie down on the mattress and I stare at the ceiling and I wait.
18. Dom
Viktor and I go through the traffic feeds frame by frame. The white van appears on a camera two blocks east of the service road at 4:51pm, heading north.
It appears again on the boulevard at 4:53, turning onto the highway on-ramp. After that, nothing. It doesn't show up on any of the highway cameras within a ten-mile radius.
"They exited before the first camera. There's a two-mile stretch between the on-ramp and the first highway camera. Somewhere in that stretch there's an exit or a turn-off."
Viktor pulls up the map. It’s an industrial area with warehouses, storage facilities, a decommissioned rail yard. Plenty of places to hide an omega.
"Get people down there. Every building, every lot."
"On it."
He leaves. I stand for a moment thinking, then turn around, planning to grab my coat and join them. There is no way I am standing in this penthouse while my omega is out there.
The elevator chimes. My father walks in wearing the dark coat, his face set in the expression he wears when he has already decided what is going to happen and is simply waiting for reality to comply.
He stops in the living room. He looks at the sofa and his nostrils flare.
"Stinks of omega in here."
