Chapter One
Sloane
Day twelve.
Or is it day thirteen?
Ugh. I’ve been here so long, I’m starting to lose track of time.
Slits of light filter through cracks in the wooden slats above me. Each morning, gray dawn creeps in and I make another sad scratch on the dirt wall with a small, jagged stone. This is how I try to keep track of days lost in this hole. Twelve scratches, which means twelve days since I woke up in this dark pit with a splitting headache and no shoes. And the slow, horrifying realization that my unpublished story about a billionaire’s dirty money scheme was going to be the last thing I ever wrote.
Lucky me.
The pit is about eight feet deep, roughly six feet wide, with wooden boards laid across the top. A heavy padlock keeps them in place. A filthy bucket stands in the corner for... well, you can imagine. There is no bed, only the dead grass on the dirt floor and my arm as a pillow.
It’s impossible to escape. I’ve tried and gotten nowhere with it.
Once upon a time I was Sloane Adams, super sharp investigative journalist, priding myself on my ability to dig out stories and take down bad guys.
But today I’m just trying to stay alive.
After two weeks of hot and humid weather, lots of scary bugs and little to no food, my clothes hang loose. I arrived fit but overweight and now I suspect I’ve gone down a whole pant size.
They took my shoes on day one, which is smart because it really makes it harder to run. The rough floor has torn them up pretty good. I’ve wrapped my poor feet in strips of fabric from my ruined blouse, but it’s not enough. Every time I stand, I feel the sting of open cuts.
My hair is long and filthy, my hands dirty with caked mud under my nails. I’m certain I smell like a latrine, but I’m used to it all now and can’t tell anymore. But I’m still alive and breathing. That has to count for something, right?
I’ve spent most of my time observing my captors, trying to riddle a way out of here.
Two armed guards rotate above in eight-hour shifts. The daytime guy is lazier. I’ve noticed he takes long breaks and sometimes doesn’t check on me for hours. The nighttime guy is more alert but has a gambling problem; I can hear him on his phone, cursing at whatever game he’s losing money on. I find myself surprised they even get cell service out here. There’s a third one who only shows up occasionally, and he’s the one who scares me the most. He looks down at me like I’m already dead.
Long ago, I stopped crying and screaming for help, cursing at them to let me go and demand they allow me to speak to the American Consulate. All that resulted from my outbursts was me being slapped, punched and fed less food and water. Now I’mquiet, biding my time, trying to keep up my strength until I can make the right move.
Because I’ve come to the conclusion that the only person who’s going to get me out of this mess is me.
I’ve learned a lot about my surroundings these last twelve days, which I hope will help me continue to survive and in fact make it out of here alive. I’m somewhere in the Columbian jungle, held by members of the local branch of the cartel. The compound above, sounds small. I hear maybe six or seven distinct voices speaking Spanish throughout the day. Trucks come and go, two arrive in the morning, one in the evening. Someone has a radio that plays terrible narcocorridos at all hours.
I file away every detail and pattern.
Because when you’re alone in a muddy pit for twelve days with nothing but your thoughts, you end up replaying every decision that led you here. Every choice or possible mistake.
And the big one—the one I keep circling back to—is that form I filled out three weeks ago.
Before I left D.C., I’d filled out a standard authorization with the Times, like I’d done dozens of times before. Name, passport number, insurance information, and that one little line:In case of emergency, please contact.
My pen hovered over the blank space.
Logically, I knew I should write down Ryan Krychek, my fiancé. But my hand didn’t move. I thought about the last fight we’d had over the phone before I left. When I told him about the Colombia trip, about the money trail I’d found connecting Larry Aldridge to the Reyes cartel, he’d just sighed and repeated that I needed to quit. He’d said my trip to Colombia was obsessive and reckless and that I cared more about my career than about us.
I’d always thought these types of comments, which he made whenever I left on assignment, were rude. He’d never offered togive up his own career and move across the country so we could be together, even though his job was the one that was easier to relocate for. He’d said that if I really loved him, I’d drop everything and move to LA, and we could finally start our life together. And at first, I found myself trying to find a way to make this work, but nowadays I don’t bother. Our whole relationship was long distance and we’d originally met on vacation, so we’d never had anything real, had we?
And when Ryan had started saying he would pay for me to go to a gym and would even hire a personal trainer for me so I could “lose some weight”, I’d said... nothing. Somewhere deep down, I knew I’d already ended it, I just hadn’t said the words yet. And now it’s July and I haven’t seen Ryan in real life since Christmas, when of course I had to fly out there for us to be together for the holidays. His family treated me like a second-class citizen, whispering a little too loudly behind my back about how I needed to lose weight.
So instead of writing Ryan’s name on that form, I wrote down someone else.
Jonus Irontree.
A seven-foot-tall green orc I’d never met in person, who lived in California and worked as a media handler for his famous cousin, Garlen Irontree. Our friendship started as a fifteen-minute professional interview and became... something else.
