"Yeah." His voice is flat. "All the time."
I finish the bread. Wipe my hands on my jeans, the ones I changed into at the estate, the ones I chose because I could run in them, fight in them. Good instinct, bad outcome. Here I am in my running clothes with nowhere to go.
"Did they target you specifically?" Matt asks. "Or was this a wrong place, wrong time thing?"
The question is reasonable. Logical, from a man who just told me he was drugged at a club. A fellow victim trying to understand the rules.
But my brain, honed on months of living with a man who weighed every word for advantage, snags on the phrasing.Target you specifically.Nothow did you end up here,orwhat happened to you.
I give him an answer that's true enough. "Wrong place, wrong time."
"Yeah." He exhales. "Same."
I don't tell him about Gabriella. Don't tell him about the SUV, the dead guards, the woman in red-soled heels who orchestrated the whole thing, or the men in suits who bought me from her.Don't tell him about the man whose bed I was in twelve hours ago, whose empire stretches across three continents, whose name alone might be the only currency that could buy my way out of here.
"You know what my students would say right now?" Matt's voice cuts through the dark. "Mr. D, this is literally the worst field trip ever."
I don't want to laugh. Every part of me is screaming and raw and terrified, and the last thing I should be doing is laughing. But the delivery is so deadpan, so perfectly timed, that a sound escapes me anyway, half-laugh, half-sob, ugly and real.
"That's terrible."
"I know. I have the worst jokes. My kids made a compilation once, put it on the class Instagram. Got more engagement than anything I'd actually assigned all semester."
"That tracks."
"Right? Eleven years of graduate education, and my greatest contribution to society is a lowlight reel of bad puns."
I pull my knees to my chest and wrap my arms around them. The concrete bites through my jeans. My joints and fingers feel stiff from the cold as I press my forehead against my kneecaps, taking stock.
I'm in a cell. Underground, probably, based on the temperature and the moisture and the total absence of natural light. There are guards on a schedule and other women being held. A man named Matt who teaches English and shares his bread with strangers is in my cell.
In the dark, you learn what you're really made of.
My mother used to say that. Or some version of it. One of her Catholic kitchen-table philosophies, delivered over instant coffee while Danny and Sean fought about whose turn it was to take out the trash. I never really took much notice. Figured I already knew better, anyway. After all I had my weapons—sarcasm, stubbornness, a talent for reading old buildings better than I read people.
The Murphy refusal to lie down isn't something I decide, it's just what happens when I breathe, whether I want it to or not.
"Matt."
"Yeah?"
"Does anyone know we're here? Anyone on the outside?"
He's quiet for a long time. Long enough that I can hear the drip-drip-drip counting seconds against metal.
"No. None of us knows where 'here' even is." His voice has lost the joking edge. Stripped back to the bare truth, or what sounds like it. "I don't think anyone's coming for us."
The words land where I already knew they'd land. In the pit of my chest, next to the bruise and the stale bread and the fading memory of warm sheets.
Elio.
His name moves through me before I can stop it. His hands on my hips. His voice in the dark.Stay. Promise me.The way he kissed me, hard and desperate, like some part of him thought he was walking into a trap, and the best he could do was ask me to wait.
I promised.
And then men who weren't his put me in a car, and a woman who hates me sold me to strangers, and now I'm on a concrete floor with a bump on my skull and half a piece of bad bread in my stomach, and he has no idea where I am.
"Matt."
