Sizing the place up.
Fucking documenting.
My pulse kicks hard against my ribs, loud enough I swear they might hear it across the yard. No one should be back there. Not tonight. Not when the night crew clocked out hours ago, and the mine is supposed to be locked tighter than Fort Knox. And as I watch, one of them raises his arm, and the small bright rectangle of a phone screen glows in the dark.
They’re taking photographs.
A knot of dread twists low in my stomach.
Because people don’t photograph a gold mine in the middle of the night unless they’re planning something.
I kill the office light through the door I’ve barely re-cracked open, then ease it shut again and press myself back into the shadow of the doorframe. Darkness swallows the room, and I stand there frozen, listening. My heart slams so hard I feel it everywhere, in my throat, in my wrists, in the roof of my mouth. Each pulse feels loud enough to echo off the concrete walls.
For half a second, my brain tries to tell me I’m overreacting. But my body doesn’t listen.
My lungs drag in a careful breath through my nose while something old and primal takes over inside me, instinct shoving its way to the front before panic can get there first.
Don’t move.
Don’t make a sound.
Don’t let them know where you are.
I know this feeling.
The sharp, electric awareness is crawling up my spine. The way the air suddenly feels too thin, like the world has tilted half an inch and everything dangerous is sliding toward you.
I have felt this before.
I remember being watched by people who were never supposed to find me.
I remember the exact moment a stranger’s attention turns you from a person into something valuable to take. You become leverage, a payout, something with a dollar value attached to it. The memory crashes into me so hard my stomach clenches.
Sixteen years old and walking back to my father’s truck after school with dust on my boots and homework in my bag, thinking about nothing more dangerous than whether Dad would let me skip mine paperwork that weekend.
Then hands grab me. One over my mouth. One around my waist.
The world lurching sideways so fast that I didn’t even have time to scream before they dragged me into the back of a van.
I remember the smell first… gasoline, sweat, and cigarettes soaked into old upholstery.
Kicking hard enough to bruise my own ankles against metal while somebody laughed and called me a‘wild little bitch’like my terror was entertaining to them. Then the zip ties cut into my wrists so tight my fingers went numb.
The panic.
God, the panic.
That horrible, animal kind that makes your chest hurt because your body knows before your brain does that something terrible is happening.
I remember begging at first.
Then screaming.
Then learning that screaming couldn’t help me.
They kept me in a concrete room with one bare bulb hanging from the ceiling and a mattress on the floor that smelled of mildew and stale piss. Every time the door opened, my whole body would lock up because I never knew which version of them I’d get.
The ones who wanted money.
