I say nothing. I look at the wall past his shoulder and breathe through my nose and think about the binding on my wrists, the give in it, whether there's any angle I haven't tried yet.
"She doesn't say much," the younger one says to the other, drifting back toward the door.
"Boss said we can't touch her." The broader one doesn't look up from his phone. "Didn't say anything about later, though."
The younger one laughs. It bounces off the corrugated metal walls and comes back distorted, and I press my thumbnail into the rope at my wrists and work at it and say nothing and think about rage instead of fear.
Time passes in the elastic way it passes when you have nothing to measure it against. The light through the high warehouse windows doesn't change much. My knees stop hurting and go numb and then start hurting again. The guardsrotate their conversation between their phones and occasional observations about me.
The younger one gets bored eventually. He pushes off the wall and saunters over, crouching down to my eye level with that permanent almost-smile. He’s close enough that I can smell cigarette smoke on his jacket.
He starts talking. Something about what Dominic plans to do with me once Phoenix doesn't show, his voice low and conversational, enjoying the sound of his own cruelty. I keep my eyes on his face and my breathing even and I wait, because I only get one shot at this and the timing has to be right.
He leans in.
I drive my forehead into his nose with everything I have.
The crack is immediate and dense and deeply satisfying. His hands fly to his face and he rocks backward, the words coming out of him garbled and high-pitched, nothing like the voice he was using a second ago. Blood pours through his fingers, fast and dark, hitting the concrete in a steady drip that echoes in the silence.
I'm already pulling at the binding, wrenching my wrists apart with everything I have, and for one suspended second I think I feel it giving, I think the rope is moving, I think this is actually going to work.
The broader one crosses the room in four strides.
The bigger guard moves before I can react. His hand closes around my arm and the floor comes up fast, my cheek hitting concrete hard enough to send white sparks in my eyes. He's saying something above me but the words don't register because his fist drives into my stomach and every molecule of air leaves my body at once.
I curl around the pain. It brings my face up just enough for the slap to land clean across my cheek, the crack of it ringing off the warehouse walls. My ear goes high-pitched and useless. Thetaste of blood fills my mouth, warm and metallic, and I press my lips together and breathe through my nose and refuse to make a sound.
"Stupid," he says, very calmly, the way someone says a word they've used many times before. "Stupid girl."
Another punch. My ribs this time, and I hear the sound I make, something involuntary and terrible, and I hate that I made it. The younger one has stopped making noise and is watching now, one hand still pressed to his face, his eyes gone flat and mean above his fingers.
"You're going to pay for that," he says thickly, through the blood.
I press my head to the concrete and breathe and wait for it to stop, which it does, eventually, because Dominic told them not to mark me up and there are only so many places you can hit a person before the evidence becomes visible. When the broader one steps back I stay where I am for a moment, taking inventory. My ribs ache with each breath. My face feels swollen on the left side. My wrists are still bound.
The binding is looser than it was.
I file that away and don't move and focus on my breathing and wait.
Dominic returns sometime later. I hear his footsteps before I see him, that quiet rhythm I've memorized by now, and I push myself upright as he comes through the door because I will not be on the floor when he looks at me. The effort costs me and my ribs wail with pain.
He stops when he sees my face.
His pale gray eyes move from me to the broader guard and back again, and the temperature in the warehouse drops in a way that has nothing to do with the concrete floor. He doesn't raise his voice. That's almost the most frightening thing about him, the way his anger doesn't need volume.
"I told you not to mark her up." He says it quietly. "She needs to look presentable for the video."
The broader guard starts to explain. Dominic stops him with a look.
He crosses the room and crouches in front of me. This close I can see the scar above his left eyebrow, the broken capillaries in the whites of his eyes. His scent hits me, the same sharp smell from the sidewalk, and something in my stomach turns over at the recognition of it. He takes my chin between his fingers without asking, tilting my face toward the light, and his touch is so impersonal that it's worse than roughness would have been. Like I'm something he's inspecting. Like the bruise on my face is an inconvenience to him rather than a thing that was done to a person.
He examines the damage and releases my chin.
"Here's what's going to happen," he says. "You're going to record a message for Phoenix. On camera. You're going to tell him that if he doesn't confess publicly to murdering my brother, I'll send you back to him in pieces."
"I won't do that."
"You will." His voice carries no warmth. It's a statement of fact, the way you'd tell someone the weather. "You'll do it because the alternative is considerably worse, and because you're smart enough to understand that."
