Iris
It’s always warm. I don’t have a sheet or a blanket, but I don’t need one. The temperature rises through the day until it’s almost unbearable, and then it breaks to something more manageable in the dark.
The days all start the same way, with the light coming gray through the high, little window and my whole body aching like I fought a war in my sleep.
Maybe I did. I don't remember my dreams, only that I wake up with my hands in fists.
So I get up and stretch out the knots in my back, and I start paying attention.
The two men from the first day here aren't the only ones. There's a third who comes with the morning food, older, heavier, with a gray mustache and the tired eyes of someone who has worked this exact job for a very long time and stopped finding it interesting a decade ago. He doesn't look at me the way the younger one does. He barely looks at me at all, actually, and there's something almost comforting about that. I decide to call him Mustache, because I need names for these people even if they won't give me their own, and because giving them ridiculous names is the smallest possible way I can win.
The younger ones I've already named too. The one who looked at me like I was something on a menu is Ken, because he has thesame plastic, empty prettiness of a doll that's never been played with properly. His friend, the one who laughed at my English like it was a party trick, is Vinny, because he seems like a Vinny, and also because it makes me want to laugh, and laughing feels like the only weapon I have left that they haven't managed to take from me yet.
Mustache sets down bread and something that might be a kind of ham and a bottle of water, and he says one word to me before he goes, short and clipped, gesturing at the plate.
"Mangia."
I’ve determined this meanseat, and when I pluck a piece of bread from the small hunk and put it in my mouth, he nods and leaves.
I spend the morning at the bars, holding on and listening to the sounds beyond the locked door I can’t see. The hallway beyond my cell is stone too, and voices carry strangely in stone, bouncing and flattening at the same time, so I catch fragments without ever getting the whole sentence. I hear a name repeated.Ramunno.I hear it again, and again, always said with the kind of weight my brothers' names carry back home. Like a gravity. Whoever Ramunno is, he's the one the rest of them seem to respect, or fear, I’m not quite sure.
I’ve heard other things, too. The tinny sound of a television, the braying laughs of the men, and the sweeping, keening sounds a woman makes when she should be with her husband but she is with Ken instead.
Ken is a sly dog. I almost let out a sarcastic whoop the first time I heard them. But I figured I shouldn’t give away the fact that I can hear as much as I am doing.
The other thing I’ve heard enough to understand that they know who I am.Orlov. Which means I'm not a random womansnatched off a street for sport. I'm a message. A chess piece. Somebody picked me on purpose.
The thought settles something in my chest, oddly. If I'm a message, that means someone is meant to receive me eventually. It means there's an endgame here, a reason to this that isn't just cruelty for its own sake. I can work with that. I can't work with chaos.
Around what I guess is midday, Ken and Vinny come back, and this time they bring a third man I haven't seen, younger even than them, nervous in a way the others aren't. He's carrying a phone, and he holds it up to the bars and takes a photograph of me without asking, the flash going off too bright in the dim room, and I flinch before I can stop myself.
"Hey," I snap, before I can think better of it. "A little warning would be nice."
They don't understand me, obviously, but Vinny laughs at the tone of it, delighted, like I'm a parrot that's learned a new phrase. He says something to Ken, who grins, and then Vinny and the younger guy leave, taking my photograph with them to wherever photographs of kidnapped women go.
Ken sits on the chair in the small space on the other side of the bars, knees splayed in arrogance, and watches me. Like I’m actually going to go anywhere.
The photo was proof of life, probably. Which means they’re in contact with my brothers.
I think of Liam's hands, always steady on the wheel, always steady on everything, and wonder if they're steady now. I think of Killian's temper, the way it used to scare me when I was small and delights me now that I understand it's just love with nowhere else to go. I think of Aidan's quiet math, the way he can look at a mess and see the solution before anyone else hasfinished panicking. I think of Rafferty, who doesn't say much but shows up anyway, every time, no matter what it costs him. I think of Connor, the brother who is about to become a father again and now his sister has been kidnapped. I hope he is okay. I hope Anya and the baby are okay. I have an entire new niece or nephew and I can’t celebrate because I’m stuck somewhere in Italy.
I think of Ma, but I have to stop thinking about Ma, because if I let myself go there, I won't come back from it today.
By the time the light through the window brightens fully, I've learned four more words.Silenzio.Vinny said it to me directly, hand raised, when I started humming to fill the silence, so that one's easy.Fame, which I think might mean hungry, because Mustache said it while pointing at my untouched dinner plate with something that might have been concern if I let myself believe it.Aspetta.Which I think means wait. This was Ken talking to a slinky, sexy woman wearing a bodycon dress as she was walking back through the door having come to look over what they were hiding down here. She paused in the doorway, turned back to look at him popping her ass as if to say ‘later.’ Andtroia, which Ken says every single time he looks at me, low and with his lips curled in disgust. I haven’t figured out the exact meaning, but just the way he says it makes it clear it’s derogatory and offensive.
Ken and I have managed to get into our own little routine when it’s his turn to watch me. He calls metroia, I roll my eyes, he smacks the bars or spits into the cell, I look at him like he is disgusting. He makes more vaguely threatening sounds in Italian. I shake my head at him. He smirks and grabs his crotch.
It’s Moustache who looks after me. He brought me clothes on my second morning here. A T-shirt and leggings that actually fit,but weren’t new. He taught me how to say ‘thank you,’ in Italian. He looks remorseful whenever our eyes meet.
This morning I couldn’t help but reach out and touch his arm when he brought me my daily plate of food. Wanting to offer him comfort or reassurance that I’m okay. The contact was brief and as soon as he was gone I wondered what the hell I was doing.
These men took me from my home, moved me halfway across the world, but the minute one of them shows any sort of compassion I go into full Iris mode wanting him to feel better.
I need my head rinsing. That’s the only thing for it. Being snatched and held against my will has obviously affected my brain more than I’d realized.
“Troia,” Ken says at me, getting my attention.
“Si?” I respond.
