She is a contract. Coordinates, a floor plan, a guard rotation and an exit strategy. She is a job.
That's all she is.
The plane banks south over the Alps. Below, the mountains are sharp and white and indifferent. I watch them pass and think about the contacts I need to reach out to. Contacts I haven’t needed for years. Some of them might not even still be alive.
I close my eyes and wait for the plane to deliver me to Sicily, where a woman I've never met is waiting for someone to come for her.
Iris
I wake up on cold, damp stone.
That's the first thing my body understands before my brain catches up. The uneven floor under my cheek, and a headache that feels like someone parked a truck on my skull and left it running. My mouth tastes like pennies and chemicals. My wrists ache in a way that tells me they were tied at some point, even though they're free now.
I lie there for a long moment, just breathing, charting myself the way Aidan taught me once, years ago, half joking.If you're ever hurt, Iris, check yourself before you panic. Fingers. Toes. Can you feel them? Can you move them?I hadn't thought I'd ever need it outside of a hypothetical family safety lecture delivered over dinner.
Fingers. I can feel them. Toes, same. Everything aches, but everything moves.
Okay. Okay, good. That's something.
I crack open my eyes.
The room swims into focus slowly, gray stone walls, a small high window with no glass, letting in a slice of white daylight and a breeze that carries the smell of the ocean. There's a thin mattress beside me and a bucket in the corner that I choose not to think about yet. One wall is just bars, like a jail, with a door I don’t need to test to know is locked.
I sit up too fast and the room tilts, my stomach lurching with it. I press a hand to the floor and wait for the spinning to stop.
Van. White van. Hands. The cloth over my mouth, sweet and awful.
The memory comes back in pieces, like someone shattered a vase, handed me the shards and told me to reassemble it. I remember the small tissue-wrapped package of lace falling. I remember fighting, my nails, my teeth, everything I had, and it hadn't mattered at all. Whoever grabbed me had done this before. My struggling had been an inconvenience to them, nothing more.
I don't remember the drive. I don't remember arriving here. There's a gap where hours should be, and the not knowing of it scares me more than the stone room does.
I stand, because sitting on the floor waiting to be terrified feels like a waste of the adrenaline currently trying to claw its way out of my brain. My legs hold. I walk the perimeter of the room, palm trailing the wall, counting steps the way I've seen my brothers do when they walk a property they're thinking about buying. Twelve feet by ten, roughly. One door. One window, too high and too narrow for anything but light and air and the sound of an ocean…
Where the fuck am I?
Voices drift from somewhere beyond the bars. Two men, maybe three, speaking low and fast in a language that is absolutely not English or Russian. It takes me a second to place the rhythm of it, the way it rolls and lifts at the ends of words.
Spanish, maybe? Italian?
My stomach drops.
I don't speak any Spanish or Italian.
I'm not in the states. I'm not anywhere near my family’s territory, our contacts, our reach. Wherever this is, it's someone else's world, someone else's rules, and I don't even know what language they're speaking in.
For a second, panic tries to take the wheel. My breath goes short and sharp, my vision narrowing at the edges the way it does right before I cry, and I hate it. I hate it so much, because crying doesn't open doors, it doesn't teach me a foreign language, and it doesn't get me home.
Don't freeze, Iris. Don't wait to understand. Just run.
Liam's voice, or maybe it's a composite of all five of my brothers, drilled into me since I was small enough to teach. I can't run. Not yet. Not through a locked door with no handle. But I can do the next best thing, which is the thing I've always been best at.
I can figure out the people.
Two men appear twenty minutes later. They’re both younger than I expected, maybe early thirties, and dressed like they're going to a nightclub. Dark jeans, expensive watches, the kind of casual arrogance that says they've never once been afraid of anything in their lives.
They unlock the door and the taller of the two slides a plate of bread and cheese across the floor, then rolls a bottle of water after it. The plate rattles to a stop just in front of my feet. The other one leans against the doorframe and looks at me in a way that makes my skin crawl.
I smile.
