They're confident no one followed us.
Given how we're clearly in the middle of fucking nowhere, I'd guess that they're probably right.
As the light in the windows dims from gray to charcoal, Gold Chain comes back in with a cigarette dangling from his lip. He claims the seat Buzzcut vacated earlier.
"So," he says, tipping his chair back on two legs. "Boss ain't coming tonight."
"Radioed again," Buzzcut confirms from the other end of the room. He's cleaning a handgun on one of the cots—a Glock, disassembled on a rag. "Earliest is tomorrow afternoon. Roads are fucked."
"Tomorrow afternoon." Gold Chain scratches his jaw. "That's a long time for us to entertain ourselves, huh?"
A nasty note in his voice makes the hair on my arms stand up. It's not what he says. It's the way he says it—loose and idle, like he's contemplating what to have for dinner, except the thing he's contemplating isn't dinner.
"Don't," Beanie growls from the doorway. It's the first full word I've heard him speak.
"Don't what?" Gold Chain gives him an innocent look. "I'm just saying. It's a long night. She's right there. And it's not like she's going anywhere."
"Boss said hold her."
"Boss saidtalk to her.Well, there's more than one way to get somebody talking, isn't there?"
All the sounds in the room go mute.
Buzzcut pauses with the Glock's slide in one hand, his eyes flicking from Gold Chain to me and back.
"Sheispretty," Buzzcut notes. Slowly. Like he's trying the idea on.
"She bit you," Gold Chain says, grinning. "That sorta thing deserves payback, don't it?"
"Yeah." Buzzcut looks at his palm, twists it this and that in front of his face. "She did. It does."
I remember the domestic violence unit from law school, all those horrifying statistics I memorized for exams and then tried very hard to forget. They were bad enough that they made me switch my concentration from corporate to pro bono. And the stint I did at that clinic on the Lower East Side, the faces of the women I was tasked to help, the deadness in their flat, dissociated voices while I held their hands and wrote everything down and promised them it would be different now…
I never once imagined I'd be on this side of the desk.
My body is going offline. Breath shallowing out and stilling, fingers chilling to full-on numbness. My hearing has dulled to nothing but a keening buzz, and the edges of my vision are going black like my brain would really prefer not to suffer through the images of what's about to happen next, thank you very much.
Don't you dare pass out, Caroline. Don't you dare.
Gold Chain stands. The chair legs scrape against the plywood with a sound that will live in my nightmares for a very long time, assuming I survive long enough to have nightmares. He takes one step toward me.
I don't flinch. I don't look away. I keep my eyes on his and let him see everything in them—the fear, yes, because I can't hide that, but also the fire.
"If you touch me," I spit, "there will be consequences. People know where I am."
"You told the Russian nobody knew you were here," Buzzcut interrupts. "I was listening."
I feel the blood leave my face.
Gold Chain stands. He cracks his neck, left then right, a grotesque popping sound. Then he walks toward me.
"Here's what I think," he says. "I think you're some rich bitch from Manhattan who came up here looking for her boyfriend, and nobody knows you're gone, and nobody's coming for you. I think the boss isn't here, and what the boss doesn't know won't hurt him." He stops in front of my chair. "Although it might hurt you a little."
He reaches for the zipper of my jacket.
The thought that pops up in my head right then is not rational. It's not strategic, nor even particularly helpful. It's not what my father trained me for, and it's definitely not what Dr. Levinson would endorse.
But it does feel, in its own way, kind of inevitable.
