“You sure your girl can handle herself down there?” Scarface asks, his stare stopping on my chest.
Pig.
I peer at Stone. Down where? Where are we going and why does he have to pay so much money to get there?
Stone’s eyes narrow in. “Don’t you worry about her. She’s meaner than she looks.”
His blue eyes clash with mine and I see through his words. I also see sympathy and frustration.
“Alright.” Scarface exhales, stepping aside. “You’re in.”
Stone reaches out and snags me by my elbow, making me drop my tablet once again. It crashes to the concrete floor, sending pieces darting in every direction. I wince as he digs in the tips of his fingers and pulls me into the entry of the warehouse. Struggling against him, I spare a glance over my shoulder. There’s no repairing my tablet now…there’s no passing my exam.
Stone tugs me hard against him, forcing my attention to the room. The ceiling is tall, tall enough to house a jetliner, and the windows are a shitty plastic you can’t see out of. It smells like blood and dead animals; not a big difference from outside, but noticeable enough. Right in the middle of the room I see two open, steel doors and I spot the first of many steps that descend into darkness. Where does it lead? What will we see at the bottom of those stairs and what did Stone pay so much money to get access to? I shiver at the thought.
“Please tell me we’re not going down there?” I whisper, pulling against his grip.
“That’s exactly where we’re going.”
I dig my heels in, desperate to free my arm from his grasp.
“Let me go!” I snap under my breath, clenching my jaw when his fingers tighten.
Fear and desperation curl in thick strands and wrap themselves around my stomach. I’m a second away from throwing up or passing out. This has to be a dream. A sick, confusing dream. With my free hand I slap at him, but he seems unfazed. I’m causing a scene in hopes of Scarface interfering and letting me leave. Surely he can tell I don’t want to be here? I hear Scarface laugh and now the thought seems stupid—wasted. Why would he care? I thrash violently, slapping with all my might. Black strands of hair fall from my ponytail and stick to my clammy forehead.
“Slapping? Really?” Stone hisses, restraining my arm. “Please tell me that’s not all you can do?”
What the hell does that mean? “Let me go! I know people! They’ll come looking for me!”
It’s a lie, of course, but I refuse to let the reality of my situation settle in. The reality is, if I die here, who would know? Who would come looking for me? I have no parents, no siblings, and no friends. My memory will fade away and it’ll make no difference to anyone except for the exam marker who will mark ‘non-attendance’ next to my name in a fortnight’s time, and the nurse who’ll be no doubt relieved she doesn’t have to babysit me on my next shift.
I blink away the tears that sting my eyes.
“Shut up,” he orders, his voice low and threatening. “You’re gonna get us both killed.”
“Got a problem there, Stone?”
Stone’s entire body tenses when Scarface speaks. Without a word, he dips low and I squeak as he wraps his arms around my legs and throws me over his shoulder. “No problem. She just realized she didn’t pack her new Jimmy Choos, that’s all.”
“No!” I shout, pounding my fists into his back. It’s a blatant lie. I would never forget to pack a pair of Jimmy Choos. Besides, it’s not like I can afford a brand of that caliber anyway. “Please!”
He ignores me while I squirm over his shoulder. I make no progress. Stone’s grip is tight, and he’s too strong to fight against. In this moment, I’m a mouse with my tail trapped underneath an elephant’s foot…I’m not going anywhere. Defeated, I slump and sob. Will anyone miss me? Will my face be plastered over milk cartons and billboards? Or will I become another number, a statistic, locked away in a police file and forgotten?
I close my eyes as we descend the stairs. When we reach the bottom, Stone carries me a few more feet before deciding to put me down. The second my shoes touch the floor, I swing at him. My fist connects with his mouth and the force tosses his head to the side. Shit! I hiss and clench my fist as pain darts up my wrist and tingles in my elbow. Panicked, I dive for the stairs, but he catches the strap of my bag and yanks me back. I struggle against him like a dog on a leash and get nowhere. He swears under his breath before my stomach sinks. I feel the strap of my bag bite into my body and snap. For a split-second I free-fall until heavy, arresting hands grab my shoulders and push me back. He shoves me against the wall and I sob when the back of my skull smacks the pipe. The headache-inducing pain throbs over my scalp before settling in my eye sockets.
“Listen to me—”
I open my mouth to protest, but he clamps his hand over my lips. The salty taste of his skin creeps across the surface of my lips and onto the tip of my tongue. The tears that stung my eyes previously now trickle over the rim and wet my cheeks. I’m going to die.
“Listen,” he says. “You can’t escape this. You want out? Too fucking bad. You got yourself into this mess and now you have to get yourself out.”
Air rushes in and out of my nose as my chest heaves. Nausea makes awful twists and turns in the pit of my stomach and my entire body trembles. Never have I ever felt fear like this before. It’s almost debilitating.
“The last thing you want to do down here is draw attention to yourself. You need to act like you’re meant to be here. If you don’t, they’ll slit your throat and throw you into the sewer. By the time you wash up somewhere, your body will be too destroyed to identify. Do you understand?”
Despite my frenzied thoughts, I soak up his words. Still, they don’t resonate with me. Why can’t I leave? Stone waits a few seconds before he lets his hand fall away.
“I won’t tell anyone, please,” I beg, my voice as shaky as my hands. “I just want to go home.”
Sympathy softens his hard, ocean eyes and I know what he’s going to say before he says it. It’s in his expression—his body language.
“You can’t go home.”
Debt
I can’t…
I can’t go home…
The thought dries my throat.
My pulse jumps in tempo, my tummy clenches, and I have the awful desperate urge to throw up. Then it hits me—my phone. I can call the police. From my back pocket, I fish for my cell. When I pull it out and unlock the screen, the little bars in the top right corner are gone, replaced by a small circle with a line through it. My heart sinks.
“No reception down here. You might as well throw it away.”
There’s no reception…
Tears flood from my eyes and drop onto my cheeks. In anger, I swipe at them and stuff it into the side of my bag, ignoring Stone’s smug expression. I’m not a crier. I was seven the last time I actually shed a tear. It was winter and I’d waited outside the always-growing ‘children’s home’. I remember it like it was yesterday. I’d stood there nervously, squeezing the strap to my backpack with cold, bare hands. My new parents were supposed to pick me up just after lunch, but they never showed. I’d waited, shaking in my pink gumboots, for them to come and take me somewhere different, but they didn’t, and as snowflakes began to pool on the shoulders of my blue hoodie, I’d cried. I don’t know what had happened to them. As a child, things weren’t explained to me. Still, after days of uncontrollable crying, I’d promised myself I’d never cry over something I couldn’t change. This is one of those times, I can’t change what’s happening, but the tears won’t stop and I feel as insignificant as I did that day.
“Why?” I ask, uncaring that I sound desperate and scared. “Why can’t I leave? I said I wouldn’t tell anybody.”
“It doesn’t work like that, and Jesus, will you stop crying?” He flicks his tongue over his bottom lip with a frustrated lick. “You’ve stumbled across a big secret here and there’s no easy way out. I can’t force you to stay—and I won’t, not if it gets me kil
led too—but if you want to live, you’ll lick your wounds, Kitten, and hold back your damn tears.”
With a sniffle, I wipe my nose on my bare arm, collecting tears that flow from my nostrils, not my eyes.
“If you don’t, if you want to leave right now—” He points a long finger to the stairs he carried me down, “—you can climb back up those stairs and let Steve know you’ve changed your mind.”
Steve? Scarface’s name is Steve? I didn’t see that coming. Still, even though he has a friendly name I don’t inch toward the stairs, no matter how desperately I want to.
“What happens then? If I decide to leave?”
Stone shrugs his broad shoulders. “Steve can be a reasonable guy. I’m sure he’ll make your death quick and painless.”
He turns from me and heads down the dark tunnel, away from the stairs. I reach out for him, snagging the soft fabric of his hoodie, squeezing it between my fingers before he’s able to slip away. “Wait. My death? He’ll kill me?”
With a glance over his shoulder, Stone nods. “You know about this place now. You can’t unsee it, you can’t avoid it and you can’t talk about it.” His eyes darken and narrow in on me, forcing me to release his hoodie. “You don’t have a choice but to wait it out down here. You fight or you die. Maybe next time you’ll think twice about following a stranger from a train in the middle of the night.”
Fight? I can’t fight. I can barely lift a crate of medical supplies without complaining. A fight with me wouldn’t be much of a fight at all. I slump into myself. This is not how I envisioned this whole thing going. To be honest, I don’t know what I expected. I was only focused on the money and how little I had to worry about my own safety. “I just wanted you to fix what you broke…”
“Yeah, well, it doesn’t seem worth it now, does it?”
Lowering my chin, I shake my head. It’s not worth it at all.
“And you owe me ten grand, by the way.”
My brows pull together, confused. Ten-freaking-grand! “For what? Ruining my life?”
Stone gestures around him. “It’s not cheap to get into a place like this. It cost me ten thousand dollars to save your life.”
I fold my arms as a tingle of frustration slices through my chest. I’m surprised how quickly it replaces my panic and fear. I didn’t want this. There’s no way I’m paying him ten thousand dollars for getting me trapped underground. Let’s not mention the fact I have to fight my way out. On top of that, I’m going to lose my job and my apartment. He has ruined my life.
“You expect me to pull that kind of money from my ass? I followed you from a train at one a.m. to fix my tablet because I can’t afford it. It only costs one hundred dollars to fix a busted tablet screen and if I can’t afford that, what makes you think I can afford ten thousand dollars?”
“Because down here, you have the opportunity to win up to eighty thousand tax-free dollars.”
My ears prick up. Eighty thousand tax-free dollars? He leans in close until the earthy, intoxicating scent of his cologne is the only thing I smell. I never noticed it before, but now it’s over-powering—arousing, even. It seems all this talk about tax-free money is warping my priorities and making my thighs tingle. The dimly lit tunnel we’re standing in doesn’t scare me anymore. Instead, a slither of excitement coils around my spine. With eighty thousand dollars, I can haul my ass to Italy and never look back. I’ve always wanted to move to Italy, maybe work at a petite wood-fire pizza place and live in a small cottage made of stone. Sitting on my porch, I would overlook a vast vineyard while I sucked on feta stuffed olives and drank wine. Yeah, that’s the life I want.
“How?” I ask, suddenly a little eager to venture further underground. “How do you win eighty thousand dollars?”
Stone’s blue eyes brighten and the ghost of a smile tugs at the corner of his lips. “Money hungry, Kitten?”
I scowl, but I’m not about to deny it. If there’s a chance I can make my life a little easier, I’m not going to say no. “I’m starved, and stop calling me Kitten. It’s not my name.”
His slight smirk pulls wide and wolfish before he straightens his shoulders and disappears into the dark tunnel ahead. I wait for a few seconds, expecting him to tell me how to win the money, but he doesn’t. That’s when I realize he isn’t going to wait for me, either, and I jolt into action. I grab my bag and hug it close to my chest. Fear makes a quick reappearance. It twists my stomach and threatens to drag it south at a moment’s notice. I move swiftly and follow his movements, keeping my head low enough to graze the network of pipes above me. Eventually, above the smell of mold and dirt, I smell his cologne and I relax at the thought of having him close.
“There’s a low concrete edge here. Be—”
The concrete edge he’s talking about introduces itself to the top of my skull with an echoing thud. I dip low and rub at my forehead, gritting my teeth to ease the ache.
“Ow,” I snap in a hushed whisper.
“I told you there was a concrete edge,” Stone states, his voice filled with husky laughter. Asshole. “How hard did you hit it?”
I brush the tips of my fingers over the front of my pulsing skull. “I hit it pretty hard, but not enough to leave a bump, I hope.”
I have enough issues with my appearance as it is. I don’t need an egg on the middle of my head to make me feel worse. I’m not bad looking, not really, just…plain. I’ve never colored my hair and I don’t wear make-up. My eyes are a light brown, my lashes are short and my nose is a little on the pointy side. If I had more than eighty thousand dollars, maybe I’d look into new facial features or accentuating some of my strengths. For now, though, I’ll settle for Italy.
Keeping exceptionally low, I follow Stone through the channel. Eventually, after descending three lots of service stairs in utter darkness, he leads us into a wide, well-lit tunnel—one I can stand up in. Along the concrete, cockroaches the size of my palm scatter before squeezing themselves into tiny cracks and crevices. You’d think that for ten thousand dollars entry they’d find a better place to situate themselves other than the pipe system of an abandoned warehouse. All points of money aside, it’s an interesting place. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a system as big as this. These channels belong to an underground storm water system built to allow thousands and thousands of gallons of water through at any one time. If it storms, we’re dead.
Sticking close to Stone, I follow him down another tunnel. In the distance, I can hear muffled cheering and chanting. He follows it and it gets louder and louder until the very concrete I stand on vibrates beneath my shoes. My heart begins to pick up speed, pumping blood around my body faster than it can accommodate and my head spins as a result. I reach out and press the palm of my hand against the concrete to stabilize myself.
“Anxious?” Stone asks, peering over his shoulder with a hint of amusement on his lips.
I swallow my anxiety and brush off my hands. “No.”
In front of him, I notice another door. This one is makeshift. Pointless, really. Doors are supposed to keep things out—or in. This door, made of decaying driftwood, isn’t enough to keep out one of those gigantic cockroaches, let alone a person. I guess that’s why they have the brute upstairs, manning the entrance.
Out of the corner of my eye, I spot a large cockroach. I gasp as it skitters over the orange light and pushes itself through a crack in the door. I shudder. I’m not a hater of insects; in fact, I’m certain lots of different kinds of creepy crawlies reside in my apartment. Nonetheless, cockroaches have always bothered me.
Stone notices my distaste and shakes his head. “Get used to them. You’re going to be sharing the same space for a while.”
“Courtesy of you,” I spit back.
He angles his large body in my direction and towers over me. His intense, blue eyes zero in on mine and I can’t look away. He’s terrifying. “I saved your life.”
“Temporarily. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re in an underground storm water system. A
ll it takes is one large dump of water and we’re both dead.”
Keeping his stare on my face, he thumps his fist against the door. “Afraid of a little water, Kitten? Drowning should be the least of your worries.”
I purse my lips as he stares me down. Next to us, the door opens, but neither of us acknowledges it. I’ve never had a submissive personality. My entire life I’ve had to fight for the things I wanted and when I got them, I never let them go easily. That’s not about to change. I can sense the control in him too. He needs it like I do, but I believe I have the advantage. I deal with needy, spoilt patients, day in and day out. He can’t crack me.
“I’m not afraid,” I challenge him, squaring my shoulders. “And stop calling me Kitten. My name is—”
Beside us, a man clears his throat, startling me. I’m first to break eye contact and look at the man who opened the door. He seems normal enough—average height, lean build, no distinct facial scars and his brown hair is cropped just below his ears. As I analyze him, I can feel Stone watching me with his piercing eyes.
“Jai?” the man states, confused. “I thought you were coming alone.”
If Jai is his name, what’s Stone? His nickname? Speaking of which, I need to clear up the nickname situation and fast, before everyone knows me as ‘Kitten.’ The thought turns my stomach.
“He was,” I state, smoothing the palms of my hands down my shirt to rid them of a clammy sweat. “But then I happened.” I extend my hand to the man. “I’m Emily.”
Cautiously, he watches my hand for a few awkward seconds before giving it a quick shake. His dark, green eyes survey me, taking in every detail. He’s unimpressed; I can tell. It’s not a foreign look; I get it all the time.