“You would change in the living room when I gave you a bedroom all your own?” he asks in that thickly accented voice, which I’m starting to realize sounds vaguely eastern European. But he’s got his brow raised to me in challenge as he stands there, looming, larger than life, waiting for my response as he holds a small cloth bag.
“Well, maybe,” I say defiantly, though even I can tell I sound more like a petulant child than a grown woman. I glance down at the bag, my arms folded beneath my chest. “What’s that?”
He gives the bag a toss onto the sofa.
“It’s medicine for nausea. It will help you keep your food down,” he explains to me, the towering brute looking exactly as I’d seen him last, except he must have shaved away the stubble in the interim. But it’s quickly regrowing. “Plus some magazines for entertainment,” he adds, as if this is the 1990s and people still read magazines.
“And my cellphone?”
“I had to destroy it,” he says casually.
“What?” That was pretty much the last thing I expected him to say, and I take a step towards him angrily. “But it has all my contacts!”
“It could also be used to track you down. Is a phone worth your life?” he asks me pointedly, and I’m starting to hate his chiseled face and eerie calm. He radiates confidence and power, like some smug son of a bitch who’s never been knocked down a peg in his life.
I’m aghast. I can’t believe it. My phone. The newest model that I had to shell out a ridiculous sum for after waiting in line…destroyed. By this thug.
“How could you?!” I demand, rising up onto my knees and glaring at him. “Do you have any idea what that thing meant to me?”
He takes his time, undaunted, those dusky eyes looking me over as if I’m a strange, even repulsive creature. “More than your life, it seems,” he says simply before turning to leave.
But I can’t let him leave, and I lunge over the back of the sofa to grab his arm at the wrist.
“No, wait!” I insist, but even I realize that it’s only by choice that he stops. That thick arm beneath my hands is a thickly corded knot of muscle, and he could yank me over the back of that sofa with ease.
“What?” he asks dryly, looking back and down at me. And though he acts so calm, I get the impression I am pushing his patience to the limit.
Even though I’m pissed, I don’t want to be alone again. I’m terrified, and having him near me is safer, somehow, even if he is my captor. I hate the waiting, because when he’s gone, my head goes back to what might have happened last night.
What really happened.
And I know now that he’s definitely got me locked up in here good, and by the looks of things, he’s keeping me a while.
I let go of his thick wrist and take in a deep breath.
“How long are you going to keep me locked up?”
That question seems to take him by surprise, because he doesn’t answer me right away. He takes a moment. And that more than anything else about my capture worries me.
“I don’t know yet,” he says in that gruff voice of his. “I have to see how long the search for you persists. If I let you go too soon, then it’s just as well I didn’t haul you out at all. I should just as well have put a bullet in your head then and there that night.”
His ominous words make me tremble, all the more because I see the handle of his gun sticking out from behind his back as he faces me, side-on.
There’s some part of me, some part I’m not ready to reconcile with, that knows that what happened that night wasn’t just a nightmare. Waking up and wondering if I was dead was natural, because I remember a pistol pointed at my head.
I almost died.
This man almost killed me.
It makes me almost throw up, my stomach churning in disgust and terror, but I swallow it all down. I can’t blow this. I can’t give him a reason to kill me. I ignore the burning behind my eyeballs, the frightened tears that want to spill but I won’t allow.
Swallowing back the bile and the lump in my throat, I return my eyes to his.
“Mikhail,” I say, trying to build a bit of a repertoire with him. That’s what they always say on TV, right? Make your kidnapper get to know you. But he already knows me, at least in part... It’s still worth a shot. “I’m scared.”
His eyes narrow as he stares at me, into me. And he’s studying me. I worry that my attempt to sway him failed, but then it happens: he softens. Those broad shoulders lower a little, his sweater hugging those thick muscles showing the tension melt a little throughout him. He might be a scary boogeyman of death, but he’s still susceptible to a girl’s charms.