“I’m so sorry,” I whisper. I start to reach for her face, catch myself, let my hand drop down to my side. I kneel, start working on the duct tape keeping her legs bound to the metal chair. “Just sit tight—I’m going to get us out of here.”
Am I, though? Am I really going to get us out of here when I don’t even know where here is? It’s all wishful thinking, but right now it looks like Brooke could use some wishful thinking.
When I manage to free her legs, I start working on her arms. That takes a couple of minutes—I’m counting them down in my head, wondering when Dolph will walk through that door—and then her arms are free and I help her stand up.
“Come on,” I say, taking her hand.
I lead her to the door.
Which, of course, is locked.
“Great.” I shake my head, frustrated, and look around the tiny room. Nothing in here except the chairs. I look at Brooke, then at the chairs, then at Brooke again. “I have an idea.”
One hour to go.
Fifteen
When Dolph returns again, thankfully he’s alone.
He steps through the door—light streaming into the dim room—and pauses just long enough to glance at the girl in the chair facing him. The girl who has her head down so Dolph can’t see her face. Her hair’s the wrong color—Brooke’s is blonde, mine is black—but that doesn’t seem to register right away. It takes at least an extra second or two before it begins to make sense, but by that point the door has closed and I step away from the wall and swing the metal folding chair at his head.
As expected, it catches him off guard. He falls to the ground with a grunt, tries to get back up.
I swing the chair again, this time connecting with his face.
Blood squirts from his nose. He rises to one knee, tries to stand, but I swing the chair again at the back of his head.
He hits the ground, and I swing the chair one final time down on his head.
Dolph lies flat on the floor, unconscious.
I toss the chair away. A second later I’m kneeling over him, searching his pockets, pulling out the cell phone, then a switchblade. I shove both items into separate pockets as I stand back up and turn to Brooke.
“Let’s go.”
She raises her head, but it takes a while, as if her head weighs two hundred pounds. She squints up at me, her face now even more swollen. The girl needs a serious trip to the ER, but first we need to get out of here.
I hurry over to Brooke, take her arm, help her up from the chair.
The door was locked a minute ago, but with Dolph now in here, I’m hoping it’ll open without any trouble.
It does.
I push Brooke out into the light.
There’s a pin on the outside of the door handle. I slip the pin in the slot, which will make it impossible for the door to open from the inside. Good. That’s one asshole down. Now we have to worry about the three others, assuming there aren’t more.
Brooke slumps against the wall. She almost falls, and I have to grab her, hold her steady, looking now up and down a narrow hallway. Only … this isn’t a hallway in the traditional sense. This doesn’t even look like a building.
Where the hell are we?
That noise I heard before—the low electric humming—is coming from up the hallway. I decide what the hell and start in that direction, looking back over my shoulder, expecting one of the other masked men to make an appearance at any second.
I’m not sure what I expect, but when we reach the end of the hallway and step into the room—the massive room—I whisper, “Holy shit.”
At first it doesn’t make sense what I’m seeing.
Then, all at once, it clicks.
“This is the engine room,” I say. “We’re on a ship. A big ship.”
Brooke doesn’t say anything, leaning into me.
I keep her propped up, staring around at all the massive machinery. Halfway down the room are metal stairs.
“Come on,” I say, leading her along.
She murmurs, “We should … call for help.”
Yes, we should. But not quite yet. First we need to figure out where we are.
It takes Brooke a while to climb the stairs. I stay right behind her, my hand on her back, helping her along.
We reach the top level and continue on until Brooke stops all at once, sobbing again, telling me to call for help.
I pull the phone from my pocket. “Let’s call your father.”
She blinks at me. “What?”
“Your father,” I say. “Let’s call him. He’ll know what to do.”
She blinks again. “But why … why can’t you call your father?”
“I told you, my father’s nobody. Your father has rank. He’ll get things moving in a snap.”
I place the phone in her hand, encouraging her to open it up and dial.
She does so, slowly, much too slowly, and I’m nervous where we are, too exposed, so I lead her down to the next doorway, which leads into another hallway, and I push her through that. By that point she’s dialed and has the phone to her ear, listening, and then after several long seconds she shakes her head, fresh tears in her eyes.
“He’s not answering!”
I shush her, tell her to keep her voice down, certain that the rest of the masked men will show up at any moment. One of them will probably get suspicious when Dolph doesn’t return to wherever they were congregating and he’ll go looking for Dolph and find that we’ve escaped.
I take the phone from her, start to dial 911.
Brooke says, “What are you doing?”
“Calling the police.”
She moves quicker than I anticipated, grabbing the phone from my hand and snapping it shut.
“No,” she says, sobbing even harder now, “call your father. Please just call your father.”
I don’t know
