19
Raya Parker came to in more pain than she’d felt in quite some time.
Part of it was leftover remnants of the trekking, the effects of covering great distances every day. But most of it was new, in the form of bumps and bruises and swelling, all thanks to the wonders of blunt force trauma. She’d had a blindfold tied over her eyes for a long time. She didn’t know exactly how long it had been. Days, or weeks, or months. All she’d known was the same murky darkness, coupled with the swimming vision and the constant swaying as someone carried her up a series of mountains and occasionally crammed food into her mouth and made her drink from a lukewarm water bottle. Her hands had been tied behind her back the whole time, and her feet had been bound together with something that cut into the skin around her ankles.
Before that, she couldn’t remember anything at all.
Just the remnants of her final night of freedom, falling asleep across from her father and then…
This.
Now she awoke in something resembling a basement, but she couldn’t be certain. Her first instinct was to panic. She opened her eyes and saw something other than the blindfold for the first time since she’d been snatched, and instantly she wanted to scream and shout and plead for help.
But the two men across from her made sure she didn’t.
First she recognised Oscar Perry, with his blonde curly hair and white teeth and blue eyes. She’d always thought he looked more like a surfer than a bodyguard, but he wasn’t flashing his trademark grin today. He had nicks and scratches all over his face, and he sat opposite her with his hands bound behind him and a rope stretched over his torso, looping around the wooden support column against his back.
Next to him was the porter. Raya couldn’t remember the man’s name. He was small and squared away, and he’d been intensely shy on the trek. She didn’t think he spoke a word of English. He had a horrific injury — one of his eyes had swelled completely shut. It looked like it had been painted black and blue. Like a golf ball had been shoved under his eyelid. He sat there with his head bowed, looking awfully sorry for himself, and Raya felt a pang of empathy for him despite her own condition.
Perry was the first to notice her wake up.
He said, ‘Raya. Don’t scream. Please.’
She looked around.
They were in a dingy room with rock walls. Weak natural light filtered in through narrow cracks in the ceiling, but that only served to elongate the shadows and make everything a whole lot creepier. Raya tried to move, but her hands were stuck behind her back, tied tight to a heavy object. Constricting her movement. There wasn’t anything quite like it. She’d never been restrained before. There was something horrifying about it at an instinctive level. She tried to move — couldn’t. Absolutely helpless. At the mercy of whoever had put her here.
They could do anything they wanted to her like this.
She shivered.
It took her a moment to realise she was resting against a column — same as Perry, same as the porter.
She breathed. In and out.
Slowly.
Calmly.
She’d been practicing meditation through an app on her phone for the last six months, and she’d need every ounce of what it had taught her to prevent herself succumbing to a panic attack.
She kept breathing.
Watching her intently, Perry nodded his approval.
‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘Keep doing that.’
‘Where are we?’ she said, keeping her voice low.
‘I don’t know. They blindfolded me, too.’
She nodded at the porter. ‘What about him?’
The porter was watching them talk through his one good eye. The other hung grotesquely in the lowlight. His expression was mostly placid, but there was something resembling genuine sadness under the surface.
At their situation, most likely.
Perry shook his head, exasperated. ‘Haven’t been able to get a word out of him.’
‘Does he speak English?’
‘I’d wager he doesn’t.’
Raya sensed the sarcasm. ‘Sorry. I’m not thinking straight. What do we… fuck… what do we do, Oscar?’
Perry looked at her for a long time. With the tension in the air, it felt like hours. ‘I don’t know.’
‘You’re the bodyguard,’ she said, sensing panic building in her chest. ‘You must be able to think of something.’
‘While I’m tied up like this, there’s nothing I can feasibly—’
An enormous crash sounded to their left, and Raya nearly jumped out of their skin. She tore her gaze to the left and saw a wood-panelled door ricochet off the adjacent wall. Thrown open hard by someone behind it.
A pair of Nepali men walked into the room.
There was nothing impressive about them — at least, not compared to Perry’s brawn. They looked like cold cruel men, but they were small in stature and build, clad in faded khakis and black military-style boots. But they weren’t the army. If Raya had to guess, she put them as some sort of rogue paramilitary force — her father, when he was home, often discussed the problem of well-trained combatants banding together outside an official government structure as one of the greatest threats in today’s day and age.
Just Aidan Parker’s idea of good dinner conversation, she thought.
Then one of the men strode forward and backhanded her across the face, and she stopped thinking anything other than, Ouch.
‘No talking,’ the man hissed in accented English. ‘All of you, shut up.’
The porter suddenly babbled something in Nepali. It sounded hostile. Neither Raya nor Perry could be sure what the small man said, but venom flared in the soldier’s eyes as he turned to the hostage.
‘Don’t hurt him,’ Raya said, but she practically whispered it under her breath, and it fell on deaf ears.
The soldier stepped over and kicked the porter in the chest.
Raya cried out.
She’d never seen violence like that before. Not in the flesh. Movies and books were one thing, but watching the sole of a boot ram into a
