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  The corner of his mouth turns down and that single, tiny movement makes my whole body thrill with hope. There—a crack in the armor. Please, please, let it be enough to let me reach the man beneath the hard asshole facade. I can see him. He’s so close. This man must be someone’s husband. He must be someone’s father. Someone’s son. He must still be those things even while he’s leaving bruises on my arms.

  “Please. I can’t let him die.”

  His mouth returns to its stoic line. Hope snuffs itself out in my heart, weak as a candle in rain. A sob balls itself up at the back of my throat. He’s gone. The moment is gone. In the bathroom, a fist connects with Elijah’s face and his head snaps back. I see it out of the corner of my eye but it might as well be playing on my own personal movie screen.

  The man who has my life in his hands gives me a sharp tug. Elijah disappears behind the black shirts. He’s gone, he’s gone, and as much as I twist, as much as I fight, as much as I hurt myself, I can’t get him back in sight.

  “Forget you ever knew him.” The voice in my ear is as rough as the sound of his boots on the ground. It’s the sound of the end of the world. “That’s the best advice I can give you. No matter what happens next, he’s already dead.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Elijah

  The interrogation room where I’m going to die is the least impressive place I’ve ever seen.

  They’ve taken it straight out of a B-movie set with its drain in the floor and its cinder block walls and ungodly fluorescent lights. No, of course that’s not true. The movies stole from this room. What’s that saying about art imitating life?

  I’m doing a pretty good imitation of dying. This room is doing a pretty good imitation of a morgue. And these guys could be doing an autopsy of all my life’s mistakes. They could be. They’re busy, though.

  Three guys in a room, me tied to a chair, and oh—here comes another one.

  Another fist, I mean.

  It connects with the soft part of my gut and I’m past the point where I can stop making noise. That’s one thing the movies never get right. Those guys are always crying too early or too late. I’m not going to cry, but I will grunt and cough.

  It’s not some tough guy routine. It’s just that I used all my tears up early in life. Look at me, getting all poetic in my last moments. The thing no one ever tells you is that a man can be aware of his own death for a cruel amount of time before it happens.

  My resistance to the process isn’t speeding things along, either.

  Or maybe it is.

  The bastard with the blue t-shirt leans into my face. It’s not standard Army issue, that blue T-shirt, but then nothing about this is officially sanctioned. This is all dark ops, secret room shit that the higher ups would rather pretend didn’t happen. “Tell us what she knows.”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  He punches me for the pleasure of it. One of my teeth is loose, maybe more, and I don’t have much time before my jaw gets broken. I taste salt and blood.

  When Blue Shirt gets close I spit it into his face.

  He breaks a rib in return.

  There’s a dance to torture. A rhythm.

  The rhythm of this torture, it’s fast. You get more information if you draw it out, the same way I drew out playing with Holly’s clit while she rocked on my lap. But this guy doesn’t seem to know the finer points of torture. Or he doesn’t care.

  That means I’ll wind up dead sooner rather than later. Small favors.

  It takes me a minute to cough the pain and the blood out before I hang limp. I’m tied up with both hands behind my back, wrists wrapped together behind the chair, chest exposed for the beating. I wasn’t wearing a shirt when they grabbed me and I’m not wearing one now.

  It’s not an amazing way to go, but it’s about the death I expected.

  I always had this coming, from the moment my dad threw me down a well and went to bed to sleep it off. Sometimes he’d come back to see if I survived the night. Sometimes he wouldn’t remember for days. You had to be strong to survive the well, but you knew, you always knew, that it would end in terrible agony.

  That’s for guys like me. Not for the Hollys of the world. Only good things for her. A man who stays faithful. Probably a doctor who coaches their kid’s softball team. A long life. And at the end, a peaceful drifting away during sleep.

  “Your girl, your pretty little girl, her skin all smooth and white. It’s a beautiful canvas. They’re holding her for me.” The man gives me a small, almost abashed smile, as if he’s a boy proud of a frog he’s brought home to his mother. It’s so disturbing it sends a shiver skating over my skin. “That’s one of the benefits of being senior here. You get to keep the good parts to yourself. And she’s a very, very good part. I commend you on your choice.”

  “Don’t you fucking touch her.”

  He grins.

  My blood goes cold and still, stuttering in my veins, but I don’t let the sharp fear show on my face. I can’t show them fear. I can’t show them how badly I’ve fucked up.

  This situation is why I never got close to anyone. This is why I walked away from everyone who ever walked into my life. It’s why I’ve separated myself from my brothers for all these years. It’s why I fought so hard not to fall for Holly.

  You can’t fight the demons I fight when you have something to lose.

  And finally, with Holly, I have everything to lose.

  Everything.

  I tried to warn her that this would happen. That the clock on our time together would wind down into the most horrific scenario I can imagine. Not the torture per se. I’ve been on the receiving end of enough of it to know that this isn’t the real hardship. The real hardship is being separated from her while it happens. Not that I want her to see this. As long as she doesn’t see, she won’t have to remember.

  My mind wanders to wherever she is. In my head no one ever put their hands on her. She’s still safe and untouched. That’s a fantasy. I’ll allow myself the one while I wait. One turns into another. It doesn’t take long. Her eyes on me. Her hands on me. Her body stretched out against mine, warm and sleepy.

  At some point I stop imagining the way things were and start picturing the way things could have been if everything else in my life had gone another way.

  But if I had been normal, if I had a family that gave a shit, I might never have met her in the first place. I’d do all of this again if it meant being with her.

  They take a minute to gather themselves, my team of assigned torturers. Blood from a cut on my forehead stings my eyes while they circle around me. I don’t bother looking. Their shadows will get closer, and when they do, more damage will come. I flex my hands behind the chair and try to keep circulation moving through them. Pointless tasks to pass the time.

  A fist into my gut yanks me back to the present.

  “Of course if you tell me everything I want you know,” he continues conversationally, as if he didn’t just strike a fatal blow, as if he isn’t panting and sweating from exertion, “then I won’t have any reason to question her. She’d be safe.”

  This is a lie, of course. It’s part of the torture dance. The rhythm.

  Two of them come close and tip the chair. My skull helpfully breaks the fall. Blurred-out vision is a good sign that they’ll crack it soon enough and then I’ll be out of my misery. One well-placed kick to the head and it’s lights out.

  My heart speeds up at the thought. When I die here, that’s the end. There’s no hope for Holly. I’m the reason she’s valuable to them at all. If I’m no longer on this plane of existence they’ll kill her and bag her and the world will never know where she went.

  The only way to help her is to stay alive.

  The only thing to look at down here on the floor is boots.

  Black boots.

  Steel-toed boots.

  The boots move out of sight and my body braces. It’s hard to fathom the exact pain of getting kicked with steel-toed boots. My muscles know
it’s coming anyway.

  They wait until I relax, then aim the first kick at my gut.

  Something comes loose in there. Bone, maybe. Part of an organ. Probably something essential, but it’s sheared away now and my entire gut feels thick with blood. This is the perfect interval to land another kick, and—

  Fuck.

  They do.

  One of them puts a boot on my knee and presses down. He starts slow and increases the pressure until the full weight of him is on the joint. I’d be a surgery case if I could get out of here. Gather round, med students. See what a broken body really is. But that’s the joke, isn’t it? I’m not getting out.

  The pressure releases from my knee at the same moment another kick lands in my stomach. I taste pennies and spit blood in the general direction of the closest steel-toed boots.

  “Tell me who’s paying you. Who hired you to kill the colonel.”

  “No one,” I grind out.

  “If you don’t tell me, I’ll have to ask the pretty girl with the brown eyes and the brown hair and the pretty tits. You ever fuck those tits? Bet they feel great around your dick.”

  “I’m going to beat your face in with my fist,” I say between gritted teeth.

  “That’s my line, dickwad.”

  My torturers hold a brief meeting somewhere above my head and decide to pick me up off the floor. This is not an improvement. I thought they’d kick me to death down here, which I had planned for, and now what? Now the chair’s back up in its place.

  One of them stands in front of me, the toe of his boot on top of my foot, and deals glancing blows to my face while another one unties my hands.

  My shoulders scream from being held in this position and suddenly freed, the pain a warning that it’s a trap. And of course it is. Of course my hands are only free for a minute, and then they’re above my head, held in place by a thick length of rope. Turns out there’s rope hanging from the ceiling. Every good torture factory needs rope hanging down from the ceiling.

  Enough rope to hold a man in place for a series of electric shocks.

  Water is the first part of the plan. At first I think there’s two of them coming with the bucket but it’s only double vision. It’s the ringleader, Blue Shirt, his face split open with a smile.

  “You’re going to talk,” he says, his grin gruesome and deranged.

  “The prisoner’s dilemma is a paradox,” I tell him.

  He pauses, glares at me, then dumps the bucket over my head. It’s hell frozen solid and it stings the cuts on my skin and forces a gasp out of me. Not my best moment. “What the fuck did you say?”

  “You wanted to talk, I’ll talk. The prisoner’s dilemma. It’s a paradox.” Goosebumps pinch the back of my neck and sprint down my arms. My stomach is hot with the injuries and cold with the water and I’ll give them some credit. It’s miserable. “It’s where two people in two different rooms are questioned. That’s what happening here, in case you needed me to spell it out.”

  In exchange for this I get a punch to the jaw that snaps my head around, followed by the first electric shock. He aims it at exposed skin above my collarbone and it arcs around the front of my throat and squeezes. Pain follows a second later.

  My teeth grind together. It’s a hell of a thing when your teeth fight to crush themselves. The pressure in my jaw from the combined reflex to shiver and the activated muscles keeping my teeth shut tight could make my head fall off and flop onto the floor. They’d be so pissed if that happened. A headless guy can’t say a damn thing against the woman he loves.

  I think of Holly in that basement in France.

  I heard her voice before I saw her. I was hurt then, too.

  Were you shot?

  In the back. It’s all very Roman.

  She’d touched me then, her touch lighter than air. Holly had no idea who I was. She had no idea what I’d already done to her. No idea what I would do. Her fingertips circled the wound. I heard the hitch in her breath. And what did she say?

  You can’t die.

  I’m serious.

  So serious, and all for a small wound. If Holly saw me now she wouldn’t know where to put her hands. There are too many cuts and bruises. Too much blood. A smile twists the corners of my mouth and Blue Shirt notices. He doesn’t like it. He stomps one foot down on mine, and damn it, I don’t have my own pair of steel-toed boots. At least one toe breaks. Maybe more.

  “So Prisoner A—that’s me in this example, fuckface.” Grinding pain splinters off from my foot and drives into my chin. “Prisoner A betrays Prisoner B in order to earn himself a better deal.”

  “Go ahead,” he says, laughing his demonic laugh. “You aren’t getting a good deal, though.”

  “Yes, well, that’s a flaw in your plan. You’re not incentivizing me to speak.” The word incentivizing comes out jumbled. I’ve taken quite a few punches to the mouth. “You’re only punishing me for not speaking. It’s only half as effective.”

  In light of my explanation the three of them decide to work as a team. One of them pulls my head back, exposing my throat. The second one lines up a boot with my other foot. And Blue Shirt goes for the heart.

  The electricity is a nice touch, it really is. It lights up every muscle in a sick parody of the way I feel when I’m with Holly. With my head back like this it’s impossible to move through it. You can’t die, whispers Holly from somewhere else. Oh, sweetheart, but I can.

  When it’s over my stomach is twisted inside out. Blue Shirt tops it off with a blow across the face. A tooth comes loose. I cough it out before I can choke on it. “Prisoner B, though. She has the same idea. She betrays A so she can get a better deal.”

  “Your girl’s going to sell herself to get free, is that right? And leave you hanging here by your wrists while we fuckin’ electrocute you? Yeah. Yeah, I could see that happening.”

  Someone has their fingers in my hair and there’s no way for me to leverage myself back to the ground. I am suspended on the back two legs of the chair. My neck could snap at any moment.

  “And that’s how—” My own cough interrupts me. It’s soaked in blood, soaked in salt and metal, and it’s the taste of something gone very wrong. It’s the taste of imminent death. It would be dramatic to even think it if it weren’t so true. “That’s how they both end up with the worst possible outcome. That’s how they both end up being tortured by the dark side of the Army until they fucking die. You want to talk? Let’s talk about that.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Holly

  The man in the room with me folds his arms over his barrel chest and taps his fingers over his elbow. He does this every time he stops to consider me, which is often.

  My head aches from crying, from screaming, from the flashbang in the basement. My back aches from the metal chair. My ankles hurt from the chains. And of course my side still aches from the bullet wound, but none of it hurts as much as my heart.

  I’m connected to the metal table in front of me by two lengths of chain. I think this is meant to convince me that the people who brought me here are not all bad. Same goes for the day-old sludge in the Styrofoam cup I keep cradled in my hands. It’s something to hold on to.

  The man stops tapping his fingers and takes a chair on the other side of the table. He looks like he belongs here, in this concrete room. I belong anywhere else.

  I belong with Elijah.

  I have a sinking feeling that he could be close. That should make me feel better, because if he’s close then there’s a chance I can get to him.

  But if they have me chained to a desk, what are they doing to him? This could be one of a hundred concrete rooms all used for varying and terrible purposes. My pulse pounds. Would it be better or worse if I could hear his voice right now?

  “Elijah North is a traitor.” The man on the other side of the table drags a fingernail across the pitted metal surface. “That much we already know. We’ve been tracking his movements for some time, but it may come as a surprise to you. I understand
you were… close.”

  He says this, and then he waits.

  And waits.

  The coffee trembles in the cup, though I could swear I’m staying still. There’s nothing else to do. I’m chained to a table. Pulling at the chain isn’t going to do anything but give away how much each passing second weighs on me.

  It’s a stupid weight, too. I shot one guy. That doesn’t mean I can topple the U.S. government. The military. Especially with no weapons and lacking even the ability to stand up.

  In the silence I can stay still, and I can listen for Elijah, and I can be afraid of what I might hear.

  It goes on forever.

  I clear my throat.

  What does he want me to say? Yes, we were close. When he burst into the basement I wasn’t wearing any pants, and I can still feel the fullness from when Elijah was inside me. Clearly we were close, but I don’t know what the right answer is.

  I’m going to burst out of my skin. That would put a wrench in his plans. The energy making itself at home in my nerves feels dangerous and raw and completely at odds with the fact that my options are down to two: answer or don’t.

  I stay silent. I’m listening for Elijah with so much focus that it feels like a knife through my temples. Like a bullet through my brain.

  A sigh. “I want to help you, Holly, but you have to understand, this is a very serious charge. Whatever he told you, you need to let go of that. He was lying, probably.”

  “He’s not a traitor.” My voice sounds flat and contrary and as soon as the words are out in the air a new fear strikes. “And neither am I.”

  Maybe I don’t understand what’s really happening here.

  Maybe the choices aren’t what I think they are.

  There’s not enough time to think it through, because the man across from me straightens. The movement is so deliberate that I know he’s relieved. He’s been waiting for me to say something so he can continue with his job. “Do you know what treason is, Holly?”

  “He didn’t try to overthrow the government.”