He hesitates.
"Now."
He tosses it and it lands on the carpet with a dull sound and I keep mine level and start moving, back to the door, one step at a time, not taking my eyes off him.
My hand finds the door handle behind me and immediately something hits the back of my head. The carpet comes up fast and the last thing I am aware of before everything goes dark is the faint and absurd thought that I am actually hungry.
* * *
I wake up in the dark and for the first three seconds I don't know where my body is in relation to anything else and my heart is already going before my brain has fully arrived.
I press my palms to the floor, it's cold and damp at the edges. I move my hands slowly outward and my right hand finds something vertical and I wrap my fingers around it and feel the regularity of steel bars.
I stand up a bit too fast and the dizziness hits me like a second impact and I grab the bars to stay upright and wait for the room to stop moving.
At the back of my head, there is a specific concentrated pain that tells me where I was hit and with what kind of force. I breathe through it until my vision stops doubling.
Then I remember. The hotel room. The trolley. The two men and the guns and the statue and the moment I had almost made it to the door before everything stopped.
"Hello?" My voice comes out small and I correct it. "Hello! Someone help me! Help! Is anyone there?"
My voice goes out into the dark and comes back slightly altered, the way sound does in enclosed spaces, and somewhere beyond the bars there is movement, and then a figure resolves itself out of the darkness and stops just outside my cell.
"Yelling will not help you," comes the deep annoyed voice.
"Who are you?" I grip the bars. "Why am I here? Is this about money? Whatever it is we can talk about it, there are ways to handle this quietly and I promise you that talking is better for everyone than?—"
He takes a step back.
"Who are you?" I say again. "Please. Please just tell me?—"
He turns and walks away and the dark swallows him and I am alone again.
I slide down the bars until I am on the floor. Nobody made me get on that plane or walk into that building or open that hotel room door, and every single decision between the email in the trash folder and this floor was mine, and I can trace each one with clarity now that there is nothing else to do and nowhere to go.
I press my back against the bars and make myself think practically because falling apart in the dark helps no one.
I pat down my clothes. Blazer pockets, empty. Trouser pockets, empty. I run my fingers along my waistband, the lining of my jacket, the small interior pocket of my blazer that most people don't notice.
Nothing.
I put my head in my hands.
Time passes in a way I can't measure. Without light there is no day or night, no reference point, just the dark and the cold floor and the distant sound of movement somewhere beyond the walls.
Guards pass occasionally, footsteps that approach and recede without stopping. I try speaking to each of them. I try calm and I try reason and I try what I hope sounds like authority.
None of them respond.
After what feels like several hours I am hungry. My stomach is making sounds that would be embarrassing in any other context.
The next guard that passes, I reach through the bars and grab his wrist.
"I need to eat," I tell him, and my voice is completely steady. "I have been here for hours and I have not eaten and I need food."
He snatches his hands away so forcefully that I fall.
I sit back down and press my knees to my chest and wait and try not to think about how much trouble I am in.
