I touched the back of my head and winced. The ache there was deep and mean, the sort that promised memory would come back in broken flashes instead of a clean line. I forced myself to breathe through it and looked around again, slower this time, more carefully.
No obvious weapons.
That didn’t mean there was nothing useful.
A metal chair. A tray. A thin blanket. A table bolted badly enough to the floor that maybe, if I had time and leverage, I could loosen one leg. My laptop was with me, which seemed like either arrogance or oversight, though the laptop was mostly useless without Wi-Fi. I had already drafted an email for help and pressed send once on instinct, absurdly hoping for a miracle, but it sat there unsent and glaring.
Still, I wasn’t passive. Irefusedto be passive.
I remembered enough to know how this had happened. I was on my way home, already thinking about Pietro and dinner and how ridiculous it was that I was smiling down on a sidewalk because of a man. I had taken the alley to get home faster. Then there was a sharp pain, a burst of white behind my eyes, and after that, nothing.
Now I was here, god knew how many hours later.
The battery on my device mattered now, so I forced myself not to waste it. No pointless opening and closing apps. No checking for signal every three minutes out of desperation alone. I needed to think like someone trying to survive, not someone waiting to be saved.
The sound of the door opening cut through my thoughts.
The man from yesterday came in carrying a tray, a bottle of water, and what looked like the world’s least appetizing sandwich.
I had tried suggesting it was drugged yesterday, refusing to eat or drink until he’d looked at me with something close to boredom and said in heavily accented English that if he wanted me dead, I would already be.
He slammed the tray onto the table with all the warmth of a prison guard finishing his shift.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
He muttered something under his breath in a language I didn’t recognize, the consonants hard and fast, maybe Slavic in origin. I looked at him more closely while he adjusted the bottle, trying to catalog everything I could. Build. Height. Scars. Tattoos.
The one on his neck caught my attention first.
A double-headed eagle.
Not Russian.
Not Slavic at all.
I looked back at his face. “You’re Albanian.”
His gaze snapped to mine.
“Eat,” he said flatly.
Then he turned and walked out, slamming the door hard enough to rattle the walls.
I stared after him, pulse climbing inconveniently.
Albanian.
That meant something. I just didn’t know what yet.
So I kept looking, cataloguing, forcing myself to think instead of spiraling.
After ten minutes of scraping at the table leg with the edge of the tray and worrying the screws with my fingertips, all I had really managed to do was skin myself. By the time I stopped, my fingers were raw and stung, small crescents of blood collecting around the nails.
Fine.
If I couldn’t make a weapon, then I needed an opening.
The man had come in three times already, always the same bored routine: food, water, tray, no conversation beyond a few barked commands. And every single time, for a handful of seconds, he left the door open behind him.
