Page 14 of Plain Sight

He looks up from the phone and blinks. “How would I know?”

“You had to know my name to find me and kidnap me, didn’t you? A professional like you probably knows the names of all the people he’s…dealt with.”

He shrugs. “I don’t see the point.”

“Because…” Every second I’m alive is a second I’m not dead. “You’ve done this for so long that they all blur together? How long is that, exactly?”

The kidnapper narrows his eyes. It reminds me of a worn-out clerk behind the counter at Target. Someone who has fifteen minutes left on their shift and who doesn’t know if they want to spend the energy making small talk.

It’s so weird.

“Fourteen years,” he says. “Or fifteen.”

“That’s a long time to be killing people.”

Oh, Lily, come on. The last thing I need to be doing is reminding him that he has a job to do. And the job is to kill me. I guess there’s no way to avoid it permanently other than slipping out of his clutches.

Lucky for me, the kidnapper looks distractedly out the windows. His eyes scan the sidewalk below. Is he waiting for them to be clear? That’s unlikely. There’s nothing out there that would keep people off the streets. He’d have to drive me outside the city to find a place that was actually secluded.

My heart goes that much faster. Maybe he’s waiting for somebody else to get here.

It would be extremely bad for me if it was two against one, but good for me if the other person is delayed for some unpredictable reason.

I imagine a businessman in a navy suit hustling along the sidewalk, checking his watch and cursing himself for being late to his last killing of the day. If a person like that shows up and the two of them discuss getting held up in traffic, I don’t know what I’ll do. Laugh until I cry. Cry until I laugh. One of those.

“You didn’t—” His eyes flick back toward me. Either this man keeps forgetting I’m here, or there’s someone more important on the way. “You didn’t start out killing people, did you?”

A near-soundless laugh. “No. I only transitioned to the more delicate jobs fifteen years ago. The pay for everything else was shit, and I had⁠—”

He cuts himself off, snapping his mouth shut so hard I can hear it. Then he stalks toward the window, crosses his arms over his chest, and looks over the street again. He’s got a little color in his cheeks, and he’s breathing slightly faster. It’s the most emotion he’s shown this whole time.

Is that good?

Or is it terrible?

I take a deep breath and pretend I’m mid-dance. No way out but through. I could’ve just dropped down to the stage and walked away if I had to, but that wasn’t the spirit of the thing.

“How many times has my grandfather hired you?”

“I wouldn’t know.” Oh, now he’s annoyed. “He’s generally discreet.”

“Yeah. That sounds like him.”

Discreet is right. If I die today, at least I’ll die knowing the truth about the man who raised me. That information won’t comfort me in my last moments, but my final thoughts won’t be consumed by the misguided hope that my grandpapa will swoop in and save me.

What an asshole.

The kidnapper glances at his phone again. Taps some more. Mutters something under his breath.

More tapping.

And then he lifts the phone to his ear.

A few beats later, he yanks it down and stabs at the screen. There’s no mistaking it—he just got someone’s voicemail.

Whose voicemail?

He shoots me such a fast glare that it’s gone before I can decide if it was real, and then he’s tapping again, each jab hard and precise.