Page 11 of Locked & Loaded

“Hello? Anyone?” he calls. His voice hits the door and dies there. “The door’s stuck!”

The metal rattles under his fist. He waits, listening, but the answer is the same nothing as before.

I sit back on my bunk, and the ugly, practical shape of the situation starts settling in.

Our compartment is at the end of the car. The guys are nearby—some of them have to be—but these old trains were clearly built by people who valued privacy over basic survival, and the noise eats half the sound before it gets anywhere. Unless one of them comes looking for us, or someone happens to pass on the way to the toilet, they might not hear us at all.

The panic tightens around my chest. The cold pressure behind my sternum spreads upward into my throat, making it hard to swallow.

We won’t die here. That’s irrational. The compartment isn’t airtight. There’s a ventilation grille in the ceiling, probably still functional. We have seven and a half hours to Copenhagen. The oxygen will last. It has to.

I know all of that, and it still doesn’t help. My brain takes every fact and twists it into proof that I’m going to die. That I might already be dying. We’re two grown men with huge lungs, trapped in a tiny room with a window that won’t open and no way out. And who knows, maybe this isn’t even a real compartment. Maybe it’s some storage space they shoved bunks into, and that grille is blocked, and nobody bothered to check because why would they?

Mads stops hitting the door, and the sudden silence drags me back into the room. His face is flushed, sweat running down his temple. He wipes it away with the back of his hand, then drops onto his bunk and lies back, one arm thrown over his eyes.

I drag my gaze away from him and focus on my breathing. In through the nose, hold, out through the mouth.

God, I would kill for a cigarette. One drag, even. The nicotine would cut through this panic like a blade. But my pack is gone—probably dropped somewhere between the platform and this compartment—and even if it weren’t, I couldn’t smoke in here. The window and the door are both sealed shut, leaving no fresh air, no way out, and nothing to take the edge off.

Jesus, it’s getting hard to breathe.

I try to slow down, but my next breath comes too fast, and the one after that drags too loudly through my throat. Across from me, Mads shifts on his bunk, sitting up enough to look at me.

“Are you trying to use all the oxygen on purpose so we die faster?” he asks, deadpan.

I can’t answer. My chest is heaving now, my head filling with images I can’t stop: me passing out in this tiny compartment, Mads shouting for help that never comes, Mads watching me die, my parents getting a call from Toledo first thing tomorrow morning.

The panic keeps feeding on itself, and a dizzy, buzzing lightness starts building behind my eyes.

Oh God, not now.

Please.

“Why didn’t you tell Toledo you didn’t want to be bunked with me?”

The question cuts through the buzzing in my head. I blink, sweat dripping into my eyes. “What?”

Mads is still staring at me from the opposite bunk, half-naked, flushed from the heat, apparently under the impression that this is a great time to interrogate me about sleeper-car politics.

“You said you didn’t give a fuck about us being in the same compartment,” he says. His voice is level, but there’s an edge to it. “Which is a lie, obviously. So why did you say it?”

I stare at him. My vision swims a little, the overhead light suddenly too yellow. I’m sweating through my T-shirt and these stupidly warm pants, my hands shaking against my knees, and Mads Holm wants to have this conversation right now.

Of course he does.

“What?” I say again, because my brain is struggling to hold on to his question while also trying not to pass out. The rest of my body, unfortunately, is still very aware of his bare chest.

“Did you want to make me look like an asshole in front of Toledo and the whole team?”

I blink. “No.”

“Then why didn’t you say you’d rather be with anyone else?”

Because I knew it wouldn’t matter. Because Toledo had already made up his mind. Because arguing would only make the whole thing bigger, and I’ve spent three months trying very hard not to make anything involving Mads Holm bigger.

And maybe because some pathetic part of me wanted to be here with him, which is not a thought I have the energy to unpack while actively fighting for my life in a train sauna.

My gaze drops to his chest again before I can stop it.