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“What are you doing here, little girl?” He spoke in heavily accented English.
“Little girl? Excuse me!” I spluttered, before clapping my mouth shut. Don’t antagonise the strange man, idiot!
“One more time.” He bent his head close to my ear, his breath smelling faintly of onions, hot on my cheek. Gross. “What are you doing here?”
I said the first thing that flew into my mind. “I came to look at the boats.”
He chuckled humourlessly. “You are telling me you came to look at the boats, on restricted land, at night?”
“Yep.”
“Foolish gi—” His words were cut off by a faint, muffled shout overhead.
“Winter!”
Caiden.
Determination filled me, and I opened my mouth to scream as loudly as I could, but the man slammed his hand across my mouth. In a flash, I felt a cold metal blade at my throat, and I froze in place.
“Nyet. Do not move. Do not make a sound. I will take great pleasure in slicing your pretty little throat open.”
Who the fuck speaks like this?
He pressed the blade harder against me, and all thoughts flew out of my mind as I felt a sharp sting. Tears rolled silently down my cheeks as I stood, statue still, listening to the faint sounds overhead. Caiden was right there, above me, and I couldn’t tell him.
The sounds faded away, and I knew he was gone.
The pressure against my neck disappeared, and the man spun me, throwing me down onto the mattress. My head jerked as I fell, sending a searing pain through me. Black spots danced in front of my eyes, and I struggled to stay conscious.
Dimly, I heard a ringing sound, then the pounding of footsteps as the man ascended the stairs. I heard him bark a string of words into his phone that made no sense to me in my state, followed by the sound of scraping metal assaulting my ears again. I curled up, holding my head, and closed my eyes.
Peeling my eyes open, I became aware of the man from before, sitting on a chair, cigarette in hand, watching me. When he saw I was awake, he stood, throwing his cigarette to the floor and stubbing it out with his boot.
“Bathroom.” He pointed to the door directly under the single light. “Water.” He indicated the bottle on the table that I’d noticed before, and then his voice turned threatening and cold. “Do not attempt to leave. You will not like the consequences.”
With that threat echoing through the room, he stomped off up the stairs, the hatch slamming down into place behind him.
My throat was so sore that I threw caution to the wind, sitting up slowly and unscrewing the cap of the water bottle. The liquid slid down my parched throat, soothing it, and I drank around a third of the bottle, not knowing when I’d be getting any more.
Once I’d placed the water back on the table, I carefully climbed to my feet, and holding on to the wall for support, made my way to the tiny bathroom, pulling the light cord that dangled from the ceiling. The room contained very little—just an ancient porcelain toilet and a tiny, cracked sink with a tarnished mirror above it.
I examined my th
roat in the mirror, noticing a thin line of red where the knife had nicked my flesh. Thankfully it only seemed like a minor scratch. Turning on the tap, I put my hands under the brownish-coloured icy water that came spurting out, and when it ran clear, I used my hands to gently clean the cut as much as I could, then dabbed water over my face.
Once that was done and my skin was numb from the cold, I felt my head, where there was a sizeable lump, which sent throbbing pain through me as soon as I touched it. Quickly dropping my hand, I made my way back to the mattress, collapsing down onto it, barely caring about the springs digging into me as another wave of nausea and dizziness overtook me. I pulled one of the blankets from the pile over me, resting my sore head on another, and somehow managed to fall asleep.
I had no idea how much time had passed when I awoke, but my stomach was painfully empty, and I gulped down another third of my water, forcing myself to stop and save some for later. I wasn’t sure if the tap water was safe to drink, and the last thing I needed was to get ill on top of everything else.
What to do? I was in no state to try to escape, with my head all fucked up, but I had to try something. A slow circuit of the room proved fruitless—the other door next to the stairs had a heavy-duty padlock that I had no way of opening. I stood next to the stairs, leaning against the wall, trying to get my brain in gear so I could think. My only chance was to make a run for it when the man returned next. Could I even run in this state? I had to try.
Mind made up, I decided to try the classic trick of arranging my blankets in a lump in the hope it would look like there was a body under there. Obviously there was no way it would actually fool him up close, but it might buy me enough time to get up the stairs and out…where? My guess was that I was still at the docks. I had to take it one step at a time. First, get out and find a hiding place, then take it from there.
I arranged my blankets and turned on the bathroom light, leaving the door ajar, so that if the blanket trick failed straight away, he might think I was in the bathroom. Yeah, it was a pretty horrendous, flimsy plan, but it was the only one I had.
Hiding in the shadows by the stairs, I waited.
The scraping of metal echoed through the room, and the throbbing in my head increased at the sound. I battled another wave of dizziness—there was no way I was going to let anything stop my escape attempt.
