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Crew rested his hands on his knees. “I’m not sure. I woke up not long before you. I haven’t seen or heard anyone.” He made the same scan of the room as I did.
“The heat,” I groaned. “Did they leave us any water?”
Crew searched the cabinets. “Found it.” Crew grabbed two bottles out of the small refrigerator, twisted off the caps, and handed one to me. I drank greedily.
Whoever had left us here, dropped us on the floor and took off.
“The door?” I lowered the bottle from my lips.
Crew shook his head. “I tried it.”
The windows were boarded up. “Are any of the boards loose?”
“I didn’t find any, but there’s nothing in here. I don’t know what we could use.”
Neither of us were survivalists. Crew had a degree in accounting and marketing, and I was a mafia queen.
“Shit.” I whispered more to myself than to illicit a response.
“I don’t know why I thought I could just get out of New Orleans. Start over.” Crew hung his head. “It was never going to happen.”
“You still can leave with her. We’ll get out of here.” He couldn’t give up this easily. Not this soon.
“Do you think they have Seraphina too?” His eyes landed on mine.
“Oh God. You think this is about you two?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?” He seemed startled. “This is exactly what we were worried about. This. Being discovered. It has to be the reason we’re here now.”
I cleared my throat and took another sip of water. “It could be,” I admitted. “Or you could have been in the wrong place. There’s no way to know until we hear the demands. Crew, this could be a deal gone bad at work. You know that.”
“But Seraphina.” He was panicked. “Oh God, Seraphina,” he whispered.
“I’m sure she is fine,” I tried to reassure him. “We have to figure out as much as we can from inside this cabin so we can get out of here.” There was a sliver of fear that she was also wrapped up in this. Would one of the organizations hurt a pregnant woman? Had the families fallen so far into a dark hole we had become unrecognizable?
“I agree, but how?”
“Let’s start in one corner and work our way around the room,” I suggested.
“What are we looking for?” Crew helped me to my feet. The room began to sway as I tried to get my bearings on wobbly feet. The water made me feel hungry. My stomach growled.
“Anything. Everything. Maybe there is something in here that would at least tell us who owns this place.” It was wishful thinking, or resourceful. It kept us occupied. It gave us a tiny scrap of control. At least the illusion that there was something we could do to get out of here.
“I wonder if we’re in the city.”
“We’ll get out of here,” he assured me.
“How?” I knew he didn’t have the answer, but I asked anyway.
“I know we will. No one would go to all this trouble just to lock us up in a cabin to die. That doesn’t make sense, does it?”
I exhaled. I wanted his argument to be true. I didn’t want to leave Knight this way. He was searching for me. I knew he was. If he never found me. If this was how it ended, he wasn’t going to forgive himself. I didn’t want this kind of ending for either of us, but especially for him to have to live with that kind of guilt.
The dividing wall to the bathroom was nothing more than a sliding sheet of plywood. There was a toilet in the corner and a sink attached to the wall. I closed it behind me and ran the water. When I emerged a few minutes later Crew was trying to pry the boards off the windows.
“I don’t think it’s going to suddenly work,” I advised. He was breaking out in a sweat.
He huffed. “Maybe it will one of these times.”
