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My face breaks out into a sweat. “Um, is it alright if you don’t smoke that? I’m sensitive to smoke.”
He pauses, turning around to look at me with the most melodramatic, incredulous stare. “Are you fucking serious?”
I’m realizing now that at the rate that I’m going, I’m more than likely going to end up as a corpse, no matter how I try to reason with him. I have to find the perfect way to steer this conversation towards a middle ground, or at least in a more productive direction.
Instead of responding, I sink back into my seat and watch him smoke despite my protests.
I wasn’t able to get a good look at him before, but he’s got some really striking features that would have instantly caught my eye under different circumstances. His jawline is pronounced and angular, accented by his high cheekbones, as I watch him take a puff off the cigar. The smoke is abysmal to breathe in, but I already know he doesn’t care about my preferences.
His hair is somewhat messy from the intensity of our escape from the hotel, though I have a feeling that it washisescape instead of mine. I’ve merely been moved from one unideal location to the next. There’s no way he was there to rescue me out of the goodness of his heart.
“How did you find me, and how did you know I knew anything about the briefcase?” I ask timidly.
“I saw you take it off the Blackjack table. I figured you’d have to be pretty stupid to do something like that if you weren’t invested in its contents somehow, so I didn’t question the fact that there were men coming after you for it,” he replies without even glancing back to look at me.
His comment stings a little. I’m tempted to comment on how stupid it is to leave such an item in full view of an overcrowded hotel casino, but I’m in no position to be making sarcastic comments. I feel like my hands are tied, and I can’t even reason my way out of this. I just have to let him be angry at me until he either gets bored with me or figures out that I don’t know anything.
“Can I ask what was in the briefcase?”
He pauses, ashing his cigar out the window as I strain for a full breath of fresh air. “You didn’t find out?”
I’m ready to scream. Only moments ago, he was so confident in my involvement with the damn thing that he was willing to kidnap me over it. Now he’s asking me if I knew what was inside?
“No, of course I don’t. I just saw that someone had left it there and decided to try to return it. That’s what normal people without bad intentions do when they see that someone’s lost something,” I reply.
He chuckles a little. “Yeah, you were watching it for a little longer than that.”
My blood freezes in its tracks.
“How do you know that?”
His eyes open a little further than before, potentially because I’ve caught him in an unintended confession of his own.
“I noticed you watching it for like thirty minutes,” he replies with hesitation. His body language is more closed off now, indicating defensiveness and mounting regret for his decision to kidnap me.
The drummers outside have grown louder, so I have to raise my voice. “Why were you watching me so closely?”
“Hey, don’t fucking talk to me like that, okay? You don’t get to start shouting at me. I’m still the one with the gun up here if you try anything.”
My stomach twists in knots at his comment, and I’m not sure whether to explain why I projected my voice more. He’s a loose cannon, that much is obvious – but will he actually hurt me?
Plenty of men are easy to irritate, but not all of them are violent. The fact that I watched him kill two people without blinking should be an obvious indicator of violence, but I don’t want to believe that he would hurtme.
Maybe it’s because I find him attractive, but a voice in my head tries to convince me that he wouldn’t hurt me on principle of me being a woman. Many men are this way, acting as if they have a significant moral high ground just because they wouldn’t harm a female in the event of a high-pressure situation. I’ve never seen this theory tested with killers, however, and it would appear to me that killing is only a small part of his profession.
“You’ve already seen too much. Even if you’re not involved, which I’m still not totally convinced, you know enough to have me incriminated. I can’t risk that,” he continues as he puts out his cigar.
I’ve been looking for the most opportune moment to burst into hysterics, appealing to the part of him that sees women as delicate flowers with no agency. I haven’t been able to find it, but I might not need much prompting if he continues to threaten me like this.
My eyes are beginning to water. “Okay, so what does that mean? Can you just say it plainly? Don’t make me figure this out for myself.”
Finally, he turns around and looks straight into my eyes. “I already told you. You can be an inconvenience or a corpse. Pick one.”
“Is that really a question? Are you trying to be funny or something? How about you just kill me if you’re going to keep up this stupid fucking power play?” I spit, losing all composure as the walls start to close in on me.
“Stop being dramatic. If you don’t piss me off and do what I say, you don’t have to die. Regardless, you’ll still be a massive burden on me for the foreseeable future, but killing you outright would just be another mess for me to clean up. If you’re alive, I can still reason with you,” he replies.
I absolutely hate how ambivalent he’s being about his word choices. Maybe to him, being given such a choice would carry some underlying context, but I can only take his words at face value.
