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“Nothing compared to what Stellan, Blaine and John are about to do to Lindsay. They won’t just kill her, Mark. You know that, right? You know.” My voice rises. “You know they’ll torment her like a cat with a captive mouse. They’ll wring every bit of sick pleasure from torturing her, and then they’ll do the worst thing imaginable.”
“Kill her,” he whispers.
“No. They’ll force her to live.” The idea of Lindsay in pain, wondering where I am, left to suffer by those jackals shoves my blood faster through me, making all my injuries throb. I’m a live wire with nowhere for the electricity to go.
He gives me a pained look, then his face goes blank, his long sigh the sound of determination. “I have a contact.”
“Good of you to think about that now.” I can hear the snarl in my voice. Don’t care.
Lindsay. Oh, God, Lindsay. What are they doing to you right now?
“It’s my dad.”
“Your dad’s dead.”
“No – this is my biological father.”
I squint. It hurts. “Your biological what?”
He shakes his head. “Remember Galt?”
Galt. Galt. Oh, yeah. Mark’s biodad. Deep undercover CIA. Whatever they did to me involved too many blows to the head. My thoughts feel like scrambled eggs.
So do my balls.
Mark continues. “Bottom line: I’ll have to go way, way outside the law to get you out. And if it doesn’t work, we both end up in prison.”
“If I can’t get to Lindsay, I might as well die.” I pull myself up and stretch, inventorying. My right shoulder’s been wrenched hard, a tendon screaming as I rotate the joint. I taste blood no matter how many times I swallow, and I’m stripped down to underwear. I don’t care.
Get me out.
The words turn into a non-stop thought that won’t let go. Getmeoutgetmeoutgetmeout.
“I wish I could say no one’s dying on my watch, Drew, but I can’t.”
When you spend days in a war-torn region in the desert, hours of monotony and boredom sprinkled in between minutes of terror and chaos, you learn to look at people differently. No shell. No walls. The look Mark and I exchange says thousands of words in seconds.
He’s pretty sure he can’t save Lindsay.
And I’m damn fucking sure I will.
“And I wish I could say I trust you with the GPS tracking system for Lindsay, but here’s the deal, Mark – get me the fuck out of here and I’ll give you that information.”
“She could die in the meantime.”
“She could die if the wrong people get that information. It’s the only way I can save her.”
“You really don’t trust me.”
“If the roles were reversed, would you trust me?” I wince as my eyes widen with emphasis, the skin tender and paper-thin. Compartmentalizing the pain is key now. Pretending it’s not there is how I survive.
It’s how I find Lindsay.
“Fuck.”
He spins on his heel and slams the door shut.
Funny. I would have answered the same way, too.
