Page 26 of Captive

He’s standing in the dark bedroom with blood on his knuckles and a torn sleeve and dust all down one side. He’s breathing hard. His eyes go over me from head to foot, fast, the way they did at the pens.

“Are you hurt?” he asks.

“No. Are you?”

He looks at his own hand like he’s surprised to find it attached. “No.”

I don’t decide to do it. I just step forward and take his wrist and turn his hand to the light from the window. Split knuckles. Nothing broken. His pulse under my fingers is fast and hard.

He goes absolutely still.

I let go.

“Two men,” he says. His voice isn’t quite steady. “One had bolt cutters. They came for the shed, where they thought the samples were. I let one run so I wouldn’t leave the building. The other one dropped this getting over the fence.”

He holds up a clear bag. Inside is a folded photograph.

It’s me.

I’m crossing the gravel outside my own clinic in the dark, medical bag in one hand and the blue case in the other. Taken through the windshield of a parked car. The stamp at the bottom reads three forty-seven in the morning. Four days ago. Thirty minutes before Luis called me about the cattle.

I sit down on the edge of the bed because my legs decide it for me.

“They were watching me before,” I say. “Before the shipment. Before you.”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t make them find me.”

“No.” He crouches in front of me, not touching. “But I kept you somewhere they already knew about. I built it for them two years ago.”

I look at the photograph. I remember that morning. I dropped a box of sterile sleeves beside the truck and almost left them. I went back for them. Somebody sat in a car and watched me pick up every one.

I start to shake.

It isn’t dramatic. Just a fine steady tremor I can’t stop, from my hands up through my shoulders. Cole sees it. His hands come up, and stop, and go back to his knees.

“Tell me what you need,” he says.

What I need is to be home. What I need is my phone and my keys and a door I lock myself. What I need is to never have met Warren Vale.

“Don’t lock it tonight,” I hear myself say.

His head comes up.

“Don’t lock it,” I say again. “Sit in the chair. Inside. Where I can see you.”

It isn’t trust. I want to be very clear with myself about that. It’s that there are men out there with photographs of me, and the only person I know for certain will stand between me and them is the man who locked me in, and I would rather see him than hear him through a door.

“Rule three,” he says quietly.

“I wrote it. I’m changing it. Again.” My voice cracks on the last word and I let it. “For tonight.”

He pulls the wooden chair to the open doorway and sits in it, facing out, his back to me, his body filling the frame.

I lie down on top of the blanket in my clothes. I watch the shape of his shoulders against the dim hall light. He doesn’t turn around. He doesn’t speak. Every so often he flexes his split hand and the muscles in his back shift under the torn shirt.

I think about his hand going still under mine on the cow. I think about him on one knee on wet tile, waiting for me to let him out of a bathroom. I think about his voice in the kitchen saying I wanted you so bad it felt like getting kicked, like it was a fact about the weather.