Page 8 of Captive

A man on a bucket in the dark, watching a woman he locked in a room. I know what that looks like. I let it look like what it is.

Under it, where I can’t make it stop, is the rest. I like knowing exactly where she is. I like that every door between her and the world goes through me. Something Russell fed for years is lying in the dark with its chin on its paws, satisfied, and it doesn’t want anything else tonight except to keep watching that window.

I don’t argue with it. I don’t feed it either.

I don’t go to the door. I don’t knock when it isn’t time. I don’t say her name through the wall to hear her answer. I just watch the cow breathe, and every few minutes, the window.

Eventually she steps back from the glass. The light stays on.

I sit there until it goes out.

Chapter 3

Sofia

The lock turns three times before midnight, and never for me.

At four in the afternoon, Cole stands in the doorway while I check 14C and replace her fluids. At eight, he holds the light and writes down the numbers I call out. At eleven, he carries the used supplies to the disposal bin and brings back a clean bucket without being asked.

Every time, he knocks before he opens the door. Every time, he says my name first. He never steps inside the room.

Every time, he locks it again behind me.

At the eight o’clock check, the flashlight slips in his grip while I’m listening to the cow’s lungs, and the beam slides off her ribs.

“Closer,” I say, without looking up. “Here.”

I reach back and take his wrist and move the light where I need it. His skin is warm. His pulse jumps once under my fingers, hard, and he goes rigid all the way up his arm.

I let go. He holds the light exactly where I put it and doesn’t move it a quarter inch for the next four minutes.

When I stand up, he steps back so fast he nearly hits the rail.

Neither of us says anything. He walks me to the door and locks it. I stand on the other side of it with my hand closed around nothing, feeling the ghost of his pulse against my fingertips, and I am so angry at my own body I could scream.

I learn the sound of it. A heavy click and then the quieter scrape of the bolt seating. After the third time, I hear it in my head even when he isn’t touching it.

I spend the evening taking inventory, because inventory is what I do when I can’t do anything else.

One narrow bed with a wool blanket. One wooden chair. One window facing the treatment shed, opening exactly six inches before a steel stop catches it. The screen is riveted, not clipped. A bathroom with a sink, a toilet, a shower stall, and a second window too small for anything larger than a cat. My medical bag, which he let me keep. My sample case, which I’ve hidden under the bathroom sink because a leaking roof would have to defy gravity to reach it.

No phone. No keys. No way to tell anyone where I am.

I’m not hungry. I eat anyway, because captivity doesn’t get better when dehydration starts making the decisions.

Around nine, I stand at the six-inch gap in the window and watch him.

He’s sitting on an upturned bucket in the shed, twenty feet from 14C, with his back against a post and his forearms on his knees. Not sleeping. Not on his phone. Just watching the cow breathe, and every so often, turning his head to look at my window.

When he sees me there, he doesn’t look away. He doesn’t smile or nod or do anything to make it friendly. He just looks, steady and dark, like a man keeping a count.

I step back from the glass. My heart is going harder than it should.

I tell myself it’s fear. Most of it is.

At some point after one, I sleep, badly, in my borrowed clothes.

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