Page 12 of Cast in Shadow
They were losing patience with her. Getting rougher. Hitting harder.
She was prone on a couch with duct tape over her mouth and zip ties around her wrists and ankles. Everything hurt. Her head pounded with a dull headache; her mouth felt as if it were stuffed with cotton. The smell of cigarettes and stale fried onions hung in the air, doing nothing to assuage her upset stomach. She forced back the nausea—the only way out was through her nose—and concentrated on gathering as much information about her situation as possible.
Aggie chanced opening her eyes to slits and tried to focus. Without her glasses or contacts, anything more than three feet away was blurry. She was able to make out two shapes near a table and what looked like a laptop. Presumably hers.
What exactly they hoped to find, she didn’t know. They didn’t seem to be either particularly bright or tech-savvy.
What she did know was, there was nothing on that laptop that would interest them. She wasn’t stupid enough to store anything locally, and access to the secure, private cloud server she used was only possible when certain conditions were met.
She concentrated on other things, like their voices. One sounded relatively young. The other, rougher and more commanding—and unfortunately, the one she’d tased in her apartment. The subtle melody of birdsong and the lack of traffic and people outside suggested she was no longer in the town.
“It’s clean,” the younger man said. “There’s nothing here.”
“Look again,” the rougher voice commanded.
“I can, but the results aren’t going to be any different. I’ve done a complete scan. No wire transfers, no pictures, no incriminating emails, no hidden files. Either you picked up the wrong device or you picked up the wrong girl.”
The older guy grunted, then moved further into her range of vision.
“You can stop pretending now. I know you’re awake.”
When she didn’t respond, he grabbed her by the hair and yanked her to an upright position, which did nothing for her headache or her roiling stomach. She stared up at him with wide, scared eyes.
Cold malice rolled off him in waves. This was a man who wouldn’t think twice about snapping her neck. Might even take pleasure in it.
He ripped off the duct tape, and she sucked in a mouthful of air—air tinged with men’s cologne and tobacco. She squinted to bring him into better focus. He grabbed a chair and set it in front of her, then sat down on it.
“Let’s try this one more time. Where are the files?”
She blinked and tried to focus past the dots swimming in her vision, responding the same way she had every other time he’d asked. “What files?”
He smiled. It was chilling. “The files that contain the information you and your boyfriend have been stupid enough to keep.”
“I told you, I don’t know what you’re talking about. And Sam is not my boyfriend. We went out a couple of times as friends—that’s all.”
“That’s not what he said.”
She pulled her brows together in confusion and shook her head. “Then, he’s lying.”
He moved so fast that she couldn’t have defended herself even if her wrists weren’t bound. His hand shot out and hit her hard, sending her off the couch and onto the floor in a heap. She curled into a ball and tried to make herself as small as possible.
He followed that up with a swift and sudden kick to her kidney, and holy hell, that hurt.
Leather-gloved fingers grabbed her by the hair again and yanked her to her feet as if she weighed nothing, then he slammed her against the wall. Pain exploded at the back of her head and radiated down her spine.
He moved in close. Close enough that she could see every cruel feature. She committed them to memory. Pale, pockmarked skin. Dark, close-cropped hair and darker eyes. A wide nose that looked as if it had been broken a few times. A faint, thin scar that ran from his left ear to his jaw.
His smile grew colder. He didn’t break eye contact as one large hand closed around her neck and lifted until her feet dangled several inches from the floor. Her bound hands gripped at his fingers in a desperate attempt to loosen his hold as she kicked out. She managed to land one double-footed kick before he calmly reached down, grabbed her right ankle—the same one that had been dislocated during the snatch and grab—and twisted. He punctuated that with another body slam against the wall.
Her lungs emptied in a sudden woosh, and fresh waves of pain rolled through her in both directions, from the back of her head downward and from her twisted ankle upward. The waves met in the middle in a nauseating collision.
She groaned in pain and tried to suck air back into her lungs.
His phone buzzed with an incoming text, giving her a temporary reprieve. He held her easily with one hand while he checked his phone with the other. His eyes darkened, and his scowl deepened. Then, he shoved his phone back into his pocket.
“I’ll be back. You have until then to reconsider. If you refuse to tell me what I want to know, I’ll start removing body parts until you do.”
She believed him.
