37
Sara
Over the next three weeks, I do my best to prove Peter wrong, to distance myself from him, but it’s a futile endeavor. Every time I erect any barriers between us, he breaks them down, and the perverse connection between us grows, aided by a physical attraction so strong it rips at the last shreds of my resistance.
Now that he’s had me every way, my captor knows no boundaries with my body, and our sex is more intense than ever—and our condom use ever more sporadic. I don’t understand how that happens, how my brain just shuts down at his touch, making me miss something so important. I don’t want a child with Peter—I dread the mere thought of it—but when he sweeps me up in his embrace, pregnancy is the last thing on my mind.
So far, I’ve been lucky, with my period coming last week as usual, but I know better than anyone that all it takes is one slip, one careless moment. And I’m not sure that Peter is being careless, exactly. He still uses condoms when I manage to remind him, but there have been no more morning-after pills—not after that one time.
“I’ve read through all the medical literature on the topic, and I don’t want you exposed to those hormones,” he stated when I begged him to get the pills for me again. “You’re extra sensitive—you said so yourself—and I’m not risking your health on the off-chance we might’ve gotten pregnant.”
And no matter how much I tried to reason with him, pointing out that I’m an Ob-Gyn and can assess the risks myself, he wouldn’t budge.
I’m beginning to suspect that Peter wants me pregnant, and that, more than anything, is what again turns my mind to escape.
This time around, I bide my time, carefully planning every step. I’m almost certain that Peter spoke the truth when he said the mountain is ringed by cliffs, but on our hikes through the forest, I’ve seen cliffs where the slopes are less sharp and the roots provide convenient handholds. The mountain is definitely inaccessible by car, and going up would be next to impossible, but a hiker who knows what she’s doing could possibly get down.
At least I’m hoping that’s the case.
I begin by deciding on the provisions and scoping out their locations. I can’t stash them in advance without getting caught, but I pay careful attention to where everything is stored. Rope, a sturdy knife, a backpack, nonperishable food, bottles of water—I keep a mental checklist of the essentials so that when the time comes, I can gather everything in a few short minutes. It helps that Peter and his men are neat to the point of OCD; everything in the house has its place, so all I have to do is remember where that is.
I also contemplate stealing a gun. The men are careful around me, stashing their weapons out of sight, but I’m pretty sure I could get my hands on something if I really tried. I haven’t tried, though, because by the time I learned where they keep them, I’ve gotten to know each of my captors and can’t imagine hurting them. The healing instinct is too deeply ingrained in me. I could probably pull the trigger under some circumstances—if my life was in danger, let’s say—but these men don’t pose a mortal threat to me. On the contrary, they’re nice to me, each in his own way. And taking the weapon to bluff them into letting me go would be stupid; they’d instantly see through my pathetic threat and take the gun away.
I’m up against elite ex-soldiers, not regular men, after all.
Still, I add the gun to my mental wish list, just in case an opportunity to acquire one arises before my escape. I might not be able to bluff Peter and his men into complying with my demands, but the same can’t be said for some Japanese farmer. I’d try the civilized approach at first, of course, but if I’m having trouble gaining access to a phone, I’m not opposed to waving a gun around—unloaded, of course.
As I work on these preparations, I also start keeping an eye on the weather, casually asking the guys for a forecast each day. We haven’t had snow yet, but it’s already October and winter comes early at this altitude.
The last thing I want is to get caught in another icy storm.
“I don’t like the cold,” I complain to Peter when we return from a walk one day. “And I especially don’t like it when the day starts off at one temperature, and by evening, it’s twenty degrees colder.”
“Poor baby,” he croons, taking off my jacket to rub my arms. “Come, let’s take a shower and get you nice and warm.”
I let him warm me up with a hot shower and two orgasms, and the next day, I resume complaining about the weather—that way, no one will think it strange if I keep asking for a daily forecast.
As I’m doing all this, the guys are engaged in planning of their own. After a long break to throw the authorities off their scent, the team agreed to take on another job—a highly paid, highly dangerous assassination of a politician in Turkey.
I’ve been trying not to think about it, because each time I do, I get so anxious I can’t eat or sleep. After what happened in Nigeria, just hearing the word “job” raises my blood pressure.
“Why do you have to do this?” I ask Peter in frustration as mid-October—the client’s deadline to complete the job—draws nearer. “You said yourself, it’s especially dangerous out there for you these days. You got paid millions—millions—for that Nigerian banker. You can’t have gone through all that money so quickly.”
“Of course not, but we have to think ahead,” Peter says. “Aside from some of our more expensive toys, our hackers cost a fortune, and we need them to continue evading the authorities—and searching for Henderson.”
Shaking my head, I take a breath and head into my recording studio, both to distract myself with music and to avoid another argument. Because if Peter is inflexible about the necessity for these jobs, he’s absolutely immovable on the topic of Henderson—the one man still remaining on his list. The one time I cautiously brought up the possibility of forgetting the general and moving on, Peter shot me down so harshly I haven’t been inclined to try again.
“He personally issued the order for the Daryevo operation,” my captor snarled, his handsome face so twisted with rage it was unrecognizable. “He did this”—he shoved the phone with pictures of the massacre at me—“and I’m not going to rest until he and anyone who’s helping him are rotting with the worms, just like the corpses of my wife and son.”
I nodded then, backing off, because as much as I’d like to pretend otherwise, I do understand Peter’s need for vengeance. I can’t imagine losing people I care about in such a horrible way, and I know it had to have been even worse for him. From everything he’s told me, those short years with Pasha and Tamila were the only time he’s experienced anything resembling family and love.
Last week, for the first time, Peter talked a little bit about his son. It was after he woke up from a nightmare about his family’s deaths, his big body shaking and covered with cold sweat. He reached for me then and fucked me, and in the quiet aftermath, he admitted how much he misses his little boy—how acutely he still feels his absence.
“Pasha was… life,” he told me raggedly. “I don’t even know how to explain it. I’d never met a child who took such joy in the mere act of existing. Birds, insects, trees, the sky and the rocks—everything was new to him, everything was fun. And he had so much energy. Tamila could barely keep up with him. He drove her crazy. And cars…” His powerful chest rose with a deep breath. “He loved cars. He wanted to be a race car driver when he grew up.”
“Oh, Peter…” I lay my hand over his. “He sounds wonderful.”
“He was,” Peter whispered, turning his palm up to squeeze my fingers, and the intensity of pain in those words gutted me to the quick.
For all of his obsession with me, my captor is still grieving the loss of his family—the people he truly loved.