Jenna
“Well, it seems I underestimated your friend Garrett.” Dima came back in and sat down on the crate again. “So, I guess he will be coming to see you after all.”
Despite how panicked the others sounded when they were talking to him outside, Dima didn’t seem fazed at all by the news that their attack on the Crowns of Satan had failed. His tone and face remained calm as he talked. I suspected he was either impressed or trying to pump himself up for the coming fight.
“We have a surprise for him, though. If he tries to show up and disrupt the deal, there will be enough firepower on this boat to blast him into oblivion. He doesn’t stand a chance, you understand? Not a chance.”
“Are you trying to convince me or just yourself?” I asked. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to poke at him.
“I’m just letting you know,” he said. “I don’t want you to be surprised when your knight in shining armor gets dumped in the lake along with all of his little friends because they took on more than they could handle.”
I nodded. “This is all just talk,” I told him. “I’ve heard it before. You must feel really small inside to always have to talk so big.”
He laughed. I mean, he really laughed. I didn’t think that what I’d said was that funny, but he cracked up.
“You’re funny,” Dima said, wiping tears away from his eyes. “You have me in tears over here.”
He shook his head, still snickering, and turned to leave the room. Once the door closed, I was alone again in the utility closet on Igor’s yacht. I realized that inside this little room, I had no idea what time it was outside. I did know that I needed to pee. I wondered if Dima would let me go to the bathroom or if I had to wet myself here in the chair. I hoped for the former over the latter, but I also wasn’t going to hold my breath.
I tried to focus on the swaying of the room to keep my mind from floating back over the last several days of my life. I imagined myself sitting on the crate in front of me, asking me questions about what all had happened.
“Do you regret leaving your office that morning with Garrett?” I would have asked myself in that situation.
I caught myself actually thinking about the answer to that question. My knee-jerk reaction would have been to say I did regret my decision to go along with Garrett, but I wondered if I really did regret it. I finally decided my real answer would have been different.
“No, I don’t regret it,” I said aloud. “My only regret is that I didn’t trust the right one.” Garrett was dangerous and exciting. He showed me that there was so much more to life outside the stuffy libraries and universities where I had spent most of my adult life, and even a good bit of my life as a student.
“What would you have done differently?” I continued interrogating myself.
“I would have trusted Garrett.” I nodded. Garrett knew what he was talking about. This was his element, his world. In academia, I knew my way around, and I was an authority. In this world, he was one of the authorities, the experts. Because I hadn’t trusted him, I was tied to a chair and stuffed in a utility closet on a thug’s yacht in the middle of Lake Michigan. I awaited my judgment. I knew my time was limited now.
“If you survive this, will you change anything?” I asked myself.
It was the million-dollar question. Would I change anything in my life after this? I didn’t have an answer for that one. I wasn’t really sure I was going to get out in the first place. These men were never going to stop going after each other, and that left me sitting right in the middle as long as I was lined up beside either of them. If I got out, I’d have to think long and hard before deciding whether I thought a relationship with Garrett was really worth all of this.
The door opened, and it was Dima again.
“Oh, you’re still here,” he taunted me. He sat down where my imaginary self had just been sitting, vanishing her from the crate.
“Well, I thought about leaving, but I figured you wanted to keep your chair,” I joked back.
“No, you can have the chair, Dr. Dunn. You look too comfortable in it. We wouldn’t think about taking that from you,” he said back to me.
“You know, it was really peaceful and quiet while you were gone,” I told him. “Why do you keep coming back in here?”
He actually looked hurt. “I didn’t want you to get lonely.”
I was touched. He actually seemed genuine in that moment, but he continued talking.
“I figured you needed to have someone with you in your final hours. Everyone should have someone by their side. Someone they know, at least, if not someone close to them. I think we know each other pretty well, don’t you?”
I just stared into his blue eyes.
“That’s right, Dr. Dunn. It won’t be long now. When your boyfriend shows up, you’re going to get a front row seat to his death. Then,” a perverse smile spread across his face, “we’re going to dispatch you.”
Again, I found myself fighting back the words that wanted to come crashing forth. There were so many things I wanted to say in protest, but I didn’t want to give him any ammunition against me.
“Do you want to know how we’re going to do it?” He sounded like a guilty child taking pleasure in whatever it was that he wasn’t supposed to be doing.
I didn’t answer, but the giant Russian still leaned forward to speak in my ear.
“I’m going to cut you free from this chair with the knife you gave me. Then, as you try to get free from me, I’m going to give the knife back to you. I’m going to stab you, Dr. Dunn. I’m going to stab you so, so many times.”
He sounded like the idea of stabbing me repeatedly was getting him off. My skin crawled at the creepy, erotic tone in his voice.
“You’re a sick man,” I hissed.
He took a shaky breath in my ear, and I felt my stomach heave. Then, he laughed at my revulsion.
“I never told you how much it meant to me that you would come down and talk to me by yourself, Dr. Dunn. Your personal interest in my captivity was touching,” he said. “I want to thank you.”
I tilted my head, unsure of what he really meant.
“You inspired me. I waited to see you. I knew that eventually the tables would turn, and I would be faced with the same decision you had to make, where to place my loyalty. In realizing that I would be faced with that choice, I had to evaluate my loyalty in the basement of Garrett’s clubhouse,” he continued tormenting me.
“What did you decide?” I asked, though I knew the answer already. I could tell he wanted me to ask.
“I decided that, unlike you, my loyalty is unwavering. I am loyal to Igor. Are you even loyal to yourself, Jenna? I imagine if you were, you wouldn’t have even taken a job from someone like Garrett in the first place. Or were you bored with your life? Were you searching for a way out? Is that why you took the job from an obvious thug like him? Were you trying to shake things up?” He flooded me with questions. He was good at filling my head with doubts.
They were all good questions that I needed to be asking myself, especially since I didn’t have any good answers for them. I’d been wondering why I had taken Garrett’s job offer since that first day. So far, I couldn’t think of any good reasons beyond needing the money to help with my mother’s bills. At the same time, being stuck in this life, I hadn’t been able to take the time to address any of the important daily concerns of my normal life.
Oh, but if I made it out of this mess, I would have a great story to share. That thought brought a smile to my face. Dima didn’t seem too amused by my smile, though.
“Is something funny, Dr. Dunn? Is your betrayal of yourself and of your boyfriend funny to you? It’s not going to be funny to him when he sacrifices himself to try to rescue you,” he taunted me.
I didn’t respond. In fact, his reaction made me settle into that smile, allowing it to spread further across my face, ear to ear, just because it drove him crazy.
“Wait,” he said. “If we let him see you here, if he knows you’re alive, you might be in even more danger. He might decide to sacrifice you so he can escape with his life again. No, no, we can’t have that, Dr. Dunn. We’re going to have to kill you first, I guess.” A smile crossed his face now. “We may even kill you before he gets here so that he finds your body when he arrives.”
We were back to his little fantasy about murdering me. I was beginning to understand why he’d taken this line of work over many other things he could have done with his physique. He took far too much pleasure in the violence of it all.
“The possibilities are endless,” he continued, smiling like a schoolboy. “If you’ll excuse me, Dr. Dunn, I’m going to go work this out a little more. I need to decide exactly what I’m going to do, how I’m going to do it, and when it needs to happen.”
I rolled my eyes as he stepped out of the room again. I began to wonder if there was a practical reason for his restlessness. I wondered if he wasn’t talking so much shit to cover up the fact that he really was scared of Garrett and his men. After all, they had defeated men who had presumably been trained to kill their targets with some measure of efficiency.
I took his apparent concern as a good sign for me. It meant I had a chance to make it through this. Not being someone who wanted to depend on someone else for security, however, I continued working the chair after he left the room. It was wooden, for crying out loud! I had to be able to break it eventually. Eventually the wood would give, right? At least that was my thinking on the matter.
The chair didn’t seem to budge. There didn’t seem to be any distress or any weak points I could exploit to free myself. I didn’t want to be stuck on this boat waiting for Garrett to arrive or for Dima to decide he was tired of playing with me.
If my theory about the bear’s concern over Garrett’s arrival was true, it meant that I offered him a distraction. As a useful distraction, he would probably keep me around until the last minute, which increased my chances of being rescued.
My mind filled to the brim with possibilities and theories, questions and reflections. Just as Dima seemed to need me as a distraction, I was beginning to realize I needed him, too. I felt like there was some truth in what he’d told me earlier about looking forward to talking to me at Crowns of Satan HQ, but not because he knew he was going to talk me into helping him at some point. I felt that I understood why he had looked forward to talking to me, because in my wooden chair, locked away in a closet and unable to tell if it were day or night, I felt the same way.
I caught myself wanting him to come back in so I would at least have someone to talk to or listen to besides my own thoughts, which were getting more and more persistent, and more and more panicked. Dima was becoming a comfort, offering me solace from the growing noise in my own head. I wanted him back because he also helped me pass the time faster than the waves rocking the boat. Even if it meant having to listen to him fantasize about killing me.