Reece.
Fuck. I hate myself right now. Why do I always do this?
Why do I either choose women who don’t want to be involved, safe bets all round, or when something good does happen, why do I go and screw it up? Pull away? And I am pulling away. I feel myself putting those barriers up, and what’s more Kate did, too. She’s not stupid. I’m also a bit angry at her, though. She had to push. I thought her regal, composed, to be honest. I supposed I thought she handled herself a bit like a man at first. Then we got hot and heavy, and I saw a more vulnerable side to her, much more. I should have stopped it then. Hell, I never should have started it.
I need fucking therapy is what.
More than any of my friends, I always wanted a relationship, and before the event, I think I’d have eventually found one. The time spent in that fucking dry and rotten hellhole of a room with Liam warped something in me. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t get away, and now I have this need to always be free. Even my friends moan about it, as I’ll cancel something we’ve arranged to go off climbing or hiking. I don’t think they understand how pathological it is, though.
I used to believe I’d find what I wanted one day. Get a family and a home where I can settle. Now I’m not sure I ever will. Not sure I can.
It’s as if, after being trapped in such a way, not only can’t I bear to be indoors for too long, but I can’t bear to be tied down in any way. I want to be with someone. I want what my friends have found, but the thought of it also terrifies me. Yep, I need therapy. Not going there, though.
And Kate? I let myself think about her. Is it her? Is it that she’s not what I want?
No. I decide instantly, on instinct. She’s fucking amazing. Beautiful, intelligent, strong. I realize then that she’s scary as hell to me because she could be the real deal, and because I can’t cope with the idea.
I’m already pulling away. She broke our magic spell, the little bubble we were in. I can’t blame her, she only wanted to know this was real. And it is. But by making it something tangible, explicit, and worse, stated, she’s set off the itch within me. That need to keep moving. To be free.
Can I overcome it? Somehow find a way to tamp down the incessant need to be able to do what I want when I want? Find a way to compromise so I can live something approaching a normal life?
Shit. If anyone is worth it Kate is, which terrifies me all over again.
“Fuck.” I hit the wall by my side, wincing as my knuckles crack against the plaster. I’m such a mess, and I’m going to fuck this up.
I hear Kate leave the bathroom and try to compose myself for when she comes back into the room. After about five minutes, I realize she’s not coming back, so I head on upstairs, searching her out. I don’t want to leave it like this. I find her in her room, curled on her side in bed, eyes closed. She’s feigning sleep. She’s not actually asleep. I can tell the difference, but I don’t know what to say to her, and I want to give her this respite. Some time to regather her thoughts, and her dignity.
Not that she’s got any reason to feel embarrassed, but I expect she is. She put it out there and I slapped her down.
I go deal with the fire, and then take a long, hot shower. Then I head to my own bed. It’s only ten pm, and normally I don’t go to bed until midnight or later, but I’m depressed as shit with my stupid fucking self, and so I go clean my teeth, and sink under the covers.
There’s another issue I need to talk about with her. I’ve been doing some digging behind her back into her finances and her life. I could have asked her, but I had to find out everything I could, and people cover shit up when they know someone is going to go looking.
I didn’t tell her and instead I spied on her. I did so by digging into things on my own, hacking into her life. It’s led me to a guy I think is possibly the man to blame for stalking her, but if I tell her that, I’ll have to tell her I went behind her back. I sigh and stare at the ceiling. I’ve gone and truly fucked up by getting involved with her. She’ll hate me now for what I’ve done on both scores.
I open my iPad, needing to kill time before I check in with Liam at eleven, and turn to the book about the ill-fated expedition to find the Northern Passage, but that only reminds me of Kate. With a sigh, I close it and shut my eyes.
I must have fallen asleep because I awake with a start, something putting me on full alert. I can go from asleep to awake and alert in an instant, and now I’m wide awake and something is off.
My eyes search out the red letters on the alarm clock. Eleven-fifty pm. Shit, I missed touching base with Liam. I don’t move a muscle, instead listening, watching, and utilizing other senses, those ancient senses that most humans don’t use anymore. There’s a storm raging outside, I can hear it even through the shutters and the thick glass.
In here, though, there’s an odd stillness. It’s too still, the odd calm before the tornado rips your house apart. Once more, I tune into those more ancient senses. The ones that prick the back of your neck, or tell you a person is wrong somehow, from a simple glance. I let them come online fully as I lie stone still in the thick dark trying to figure out what woke me so suddenly. There’s no noise. No odd scents, and though it is dark, my eyes can’t make out anything moving.
Then I feel it. A tiny disturbance in the air by my head before a blinding blow hits my temple, knocking me sick and making bright forks of lightning flash in front of my eyes.
Another searing blow and all fades out.
**
Pain.
So much pain.
My head is splitting. Sharp, searing flashes of white hot agony zing down the left side of my skull. Where the hell am I? I try to lift my head and it makes my stomach roil, so I let it stay hanging. I’m laid on a cold, rough surface, legs behind me, and my arms in front of me, out to the side at an unnatural angle. I try to open my eyes but the moment I crack them a millimetre and a tiny bit of light streams in, my head screams, so I slam them shut. I move my arms. A loud rattle, and the cold chafing of metal against my skin tells me I am handcuffed, or maybe chained.
Crowded thoughts flit through my mind. Am I on a mission? Afghanistan? Something in Eastern Europe?
Christ, Reece, focus.
The fog makes it difficult to think, but I need to cut through that and concentrate. My life probably depends on it. Where was I last?
As if reaching back through a dark tunnel, I try to grab the memories of what came before this endless pain in my head.
A house. Near a beach. A woman.
Kate!
My mind snaps back into focus. I was with Kate. What the fuck has happened?
I need to open my eyes. Look around.
Carefully, I try once more to lift my head and with a groan manage it. My shoulders ache at the sockets where my arms are forced up and out at an unnatural angle against my prone body. Once more my stomach churns at the smallest movement and I swallow down thick, acrid bile. Shit.
I think the fucker has possibly fractured my skull because the pain is horrendous. Worse than I felt after a nearby bomb detonation hit me with the blast wave in Georgia many years ago. And I got a nasty blow to the head from debris then.
I shiver and look down at myself. Where are my fucking clothes?
I’m naked, and my feet are tied together with thick black tape. As I slowly move my gaze up my body, I see there’s more of it around my legs below my knees. Kate is maybe at the hands of a madman right now, while I’m handcuffed and bound, head spinning.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
Panic crawls all over me, and I drag myself out of the threatening pit of despair, go to that place in my mind where I can remain calm, focused. There must be a way out of this. There’s always a way out. Who has done this to me? The only person I can think of is Kate’s stalker, which means she might be in a similar condition to me right now. Held somewhere naked, hurt, and at the mercy of a sadistic sociopath.
This time my stomach can’t be stopped, and the muscles in my abdomen convulse as I bend over and vomit. Marvelous, now I’m going to have the stench in my nostrils.
Footsteps sound to the right of me, and a shadow appears, coalescing into human form as it nears me. The dim light of the room doesn’t let me see his features clearly, but it’s a male. Small built, about five feet ten, I guess, although it’s hard to tell from the floor. He’s holding something in his hands. Oh, joy, it’s a cattle prod. It doesn’t take genius to work out what it’s for.
“Hello, Reece. You piece of utter shit.” The man’s voice is rich, cultured. He sounds educated, upper middle-class, I’d guess.
“Hello…I don’t know your name, so I suppose you have me at an advantage.” My voice sounds like rusty metal.
I rein in my desperate need to scream and shout at this lunatic and instead use my training. People think the special forces is all about being some macho idiot who uses his fists first and asks questions later. It’s not. Yes, we are deadly fighters, but we’re also trained in psychological warfare, in interrogation techniques. In a situation like I’m in now, no good will come of me being aggressive. If I can keep things calm I can perhaps get a chance to escape if he leaves me alone again.
In fact, my best bet is trying to build a rapport with my captor. Only, my captor isn’t some foreign insurgent fighting for a cause, he’s a fucking bona-fide lunatic.
“You can call me Ian.”
If this guy is Kate’s stalker, I know it isn’t his real name. His real name is Duncan Jacobs, but maybe this isn’t him. What are the odds though?
I had found his details as he was the owner of the company, and I knew he’d done the work for the building society that had given him access to the women’s accounts, but I hadn’t seen his picture yet, or got into his life. That was going to be tomorrow’s task, along with admitting to Kate that I’d been digging around in her life.
“Hello, Ian.” I look around the dank room and figure it must be a basement, either to a block of apartments, or a commercial building. The thick concrete post my arms are fastened around doesn’t lend itself to a house. There’s one window, with bars on it, and the view from it seems to be of a stone wall of some sort. I swallow down the urge to say something snarky like nice place you’ve got here.
“You’ve put a spanner amongst the works, you have,” Ian tells me. “Fucked up all my plans.”
“What plans were those?”
“Oh,” he sing-songs at me. “I think you know what plans. Plans involving myself and one delectable lady novelist. You have to hand it to the girl, she’s got guts and resourcefulness aplenty. To get away from me, she changed her name to that of a man and wrote books good enough to be bestsellers.” He laughs. “I don’t think I’ve had a paramour do that yet.”
I want to grab his skinny neck and squeeze until his eyes bulge out of his head, and he dies gasping for air. I will, too, once I get myself out of this pickle.
“What have you done with Kate. Is she here?” I keep my tone conversational. Just two mates having a chat down at the pub.
“She’s not here. No use for her now, not now you’ve soiled her. Ruined her.”
My mind scrambles over what he’s saying, trying to make sense of it, above the pain and the bone deep foggy exhaustion.
“Aw, look at the big, tough soldier trying to figure it out. I like them un-sullied. Women who haven’t been touched for a long time. And then I like to sully them. You did the sullying yourself, so I have no need of Kate now.”
His words mean the profile we were building fits. I’ve been working on this. Not only with the contact I had in the intelligence services, but also myself, Ethan, Liam, Luka, and Maggie. We were all working on making sense of this guy, of his modus operandi, and we figured he preyed on women who had been single for a long time. Maggie said it must have been a kink of his. She also said judging from the way he waxed lyrical about using toys on the women, he possibly has erectile dysfunction. Felt like less of a man because of it, so he went after women who hadn’t had a man in a long time. No competition to live up to, and even then, he had to resort to using toys.
The women who survived being attacked by him said the actual sexual assaults by him were short lived, and often ended in failure on his part to ejaculate. But he used toys on them. If the same guy carried out those rapes, and the subsequent murders, he had escalated rapidly. If this is him, then I’m a dead man walking, but what about Kate? Has he killed her? Or left her alive if he has no use for her anymore. I try to organize my flitting thoughts into a coherent sentence.
“Ian. Where is Kate and is she alive?”
He sneers at me. “Oh, look at the concerned lover, so touching. She’s alive. Or she was when I left her, but I did bash her on the head, so maybe…maybe not now.”
He smirks. “She’s tied to the bed in your little love nest, naked. No phone nearby. No way to contact the outside world. She’ll probably rot there, which is what she deserves. You and me, though. We’re the ones who have to solve our issues now.”
His words hit me with the force of a hurricane. Kate is hurt, maybe dying. I’ve never felt so helpless in my whole life, not even stuck in that dark, arid room while a man was tortured and raped in front of Liam and me.
Rage fills me, but something else too. Something different to the sharp rage, this other thing is dreadful, and deep. Like a bottomless lake, and I realize it is sorrow.
Grief.
He has hurt the woman I love, and only now do I realize I love her. Somehow, over the days we’ve spent together, having sex, but also reading, talking, swimming…being friends as well as lovers, I’ve fallen for Kate.
I ruined it with my commitment issues. Her last memory of me will be of a coward who couldn’t face what was building between us.
Ian chuckles. “You seem to be struggling with something there, Reece. Want to talk?”
No, I don’t want to talk, I want to smash his face in, but I force myself to focus. To find a way out of here, so I can at least try to save Kate’s life.
Ian has let me see his face, whereas with the women he attacked early in his sick career, he covered it. One woman, he attempted to kill, he let see his face, but the sketch the police released of him was generic, and looking at him now, I can see the resemblance, but it’s also one to so many other men.
I doubt Ian is in the system, so there would be no photo of him for the police to see, and to his friends and family, he would simply have a vague, passing resemblance to a picture of a man who looks like thousands of others.
I know because he’s let me see him that he’s going to kill me, but I wonder if he’ll torture me first. Which will give me time. Time to talk to him. To try and build enough of a rapport for him to let me use the toilet, so I can overpower him. Maybe one way I can build solidarity is by playing on his issues with women.
“I’m sorry I ruined things for you and Kate,” I tell him as I struggle to get my upper body into a half sitting position. “But she wasn’t worth it, mate.”
The slap is hard and shocking. He backhands me, twice, left then right cheeks.
“You are not in any position to tell me what and who isn’t worth any fucking thing. I am not your mate. You’re not my friend. I’m not some dick you can manipulate, you know? I’m a genius. Literally, a fucking genius. I run a multi-million-pound software company, and you’re nothing but used up cannon fodder, so keep your opinions to yourself.”
He sighs, cocks his head to one side and observes me. “I’m not here to play games with you, Reece. The games are only fun with the ladies, and now I’ll have to find a new one. You’re here to die. For fucking up years of my work.”
He screams the words at me, and his spittle flecks my face like disgusting drops of rain. I don’t flinch. Don’t react at all.
He may mean to kill me, but the cattle prod tells me he wants to take his time about it, despite what he says. The only thing I can do, is pray that Kate gets away, or that when Liam doesn’t hear from me for our regular check in, he heads to the safe house to see what is going on.
Ian raises the cattle prod and aims it right at the top of my thigh, poking it into the flesh and muscle there. I grit my teeth as he holds it way longer than you would normally. A cattle prod isn’t that bad. The voltage isn’t high enough to do any severe harm. Thank God he hasn’t got a US police force taser or something because those fuckers are set high! This cattle prod, though, it can cause pain and damage if held on for long enough, or in a vulnerable enough spot.
With a nasty little smirk, Ian takes it and slams it on my balls. This time I can’t stop the cry that leaves my throat.