Chapter Two

Ruby

“Just tell us where it is and we’ll let you go.”

Yeah, like I haven’t heard that one before. The only thing that’s keeping me alive right now is that flash drive. Give up its location and they won’t even bother hiding my head when they cut it off my body.

“I told you already”, I whine, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The punch that cracks my jaw and sends a lightning whip of pain shuddering out across my body suggests he doubts my credibility. I’ve barely time to shake the fug before he grabs my chin in his hand and squeezes hard.

“What are you even doing here?” he asks. “A pretty girl like you messed up with all of this. Isn’t there enough crime for you to write about in America?”

“Please”, I whine again, sticking to my tourist in the wrong place at the wrong time story. “You’ve got the wrong person, I’m not who you think I am.”

My captor makes a sound of disapproval laced with what sounds like begrudging admiration. I guess he thought it would be easy to get what he wanted, that he wouldn’t have to resort to this. A slap across the other side of my cheek with the back of his hand nearly knocks me off my chair. I want to tell him he punches like a girl but it’ll only infuriate him more and as much as I can take the pain, I kind of like my face.

I watch him glare down at me for a moment like a chef might an expensive piece of meat he’s spent the last hour tenderizing for a six hour session in the oven, before he drags over a chair from the corner of the room, the legs scraping lazily against the dirt. Beyond the backhanded slap, I can’t think of a single other action more disrespectful. In his mind, I’m the chair being dragged along the dirt by the scruff of my neck, my knees making tracks in the earth, my death no longer in anyone else’s control but his own.

They came for me at nighttime like rats hunting prey, knocked me unconscious after breaking into my house, and brought me here, to this room, in what looks like every abandoned house I’ve ever stepped foot into in this country, in what could be a thousand different parts of Mexico.

There is my aggressor Raul, two guards stood sentry by the door, and at least three others I’ve counted who come and go from time to time, all armed, all idiotic enough to try and shoot me dead if I so much as look at them the wrong way.

It’s a far from professional outfit, which makes me think that whoever sent them has massively underestimated the extent of the information I have on them. If they’d done their research properly before smashing down my doors to drag me away for what might better be described as extreme bdsm instead of torture, they’d know already that I don’t break easily, and there’s only a single thing in this world more important to me than my job. The only thing about this group being novices is the fact that accidents are more than twice as likely to happen, and the last thing I want is one of these trigger happy teenage goons to put a bullet through my neck by mistake.

“You’re going to talk”, Raul says, sitting on the reversed chair like a Hollywood movie icon. “We know who you are.”

“Please”, I try again. “I’m not who you say I am.”

“I can’t help you unless you talk to me, Ruby”, Raul says, his hand against my cheek to gently caress my bloodied face. “It would be such a shame to see that pretty head broken into a million pieces.”

My options might be pretty limited right now, but they don’t include giving them what they need, no matter how much he tries to sweet talk me. I have no idea how much time I was out of it, but I’ve been awake long enough since to know that night has already turned into day at least once, and enough people will have realized I’m missing to begin to prepare as much as they can to help me in the event I don’t make it out of here alive. Journalists go missing and turn up dead in Mexico almost every week of the year and the police either do nothing about it because they can’t, or because they were the ones behind it in the first place.

If I want to get out of here sooner rather than never, I’m going to have to come up with a plan of my own, because no-one else is going to help me now. Getting out of the chair is going to be fairly easy, but getting past at least six armed guards without a weapon of my own a little more tricky.

“I’m going to give you one last chance”, Raul says. “We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way.”

I think he’s watched too many American movies. “I’ve told you already”, I say, my crocodile tears churning the words. “My name is Alice, I’m here on vacation. I work in a hotel in Boston.”

Raul sighs with disappointment. I watch him dismount the chair, drag it carefully back to where he got it from and pick up his rifle.

“I like you”, he says absently, as he strolls back towards me. “I read your blog. I agree with a lot of the things you say. This country is corrupt, the police are corrupt, the politicians are corrupt. Everyone is corrupt, you’re right, everyone knows it too, but it’s not your country, and it’s not your place to try and change it.” He cocks the gun to check it’s loaded, sights it, poses it against his shoulder, indulging himself in the performance. “Tell us where the files are”, he says, the barrel of the gun at my forehead now making a dent in my skin. “It’s as simple as that. Tell us where the information is and we’ll let you go home.”

This isn’t the first time I’ve had a gun pointed at me and I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure it isn’t the last.

“I told you already, I’m not-.” I don’t get a chance to finish the sentence before Raul pulls the gun away quickly, turns it over in his hands and smashes the butt end against my temple in frustration. The force of the impact topples me over towards the earth, my weight bringing the chair with me, where my head thuds heavily against the dirt.

I can feel blood running from a gash at the side of my head into my eyes, and just before I lose consciousness completely, I see Raul towering above me, his thin smile wrapped around a psychopathic laugh.

“That’s your last chance”, he says, as he toes my shoulder with the tip of his boot just to make sure I’m still breathing. “The next time I come you’ll tell me everything.”

It’s at moments like these, where death seems like an inevitable conclusion, where your body is wracked with so much pain letting go feels like a relief, that your mind wanders to those moments of the past, to reflect on the good times and the bad.

As my breathing dips and shallows, and blood refuses to stem out of the gash across my temple, and I seriously wonder whether I’ll wake up at all when I can’t help myself from finally passing out, I think about my best moments. I think about those things I’d live again in a heartbeat, my best date, my best meal, my best fuck, the times I was most happy, and there is one image that keeps popping into my head no matter how much I try and refuse to let it.

Even here, broken, bruised and what could be hours away from my inauspicious death, in a moment that should be entirely of my own deciding, he won’t leave me alone. Jaxon, that absolute bastard.