Shay
She had to be stupid.
Her fist rapped on the door once, then twice.
Shay was proud of herself for being strong enough that her fist didn’t shake as she did so.
Strong? No, you quite literally have to be the stupidest person on the planet to even consider doing what you’re doing right now.
So that begged the question: why was she doing this?
The answer was: this was the only place that had even had a hint that someone knew her father.
You really should have told Justin where you were going.
That was true, but she hadn’t for two very good reasons. First, he needed to focus. They had just come back from an exhilarating bike trip through the city, reuniting Shay with her need for speed and the feel of going fast. It had been so refreshing. When they had gotten back, however, he had been notified of an urgent mission. Shay had wished him luck and told him to keep his team safe. She hadn’t told him because she didn’t want him worrying about her going somewhere where a gun had been pulled on her last time.
The second reason was even simpler. If she had told him, he wouldn’t have let her go. Just like that. Shay couldn’t let that happen though. This was the only place that offered a hope, and she needed to take that. The longer she waited, the more unlikely it was that there would be any trace of her father left.
To her surprise, the door opened not long after her first knock. She hadn’t even needed to use the buzzer.
Shay stepped back and to her right, leaning against the building and looking at the door as it swung wide.
“I thought we told you to go away,” a dour-faced guard said, once again pulling his shirt tight to reveal the gun.
Shay tried to keep herself steady at that pointed reminder, convincing herself that he wouldn’t actually shoot her. It was just a warning. What kind of threat was she anyway?
“I know,” she said slowly, pushing off the wall and slowly walking to her left. “But I just felt like you and I had some unfinished business.”
The guard frowned. “I’m not the same person who was here last time.”
Shay laughed. “Whoops,” she said, continuing to move to the left, forcing the guard to push the door all the way open to keep her in sight. “My apologies. With the mask, you all look the same to me,” she tittered, trying to play up the ditzy-girl aspect of things.
Her shirt was pulled low for a reason, not because she wanted to show off this much cleavage to everyone.
The guard snorted, not taken by her act, though he couldn’t stop his eyes from flicking down to her breasts.
Shay arched her back ever so slightly, pushing them out at him just a bit more as she reversed her direction.
Distracted, the guard kept the door open all the way, leaning against it as they continued to look at each other.
“So, what do you say?” she asked, taking a step closer and pulling her shirt just a little lower, exposing the edges of her bra to him. She felt dirty, but it was working, so she went with it, biting down on her lower lip as she neared him.
“What, uh, what do I say to what?” he asked, his eyes now completely focused on her cleavage.
“To letting me in of course,” she said, skipping past him and into the building.
Behind her, the guard cursed himself and turned to pursue her, but Shay was already jogging down one of the boring gray hallways. There weren’t any rooms along it, just one long tunnel.
Odd.
She finally reached a door at the end and pushed her way through it, still about half a dozen steps or so ahead of the guard.
The door immediately led outside to the pier area. Overhead a big boom crane swung, loading up a container from a stack of its fellows onto the back of a flatbed truck. Several other men, clad in the same black as the guard chasing her, walked around the grounds. , But for the most part it was fairly empty.
“What the fuck is going on here?” she asked, confused at the lack of activity.
The guard chasing her shouted at his comrades and they all began to converge on her. Shay dashed forward, darting between two containers and weaving a path through them in an attempt to escape.
Unfortunately, as she soon realized, there were not very many of them. She emerged into an open area to be confronted by two guards with weapons drawn.
“Where is Charles?” she asked, as her hands automatically rose in the air. To her surprise, her voice was calm and unwavering.
“Who?” one guard asked, though the other remained silent, his head did tilt a little.
“You,” she said, pointing at the other guard, ignoring the way they both leveled their weapons at her when she did. “You know where he is. Where is Charles Lyon? Is he here?”
The barrel of another gun poked into her back before he could respond.
“I will take you to Charles,” another voice said, the cold metal pushing her forward. The two guards split to the side as she walked forward.
“Finally,” she said, letting her hands fall by her side. She wasn’t stupid enough to attack anyone. Shay lacked those sorts of skills and she knew it.
The guard behind her prodded her down the pier, farther away from the road. She took in their surroundings, trying to figure out where he was taking her. Ahead at the end of the pier was a building, more like a guardhouse than anything else. It could perhaps hold three men sitting down. She ruled that out.
Lashed to the concrete, however, was an opulent, ultra-modern yacht, all sharp edges and smooth curves. Next to it were two sleek, powerful speedboats, easily thirty-five or forty feet long. Her eyes devoured them as she wondered what they had under the hood.
“Gorgeous creatures,” she commented as they went by, the metallic paint jobs sucking her in.
The guard just grunted.
Ugh. No taste.
The guard pushed her onto the yacht, though by then she wasn’t surprised. There was really nowhere else to go this far out onto the water.
“In here,” he man said as they boarded the yacht. He pointed to a nearby room.
“Hand over your purse,” he commanded.
She thought about saying no, but he’d already raised his gun. Shay sighed and handed it over before resuming her walk to the room.
Shay felt a sense of foreboding descend over her, but it was too late by that point. The guard shoved her in the room and abruptly pulled the door closed behind her. She heard it lock with an audible click.
“Hey!” she shouted, pounding on the door, trying to pull it open from the inside.
There was no answer, but that didn’t stop her from hammering on the door with both fists. The thick plastic reverberated, but no matter how hard she punched or kicked, it didn’t give way.
“Fuck,” she swore aloud, turning to look at her cell.
Did you seriously expect for this to end up any other way? You went right back to a place willing to threaten you with a gun, and thought that by sneaking in, they might relent? What the fuck were you thinking?!
Her brain continued to berate her for the stupidity of her move, and now that things had collapsed around her, Shay realized that she should have listened. Of course coming back was a dumb move. She had been so caught up in the fact that they actually knew something that she had overlooked the danger. That wasn’t all though. With the revelation that Justin was actually one of the good guys, she had allowed herself to believe that maybe the same could happen here.
Judging by her swift imprisonment, she couldn’t have been more wrong.
Stupid and naïve. Good job.
The room was empty.
There was quite literally nothing in it. No chair, no bed, no table, not even a light. The only thing allowing her to see was the thick glass porthole that was too high on the wall for her to see out of. All she could make out was the sky, and nothing else.
“And of course, I decided to forego getting a new cell phone, so I can’t even call for help,” she said angrily, kicking the door one more time.
So she sat down and waited. Someone would have to come for her eventually.
Wouldn’t they?