Even from far away, I could tell something was wrong. When I pulled up to his place, Danny was standing outside by his car, waiting for me. He didn’t seem his usual self—the serenity he usually radiated had vanished. He shifted nervously from one foot to the other, running his hands through his hair again and again, like I was taking too long to park.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Tina’s gone.”

“Gone how?”

“She ran off,” he snapped in a tone I’d never heard him use. He looked crabby and upset, two adjectives that didn’t normally fit him at all. “She didn’t come home last night, said she was staying at Natasha’s. And she didn’t come home after work today, so I called the shop, and they said she never showed up. She didn’t call, either!”

“Damn.” My heart began to thump faster. “Did you try her cell phone?”

“Of course I did, I’m not an idiot,” he muttered. “Get in the car already, we have to look for her.” Without taking the time to turn the car around, he reversed down the frontage road, tires squealing, to the main street.

“Where are we going to go? Where could she be?” I didn’t have the first clue where to begin.

“I’m going to pay a visit to the dealer she always bought from. If she’s just disappeared without saying a word to anyone, that’s the only explanation.”

Oh, God, my inner voice shrieked. Why would she do something like this? She was doing so well! Something must have happened. “You know where to find him?” I asked tentatively.

“Yeah, I think so.” We drove to Stuttgart. The traffic didn’t give Danny any problems, thanks to his complete disregard for other drivers and the two red lights he sped through.

“How do you know where to find her dealer?” I asked at last.

“Jesus Christ, I just know, okay?” He chewed nervously on a fingernail. Offended, I crossed my arms and turned away. “Sorry,” he said after a while.

“It’s okay.” I put my hand on his thigh. “Let’s go find Tina.”

He rolled down a couple of extremely shady alleys I’d never seen before. After a while, he parked beside a trio of trash cans in front of an old warehouse. “Wait for me here,” he warned as he got out, but I followed him through the open rolling gate leading into the warehouse.

A dozen or so younger guys were sitting around on the ground, all wearing jeans, button-down shirts and dark sweatshirts. A couple of them were smoking a joint, clearly in another dimension. The others peered at us with hostile expressions.

Danny went straight for a bald guy with a cigarette between his fingers. He was wearing a white ribbed undershirt, an open lumberjack shirt over it, the sleeves rolled up to reveal his tattooed forearms. I guessed he was in his mid-thirties. Apparently he was the guy to talk to around here.

“Was Christina here?” Danny asked in lieu of a greeting.

The guy shrugged. “Who’s Christina?” I immediately suspected he knew perfectly well who Danny meant.

“You know,” Danny snapped. “Tina. Little shorter than me, long, black hair, green eyes. Did she buy anything from you guys?”

The guy in the undershirt held out a hand and beckoned expectantly with his fingers. He wanted money. “Maybe if I think about it a little more, it’ll come to me,” he said with a contemptuous grin.

Danny smiled pleasantly for a moment and then suddenly snatched the man up by his collar. Even though the guy was a head taller than Danny and had probably seventy or eighty pounds on him, Danny managed to overpower him and push him up against the wall. Without warning, he punched the man several times in the face.

“So think about it!” he growled, pressing his forearm against the man’s throat to hold him in place.

The guy tried to put his cigarette out on Danny’s arm, but Danny used his free hand to slap it out of his fingers.

“Christ, can’t you just give me an answer?”

Apparently, it was possible to make Danny angrier than I’d ever imagined. There seemed to be no upper limit to his rage. The realization frightened me. But out of the corner of my eye, I could see that the other men sitting around were slowly getting to their feet. I did a quick count. There were nine of them, and none of them looked especially puny. One reached for a nightstick.

Why the hell was Danny so impulsive? He usually threw money around without a second thought, but instead of just giving this guy fifty euros, he’d risked a brawl.

“Danny,” I said in warning. But he’d already noticed the others. He slammed his shin into his hostage’s side three times, at full force, leaving the guy gasping for air.

“Call your dogs off,” Danny snarled. “Otherwise, you’ll be dead before they can even get their hands on me.”

My brain was working a hundred miles an hour, trying to picture how Danny was planning on killing him without a weapon. It wouldn’t take the others more than a couple seconds to reach him. And he’d once told me it was practically impossible to kill someone with one blow, even for an experienced martial artist. The particular set of circumstances it would require almost never happened in real fights: the opponent had to be someone who knew nothing about martial arts, and he would have to be holding perfectly still so that you could hit him hard enough in exactly the right spot, down to a fraction of an inch. Besides, if Danny actually managed to kill him, would the others really just let us leave?

The guy in the undershirt didn’t give Danny’s words quite that much thought. He made a small motion with his index finger, and the others sat down again.

“Just answer my question,” Danny repeated.

“She was here last night,” he said, still wheezing. Danny had hit his lungs so hard he could barely breathe. Maybe he really had been afraid for his life, at least for a moment. “She bought some stuff from me and then stayed the night in the main building.”

“Where is she now?”

“No idea. She left two hours ago. She was going home.” His breath whistled loudly as he spoke.

“That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Danny released him before retreating as fast as he could. There was a flurry of movement around us. Danny grabbed my hand, and we sprinted out of the warehouse. Without stopping for a second, he shoved me into the car, glanced around hastily, leaped over the hood, and jumped into the driver’s seat. Then he locked the doors from the inside and jerked the car into reverse, slamming into one of the trash cans with a loud crunch. The car skidded for a moment, giving the men chasing us enough time to surround the car.

“Get down,” Danny told me before shifting into drive and hitting the gas. I heard a deafening bang and the sound of squealing tires. Danny careened down the narrow alley at nearly sixty miles an hour, only slowing once we reached the main street.

“Were they just shooting at us?” I screeched.

“Why do you think I told you to wait in the car? Did you think they wanted to play Ping-Pong?”

I gaped at him. He shook out his left hand. His knuckles were bleeding. I was utterly speechless, incapable of even closing my mouth. Every time I thought I finally knew Danny Taylor inside and out, I discovered a new side of him.

“What?” He looked nervous, and he was still breathing hard. “Why are you staring at me like that?”

“One of these days, you’re going to drive me over the edge!” I shook my head, struggling to compose myself. “You just hand yourself over to a couple teenagers like a lamb to the slaughter, even though they wouldn’t have stood a chance against you. But then when things really get dangerous, and you have zero chance, that’s when you go for it. Fantastic, Danny. Excellent strategy. I’m really impressed.”

He snorted. “It’s the only language they speak. If you go in there and say, ‘Please, please,’ you’re toast.”

“As soon as we have Tina back, I’m sending you to a self-help group to learn anger management in dangerous situations. Maybe learning to knit would do you good, or crocheting some potholders.”

“There’s just no pleasing you, either.” He looked insulted. “‘Don’t just put up with this, Danny. Defend yourself already, Danny. Do this, Danny. Do that, Danny…’”

“I would suggest you make decisions based on the individual situations,” I snapped, “but there’s no point. When your temper gets going, your brain shuts down.”

“Everything went fine,” he said. “Now we just have to find Tina.”

It began to rain—just drizzling at first, but then the clouds really opened up. We made our way home at a snail’s pace, keeping an eye out for her. She had to be either headed home on foot or hitchhiking. I called Danny’s landline several times, but there was no answer. Apparently, she wasn’t back yet.

Somewhere along the rural highway, Danny suddenly slammed on the brakes and pointed out into the rain. “There she is.”

She was soaking wet, frozen to the bone, and completely out of it as I ran to her and dragged her back to the car. “Tina!” I shouted. “Where were you? We were worried!” She just stared right through us without replying. Her pupils were pinpoints, and she could barely sit upright, which meant she’d probably just taken something.

She didn’t say a word the entire drive home.

Danny carried her through the rain and upstairs to the apartment, setting her down in the living room. We pulled off her wet clothes, and I made her some hot chocolate. She drank it wordlessly, clutching the cup with trembling fingers, and then suddenly began scratching herself wildly. I knew what was happening. Heroin triggered the body to release histamines, which made you itch everywhere.

Danny sat down beside her and took her hands. “Just tell me why, Tina,” he said tenderly.

“It’s starting again!” she shrieked, crying and clawing at her sweatshirt. “It’s starting again, just like before!”

I blinked at Danny in confusion. He shook his head, uncomprehending. “What’s starting?”

“Everything, just like before.” Christina’s speech was slurred. She’d jumped right back in at a dose so high that she couldn’t even talk properly. “It’s the only way I can stand the pain.”

“Should we give her something to help her sleep?” I suggested.

“No way,” Danny said. “Medications on top of drugs could be dangerous. Let’s just wait it out.”

The three of us sat up half the night on the couch, until Christina began throwing up. She finally passed out from exhaustion in the early hours of the morning, and Danny carried her to bed. He and I remained on the couch, discussing what to do next.

“I’ll call the clinic tomorrow and ask when I can bring her in,” he decided. “She needs to go back. She’s used at least twice—essentially, she has to start back at square one.”

“Really?” I was shocked. “Surely, she can’t be addicted again that fast.”

“You can get addicted to heroin by using it just once,” he said. “Not physically, but mentally. She won’t have the willpower to keep herself from doing it again. You have to remember she was addicted for years.”

“What does she mean about the pain? Does that make any sense to you?”

“Yeah.” Danny sighed. “She had phantom pain for years—pain with no demonstrable medical explanation. At first, they thought it was rheumatoid arthritis, so they ran a bunch of tests on her, but everything checked out. It’s all psychological. People who have suffered years of physical or sexual abuse get that sometimes—they have pain in places that have nothing to do with the abuse and that can’t be explained medically.

“Others often dismiss the pain as nonsense, but it’s completely real to the person experiencing it. Tina started getting it years ago. She started cutting herself to block it out. Used razor blades. Then she discovered drugs. Heroin is the quickest pain reliever out there. So that’s how she got it to stop.”

“That’s horrible!” I buried my face in my hands. “Isn’t there anything she can do about it?”

“Therapy,” Danny said. “Therapy is the only thing that helps. But she did all of that before. It’s just that…when damage has been done over years…you can’t just talk it out of existence from one day to the next.”

“Have you experienced something like this, too?”

“Phantom pain? No, I never had it. I never felt the urge to self-injure, either.”

“You just let people beat you up every once in a while,” I said gently. It was a poor attempt at a joke.

A smile flitted briefly across his face. “Masochism isn’t really my thing, either, trust me.” He sighed again. “I’ll call Tina’s psychologist tomorrow, too. She should start going back to therapy—she used to go regularly. Then all we can do is hope the rehab clinic takes her back right away.”

“Let’s go to bed.” I took his hand and pulled him to his feet.

“I’ll sleep with her,” Danny said. “We’ll need to go to a hardware store tomorrow and get some padlocks. We can’t let her run away again.”

 

Danny spent half the morning on the phone. Christina’s psychologist promised to start coming by to talk to her every day, starting the following week. The rehab clinic didn’t have space immediately, but they offered Christina a spot in their supervised group home for two months beginning mid-December. Danny agreed, and also got permission to come a couple of days later to join her for two weeks.

They also told him to focus on getting her to detox, so that she’d at least have the drugs completely out of her system by the time she joined them, and then they could focus on her psychological addiction. Her physical withdrawal symptoms shouldn’t be too bad, they assured him—she’d only used twice, she wasn’t really “back on it” yet, so cold turkey would be all right.

Danny canceled all of his appointments for the next few weeks. His modeling agency gave him a lot of grief for it, since all of his shoots were already scheduled, but Danny didn’t care. A coworker at the martial arts center agreed to sub for him, though he wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about all the extra work. Danny knew the decision would cost him both students and modeling contracts, but he didn’t see any other alternative.

Finally, he called the boutique where Christina was interning and made an appointment with the owner. It took a lot of convincing on Danny’s part, but he finally agreed to release her from her contract until the beginning of April.

Having done all of that, he drove to the hardware store and bought a handful of padlocks to keep Christina in the house for the next few weeks. Before he left, he snuck a glance into her room to make sure she was doing okay. She was fast asleep. He gave me the job of keeping her inside the house while he was gone.

She didn’t come out of her room all morning, so I assumed she was still asleep. When Danny opened the apartment door, he was already fuming. He threw me an accusatory look. “The window in her room is open. She snuck out.”

“What?” I hadn’t heard a sound. “That’s impossible!”

Sure enough, her window was open, and there was no sign of Christina. Danny turned right around and strode back into the hallway. “I’ll get her. You stay here!”

“You’re not going back to those guys, are you?” I screeched. I couldn’t let him do that. I was far more afraid for Danny than I was worried about Christina.

“Of course I am!” he growled. “I might catch her on the way, but if not, I’ll have to go there.”

“Danny, it’s way too dangerous!”

“I don’t have a choice,” he said. “I don’t think you understand the severity of the situation. That’s a drug ring. They have pimps, too. If they get their hands on Tina, they’ll send her straight out to turn tricks. Then we’ll never see her again.” With that, he walked out of the apartment, leaving me standing there in the hallway.

I ran after him in a panic. “I’m well aware of how serious this is!” I called. “I was there yesterday. Why do you think I don’t want you to go?”

Danny stopped in his tracks, came back, and wrapped his arms around me. “Don’t worry,” he said softly. “I used to go fight Tina’s way out of there all the time. I’ll be okay. Everything is okay.”

He walked to his car without looking back. I stood there fighting back the tears welling up in my eyes yet again.