Forever by Janie Crouch

Chapter Five

Jess

Horror movies had never scaredme, even when I was little. It had become a kind of game among my friends and family to find one that would spook me, but no one had ever been able to.

The films were filled with people making irrational decisions and completely oblivious to all the escape options around them. I had yet to see a movie where the masked villain or monster had come up with a way of attacking the protagonist that couldn’t have been avoided with basic geometry. The angles of their assaults were overly simple, and equally simple to dodge or sidestep at the right moment and escape unharmed.

Other people never seemed to think that it was as straightforward as I did. And more than once, I’d ruined movies for people because I’d pointed out flaws in the logic of the story or setup. But through all that, I had never been scared.

Now I was scared, and this was anything but simple.

I wasn’t scared only because I was in a tiny dark room. Or only because I was chained so tightly to the floor that I couldn’t stand up all the way.

It wasn’t just because I’d been punched in the face and thrown into a van, either. Or even because every person I’d seen here was armed to the teeth with guns that were meant for a battlefield.

No, I was scared because I had created a situation that I’d thought I could control. And it was now clear that I couldn’t.

Maybe thinking about horror movies was a comfort because they weren’t real, and they weren’t scary.

This situation was both.

It wasn’t supposed to have happened this way. Nobody was supposed to have gotten hurt.

As if the universe could read my thoughts, a scream rang out nearby. Begging. Pleading that was silenced by the muffled sound of someone being beaten.

Alena.

She’d been my best friend for the past couple of years in the Vandercroft Biotechnology Fellowship program. The women there were outnumbered ten to one, so finding someone relatively close to my age had been a godsend. I couldn’t just do nothing while they tortured her.

I hauled in a breath and put everything behind my voice. “Leave her alone!”

The sound echoed off the walls of the tiny room, and for the thousandth time I yanked on the bonds holding me. My wrists were raw from pulling against the metal.

And even though I knew I didn’t have the angle to leverage my strength against the metal chains and escape, I still pulled again. The sound of my friend screaming threw my rational brain out the window.

The door slammed open, bouncing off the wall from the force used. “Quiet,” a heavily accented voice said.

I couldn’t see his face. He was silhouetted in the light from the hallway, plus my eyes were blind from the total darkness in here.

His English was broken, but he still got the point across. “You want scream too? Quiet.”

“Leave her alone,” I said. “She hasn’t done anything. None of us have. What do you want?”

My vision cleared enough to see that he, too, carried a huge gun. The casual way his hand rested on it told me he was comfortable using it and wouldn’t mind using it on me.

Someone yelled at him from down the hall, a guttural language that I didn’t quite recognize. It wasn’t Romanian. I scanned through my brain, trying to match the dialect. Maybe it was Gagauz?

I mentally kicked myself for not brushing up on more of the local dialects before taking this trip. I hadn’t thought it would matter, definitely not like this, and I’d thrown myself into my work instead.

If I’d sat down for a couple days and brushed up, maybe I wouldn’t be straining, trying to match up parts of speech and Germanic roots to piece together anything useful from what people were saying.

“Please,” I said again, ignoring his warning. “Leave my friend alone and let us go.”

He walked closer. Maybe I had a chance to reason with him. “Please. If you’ll just let us go—”

“I told you, quiet!”

His boot kicked out toward me. I twisted just enough to take the blow on my hip rather than my ribs. I didn’t need a medical degree to know a blow of that force would’ve definitely cracked a rib. I cried out as he kicked at me a second time, hitting my thigh full force.

“Quiet!” Then he spat out what I assumed was a curse and left me in darkness again.

I hauled in a breath through the pain radiating up my side, gritting my teeth. I kept my breathing even until the pain subsided enough to think again.

The hip hurt like a bitch but was much better than taking a boot to the ribs, which would’ve completely hindered any thoughts of escape, not that there seemed to be many escape options.

Growing up around the Linear Tactical guys, my extended family who’d all been in the Special Forces, meant that I’d watched and participated in more self-defense classes before finishing elementary school than most people did their entire lives. I knew to protect the most vulnerable parts of myself like my head and ribs.

But that knowledge didn’t stop my hip and thigh from hurting like a mother. I was going to have boot-shaped bruises within the hour.

I wished I had one of those Special Forces guys with me right now. They’d know exactly how to handle this situation. Any of them . . . Uncle Zac, Uncle Finn, Uncle Gavin. Even my dad, who didn’t have any Special Forces background, would be helpful. Growing up in Wyoming taught you a lot of survival skills.

But I really wanted Ethan.

As always.

But no. I put him out of my mind. I might want him here with me, but I didn’t want him in this situation. He might be a SEAL, but as a medic—and a brilliant one at that—he wasn't going to be much help against these thugs. I hoped to God we wouldn’t need his kind of skill here. But given the scream I’d heard, I wasn’t so sure.

Shifting so there was less pressure on my bruising leg, I closed my eyes. The pain of missing Ethan was much worse than that of my leg, right now especially.

We’d had to be apart so much the past few years—he was in the Navy, and I was in London. But we’d made it work. The distance had always been temporary in light of our forever. It had never occurred to us not to make it work.

Until a couple of months ago.

I should have reached out and talked to him before I tried to do something this stupid.

Or if I hadn’t told him, I should have at least seen him. Kissed him. Held him. But I hadn’t done that. Because even though I was a genius, I was also the world’s biggest idiot.

I’d been giving him the cold shoulder for two months because I was angry that he’d missed my birthday. My twenty-first. Of course, I’d known that he couldn’t come—he’d been on a mission or something where he couldn’t give me the details. And those were good reasons.

But he hadn’t called. In the seventeen years we’d known each other, Ethan had never missed reaching out to me on one of my birthdays. I couldn’t pretend that it didn’t sting.

And then I’d been all wrapped up in this brilliant plan and told myself it was fine if there was some distance between us.

I’d been so wrong.

I should have called him and confronted him about missing my birthday. Gotten that out in the open, even if I couldn’t tell him about the rest. I should’ve called him an ass—something I’d definitely done before—and been done with it. Then at least I’d have known he was mine again. My Ethan.

Instead, I’d made shitty choices that had led me here. God, I missed him.

If I got out of here, I was never letting anything so stupid come between the two of us again. Ethan was worth it. The grudge wasn’t.

The door slammed open again, and I couldn’t help but flinch away, but this time the guard wasn’t alone. Alena, hands bound, was pushed into the room before the door pulled closed and the lock slid home. She stumbled and tried to catch herself and was only marginally successful.

“Alena,” I said, moving as close to her as I could. “Oh my gosh, are you okay?”

“Jess.”

Her whisper was fractured. Rough and broken. The dim light in the room showed me that I was right. She’d been beaten. Her nose was bloody and her eye was darkening. When she moved toward me, she favored her right leg and gasped as she lowered herself to the ground.

It could have been worse. That was a screwed-up thing to say, but on the surface, at least there was no permanent damage. How long it would stay that way for any of us was an entirely different story.

“How badly are you hurt? Did they tell you what they want?” I reached out, helping to settle her against the wall near me as best I could.

“Money,” she said softly, her head sagging against the wall. “They said they wanted money. I tried to tell them that we’re students and that we didn’t have any money. They didn’t seem to believe me, but I tried.”

Her eyes closed, and I hesitated. The loyalty Alena had shown me even though she was in pain meant everything to me. Because she’d lied. Alena didn’t have money, but I did. My family was rich because of my father’s music career. Susan and Russell also came from wealthy families. The people who had taken us could ask for a ransom and get millions of dollars without even breaking a sweat.

But Alena hadn’t used that to her advantage. It would have been so easy for her to point a finger in our direction and tell our captors we were the ones they wanted. But she hadn’t.

Reaching out, I took her hand. She squeezed back just a little, eyes still closed.

“Did you see Susan? Or Russell?”

Alena shook her head. “For like a second in a room down the hall.” She swallowed. “The kidnappers don’t seem very organized. Even when they were—” She cut off like the words were too hard. “There were times it felt like they didn’t really know what to do with me. I got the feeling that they’re filling time until someone else gets here.”

“What makes you say that?”

She opened her eyes and looked at me. “They kept arguing. One wanted to hit me more but the other stopped him, gesturing toward the door.”

“I’m so sorry, Alena.”

“What if they’re only keeping us alive until their boss gets here, Jess?”

I bit my lip. “I don’t know. If they wanted to kill us, they could have done that already. But they haven’t.” My mind scrambled to make all the pieces fit, but they didn’t. Not yet. “Were they asking you questions or anything? Was there something they wanted to know?”

“No,” Alena said. “They told me that they wanted money. That we would pay. They don’t speak English that well.”

Then why hurt her like that? To make the rest of us more pliable when they used us to ask for ransom? Purely as a threat to keep us scared so that we wouldn’t attempt to escape?

Alena closed her eyes, slumping against the wall. I didn’t ask her anything else. She’d been through enough, and the best thing she could do right now was sleep.

But if she was right, and we were being held here until someone else came for us, then we needed to get out now.

Think, Jess. You’ve solved harder problems than this.

The walls surrounding me were stone. Rough and old. The floor too. Based on the style and the state of it, the building was probably over a hundred years old. In the time I’d been here, I hadn’t heard any signs of civilization. Just some sheep and maybe a cow.

So we were in the country. Maybe an abandoned or forcibly occupied farm. They had drugged us in the van, so I had no idea how long we’d driven or if longer than a day had passed since we’d been taken. My body had been stiff and sore when I’d woken up in this room. So I was guessing at least twelve hours, but that didn’t help.

The only thing I could verify was that we were somewhere in the countryside on what seemed like an old farm. Not exactly something that would narrow it down.

Even if we were hours from the nearest city, we needed to get out soon. Now I had a problem to solve. Better than sitting here doing nothing. I shifted into a more comfortable position to accommodate the chains and let my mind go to work.