The shivers her words sent down my spine are like a trickle of ice cubes. But if we focus on anything other than getting out of here alive right now, we’ll just spiral all the way down into panicked paralysis.
I stride to the door, but there’s no handle on it and it’s cut into the metal so precisely I hardly feel the gap when I run my fingers along it.
“There’s no way out unless they open it,” Ariel says in that dead, cynical voice.
I can’t look into her eyes. There’s no light in them. None at all. So instead I fix my gaze on one of the dark corners of the container. Where a pile of blankets moves and slides into the light.
“What?” a woman’s voice groans. “Who are you?”
Ariel turns towards the voice too, her long blonde hair flapping past my face.
The woman who spoke crawls, or more like rolls into the light. Half her face is one giant bruise, her eye on that side swollen to the size of a tennis ball and roughly the same color too. Her other eye isn’t much better, but at least she can open it a crack.
I rush towards her and kneel on the dirty blanket beside her. “Let me take a look at your face.”
She pushes my hand away weakly as I try to touch her cheek to get better look.
Ariel kneels beside me too, and the woman is looking at her with recognition in her eye.
“Ariel,” she whispers. “Why are you back?”
“Not by choice,” Ariel says hoarsely. “What happened, Lacy?”
Lacy? This is the woman Trixie said knew my sister while she was captive. The woman Chance and I were searching for at that truck stop last night.
“You’re here because of me,” Lacy says and takes a shuddering breath that sounds painful. “I’m sorry.”
“How?” Ariel asks. But I know.
“I was looking for you last night,” I tell Lacy. “And when those Riders found out about it they did this?”
Lacy nods. “I tried to pretend I had no idea why you were trying to find me. I really did. But they hit so hard.”
She takes another breath, which makes her wince and hold the side of her stomach. Judging by the state of her face, it’s a very real possibility she also has internal bleeding of some sort from the beating they gave her.
“You told them about the list Trixie was making for me, didn’t you?” I ask softly.
She nods. “They beat it out of me. I wish she never told me about that, because then I couldn’t tell them a thing. But she did.”
"I know, I understand,” I say gently. “It was so brave of you to help her make that list.”
“It was stupid,” she says and tries to chuckle, but winces instead. “She said you’d make sure they’d all get locked up and I’d be free. Total bullshit. I don’t know why I fell for it. I should’ve known better. All she did was get you stuck in here too. And poor Ariel. Such a sweet girl.”
“Was,” Ariel says. “Not anymore.”
I don’t recognize the woman who said that. But at the same time, I do. I just don’t want to. This is the same Ariel who came back home to us after a year of captivity. Dead inside, unfeeling, with no will to live or try to go better. That was the reason I dived into the work I’ve been doing at the foundation and never really resurfaced. It’s also the reason why I’ve been staying away from my family. And the reason I missed the moment when Ariel got better. Now all that healing’s gone. Erased like it never was. I won’t let it be.
“We’ll get out of here,” I say. “You’ll be free. All of us will be free.”
Trixie took a lot of risks getting me that list. But she dropped the ball completely by not giving it to me. At Chance’s request. Insistence. Threats?
The anger I felt at him that night tries to light up in my chest but fizzles out in the ashy darkness that’s my heart now. I can’t find that anger again and I don’t know why. Maybe because it doesn’t matter. If Ariel and Lacy are right, nothing will matter soon.
The men who brought us here are still outside. I can hear their muffled voices which get louder from time to time before fading again.
The sound of Harleys drowns them out for a couple of moments, but then they start up again. Arguing voice. Agitated voices. Voices that bode nothing good for us.
I freeze, not a single thing inside me moving, as the door slams open, making the whole container shake, the sound of metal banging on metal drowning everything else out. Even my thoughts.