Chapter 126
[Rose's POV]
Oliver's hand tightened in my hair, forcing my face upward until our eyes met. His breath hit me in waves—tobacco, cheap whiskey, something fermented underneath it all that made my stomach contract. The overhead bulb cast harsh shadows across his angular face, and I could see the slight tremor in his raised hand, the one he'd used to slap me moments before.
"Yes or no," he said again, his voice dropping lower. "And think about it before you answer, because there's no one coming for you. No one. You can do this the easy way, or you can do it bleeding."
The words hung in the cold air between us. My left ear was still ringing from the first strike. I could taste copper at the corner of my mouth where my lip had split. The pain in my scalp where he gripped my hair was white-hot and blinding.
He was right that no one knew where I was. He was right that I was bound and injured and outnumbered. Every rational calculation I'd been running since I woke up on this floor said the same thing: comply now, survive long enough to find another opportunity, preserve what strength I had left.
But rationality had limits.
I opened my mouth to refuse him again when a sharp female voice cut through the tension from somewhere above us.
"Oliver, stop playing with the merchandise. Lucas wants you upstairs."
The grip in my hair didn't loosen immediately. Oliver's eyes narrowed, his jaw working as though he were weighing whether to ignore the summons entirely. For three long seconds I hung suspended in his grip, my heart hammering against my ribs, waiting to see which impulse would win.
Then his fingers opened.
I dropped back to the floor, the impact sending a fresh jolt of pain through my left side. Oliver stepped back, his hands moving to his belt buckle with deliberate slowness as he refastened it.
"You got lucky today," he said, the pleasant tone returning to his voice in a way that made my skin crawl worse than the anger had. "When I come back, I hope you'll have had time to think it over." He paused at the base of the stairs, looking back at me with that same curved expression. "Real careful thought."
Then he was gone, the door at the top of the stairs closing with a hollow thud that echoed through the basement. The lock mechanism engaged with a series of metallic clicks that I counted automatically—three separate deadbolts. Professional. Deliberate. Designed to keep someone in.
I stayed exactly where I'd fallen for a full minute, listening. Footsteps overhead, muffled voices I couldn't make out clearly, the creak of floorboards as people moved around in the space above me. Then silence, broken only by the distant hum of what might have been a generator or heating system somewhere in the building.
My hands were still behind my back. My ankles were still bound. But I was alone.
I forced myself to breathe slowly. The technique worked then. It worked now. After ten measured breaths, my heart rate had dropped enough that I could think clearly again.
The rusted nails were still there, jutting from the collapsed workbench eight feet away.
I started crawling.
The rope around my ankles had tightened during Oliver's interrogation, cutting deeper into the skin. Each movement forward required me to drag both legs together, using my knees and the limited leverage I could get from my bound wrists to inch myself across the rough wooden floor. The splinters caught at my clothes and exposed skin. My left side, where the earlier injury had torn open, scraped against the uneven planks with every forward motion.
Blood began to seep through my blouse in a warm, spreading patch. The pain was significant but not immediately life-threatening. What mattered was reaching those nails before Oliver returned or before I lost enough blood to compromise my motor control.
Three feet. Two and a half. Two feet.
The cold was working against me in ways I hadn't fully accounted for. My fingers, already numb from the circulation being cut off by the wrist bindings, had progressed past tingling into a deep, worrying absence of sensation. I flexed them experimentally and felt only the faint ghost of movement, like watching someone else's hands from a great distance.
Eighteen inches. Twelve inches.
The rust smell reached me first, metallic and sharp against the baseline dampness of the basement. I could see the individual grains of corrosion on the nail heads now, the way they jutted upward at angles that would be perfect for sawing through nylon rope if I could just position my wrists correctly against them.
Six inches.
My shoulder hit the base of the workbench, and I had to bite down hard on my lower lip to keep from crying out as the impact sent a fresh wave of pain through my injured side. The taste of blood intensified. I didn't care. I was close enough now that I could have reached the nails with my fingers if my hands had been in front of me instead of tied behind my back.
I rolled onto my stomach, using the workbench leg as leverage to pivot my body. The movement was awkward and graceless, requiring me to twist my hips in a way that made the rope around my ankles dig even deeper into my skin. Fresh pain bloomed in both my side and my legs, but I kept moving, kept adjusting, until my bound wrists were finally positioned against the largest of the three nails.
The nail was cold against my skin. I could feel the rough texture of the rust even through my compromised sense of touch. I began to move my wrists back and forth in short, controlled strokes, applying steady pressure to keep the rope taut against the metal edge.
The first few strokes accomplished nothing I could detect. The nylon was designed to resist fraying, and my limited range of motion made it difficult to generate real force. But I kept the rhythm steady, kept the pressure consistent, and gradually—so gradually I almost didn't notice it happening—I began to feel the rope warming from the friction.
The nail slipped.
The sharp point caught the soft flesh at the base of my thumb, tearing through skin in a single clean motion that made white light explode across my vision. I felt the warmth of fresh blood immediately, running down my palm and dripping off my fingers onto the floor below. The pain was immediate and intense, different from the duller aches in my side and ankles—this was sharp, demanding, impossible to ignore.
I didn't stop.
I repositioned my wrists, found the nail again, resumed the sawing motion. The blood made everything slippery, which was both helpful and dangerous. Helpful because it reduced the friction against my skin. Dangerous because I could feel my grip on the precise angle I needed starting to waver.
The nail caught me again, this time on the other hand, opening a gash along the side of my wrist that sent blood running in a thin stream down my forearm. I bit through my already split lip hard enough to taste fresh copper and kept moving. Back and forth. Back and forth. Steady pressure. Consistent rhythm. Don't think about the blood. Don't think about Oliver coming back. Don't think about how much time has passed.
The rope gave.
The sensation was unmistakable—a sudden loosening, a shift in the pressure around my wrists that told me at least one of the binding strands had frayed through completely. I increased the tempo, ignoring the fresh bursts of pain each time the nail found skin instead of rope, focusing everything on that growing sense of give in the bindings.
Another strand parted. Then another.
The rope fell away from my wrists in a final, complete release that left my hands free for the first time since I'd woken up in this basement. I brought them forward slowly, fighting against muscles that had locked into position from being held behind my back for so long. My fingers were sticky with blood, and in the harsh overhead light I could see the damage clearly—deep gashes across both palms, a torn section of skin at the base of my right thumb, smaller cuts and abrasions covering most of my hands from the repeated contact with the rusty nail.
The blood was concerning. The loss of fine motor control was more concerning. But my hands were free.
I looked down at my still-bound ankles, then back at the nail, then at the door at the top of the stairs. The logical next step was obvious—use the nail to cut through the ankle bindings, achieve complete freedom of movement, search the basement for potential weapons or escape routes.
But if Oliver came back and found all the ropes cut, he would know immediately that I'd managed to free myself. He would bind me more securely, probably with something I couldn't cut through with a rusty nail. He might move me to a different location entirely, somewhere without convenient pieces of broken furniture.
Whereas if he came back and found me in what appeared to be the same position, with my hands behind my back and my ankles still bound...
I could pretend. I could keep my hands positioned as though they were still tied. I could wait for him to get close, to let his guard down, to give me an opening I could exploit.
The decision crystallized with absolute clarity. I carefully positioned my bloody hands behind my back, arranging them in the approximate position they'd been in when bound. The movement pulled at the cuts and gashes, sending fresh pain shooting up both arms, but I held the position until I was certain I could maintain it convincingly.
Then I heard it.
The distinctive sound of metal sliding against metal. The lock mechanism at the top of the stairs, engaging from the outside.
Someone was coming back.
My heart rate spiked instantly, flooding my system with adrenaline that made my hands shake despite my attempt to hold them steady. I kept them behind my back, kept my ankles positioned to look properly bound, kept my breathing as controlled as I could manage while my pulse hammered in my ears.
The door swung open. Footsteps on the stairs—lighter than Oliver's, quicker, with a different rhythm entirely.
Not him, then. Someone else.
I closed my eyes to slits, keeping my head turned slightly away as though I'd passed out or given up. Through my lashes I could make out a figure descending the stairs, but the backlight from the open door above made it impossible to see details.
The footsteps reached the bottom of the stairs and stopped.
In the silence that followed, I could hear my own heartbeat, feel the sticky warmth of blood on my concealed hands, taste copper and fear in equal measure.
The overhead light suddenly seemed very bright.