part0025

C oleman couldn’t feel her tongue. That was the first thought that came to her mind as she drifted slowly back into consciousness. It was much like the way her arm fell asleep when she lay on it for too long. The question was, though, how the hell did one’s tongue fall asleep?

The question vexed her to the point where she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep at all, and she opened her eyes to stare at the ceiling. Her eyebrows furrowed into an uncertain frown. The room was dark enough that she didn’t need much time for her eyes to adjust. She stared at a very unfamiliar ceiling.

How drunk had she been last night? Had she really gone home with someone and spent the night? That was so unlike her. Then again, she had been fired from a job she had excelled at for the better part of the last decade, so she really was in uncharted territory at this point.

Except that she didn’t remember anything from the night before, either. The truth was that she wasn’t ever inclined to drink until she was blackout drunk. Which meant that either she had suddenly lived life on the wild side, or something iffy had happened to her while in the bar.

She pushed herself up onto her hands and inspected the room. Light filtered through the shades, which confirmed that it was already the morning after, but she definitely wasn’t home. From the cheap TV and idyllic cottage art on the walls, it looked like she was in a motel room.

The fact that she still wore her clothes was a good sign, she supposed, and inspected them to make sure they weren’t torn or damaged. They revealed nothing alarming. She did feel a little sore, but not in the places one would expect after—no, she couldn’t even bring herself to think it.

Jessica jumped when she heard a noise behind her. She turned as the bathroom door opened and a man stepped out. He looked vaguely familiar, but it took her a few seconds to put a name to the face.

“Raymond…damn it, what was your last name?” she asked and inclined her head in concentration. “What am I doing here? How did I get here?”

“It doesn’t really matter,” the man said. “I’m glad to see you’re awake, though.”

She opened her mouth, not really sure what to make of his response. It didn’t really matter? What didn’t really matter? He took advantage of her silence to walk over to a duffel bag on the floor and pick up a small pen flashlight before he approached the bed.

“What doesn’t really matter?” she finally managed to ask as he sat beside her. “I asked you three questions.”

“And it’s the same answer to all three,” he replied with a small smile. He wasn’t a bad-looking man although not particularly handsome. While there was nothing striking about his eyes or bone structure, something about the way that he carried himself was different. He didn’t look like the nervous man she had met the day before, and he definitely didn’t look like the man she had met at the facility.

“What the fuck is that even supposed to mean?” she asked.

“Hold still,” was his only response as he leaned closer and placed a finger on her right eye to keep it open as he flashed the light into it. He did this first to the right one, then the left.

“Not many date rapists actually bother to make sure their victims are okay after the assault, you know,” Jessica grumbled as he moved away from the bed, apparently satisfied with the results of his inspection. “I assume you’re new to this stuff.”

“I didn’t drug you,” the man—whom she was now sure wasn’t named Raymond—said with a smirk. “And I didn’t rape you. You know that.”

“And how the fuck would I know that, precisely?” she asked and leaned forward on the bed.

He opened his mouth but appeared to have come up blank as he stared ahead at the wall he now walked toward. “I actually have no idea. I merely assumed that women knew. You’d be sore and achy in all the wrong places. Something like that.”

It was a better answer than she’d expected, and to be honest, he appeared to know about as much as she did. Thankfully, she’d never really had to deal with anything quite so traumatic as that. Still, from the snippets of memory that seemed to filter back to her, she had a feeling that she had a whole other set of traumas to deal with. She didn’t know if she felt relieved or not.

“So, what did you mean when you said that the answers to my three very pertinent questions didn’t really matter?” Jessica asked once he’d replaced the flashlight in the bag. “Your name isn’t actually Raymond Burrows, is it?”

“Nope.” He shook his head and took a seat on one of the chairs a few paces away from the bed. If nothing else, he appeared to be willing to give her some space to process everything.

“Can I ask you what your real name is?” She shifted to the edge of the bed and swung her legs over the edge.

“You can call me Jeremiah,” he said and nodded as if he’d made his mind up about something. “That is my real first name, but I won’t give you my real last name. I hope you understand.”

“I don’t,” she snapped, pushed off the bed, and walked over to him. She thought that standing over him would give her some kind of presence, something that would make her feel more empowered. But, as she came close, all he did was blink calmly at her, and she found that she had assumed in error.

“What do you want to know?” he asked and leaned back in his seat to regard her placidly.

“Am I being held captive here?” Jessica asked. She returned to the bed and sat. The situation simply didn’t feel quite right—like someone had messed with the controls and she still needed to fix their blunders.

“Nope,” Jeremiah responded curtly. “You can leave this room and go on home whenever you want.”

“And what makes you think that I won’t do precisely that?” she demanded. “For all I know, you kidnapped me and brought me here. You may not be a rapist, but that doesn’t make you a good guy. And I know your face. And your first name. I could call the cops.”

“You absolutely could,” he agreed with a gentle nod.

“So, what makes you think that I won’t?” By now, she felt more than a little frustrated by his lack of reaction to her raised tone. Most people got defensive or shut down. Jeremiah, on the other hand, merely acted like he got yelled at for a living and knew that the best way to deflate someone who was losing their temper was to be calm in response.

She already knew that she would hate the fact that he would be right all the time. It was one of those premonitions.

“Because your other memories from last night should come back soon,” he replied, his voice calm and almost monotone. “I’m not sure how they managed it, but they did get you out of the bar and into the van before they injected you with Ketamine.”

Jessica did remember. It was fuzzy and incomplete, but it came back in random snatches like movie stills. Two men had approached her when she moved to the bar to order drinks. She felt bad for upsetting Raymond—Jeremiah, rather—when she’d pushed him to share a traumatic experience and she wanted to make it up to him. Halfway to the counter, a couple of men had bumped into her. When she tried to move away, they nudged her again and between them, edged her toward the back of the bar. She was about to tell them to fuck off when she saw they were armed and both guns were aimed at her.

The rest was a little easier to remember—the mind-shredding terror and the way her heart thundered in her chest as they turned and walked her out of the bar. One of the men muttered quietly that if she screamed, they would put a bullet in her back—in a place that would kill her but would take a while. She hadn’t made a peep as they dragged her into an alley, where a white van had waited. Two men waited inside, and the others pushed her in.

All kinds of terrifying scenarios had played out. Would they rape her? Pinned face down on the dirty floor of the van, she had waited for them to rip her clothing off. Her breath had caught around the lump of fear in her throat, but they made no effort to continue the awaited assault. Instead, something like a bee sting bit into her upper leg. Within seconds, everything became fuzzier and fuzzier. She remembered looking at Raymond with a vague feeling of rage and—

“Who were those men?” she asked quietly as Jeremiah had remained silent while she processed her memories. He seemed to know a thing or two about what she’d gone through and didn’t want to press her too hard.

“I’m not sure.” His voice was still calm, soothing, and soft as he spoke to her. There was something disarming about his honesty. “If I had to guess, though, I would say that they worked for your former employers, Pegasus—or, at least, the former CEO, Carlson. He cleaned up shop over the weekend. Of the seven lead scientists who worked in the facility that was shut down, five are dead—oh, six out of seven, now. Thanks, Anja.”

“What…what happened to the last one?” she asked as tears welled in her eyes. Jessica knew many of her fellow scientists and although she didn’t much like some of them, three were her best friends in the whole world. She felt like the ground had opened up to swallow her whole. Worse, she somehow felt a little jealous of this Anja person. She wanted to ask who they were, but she couldn’t get it past the lump that had suddenly appeared in her throat.

“She’s sitting in a motel room, talking to some asshole about how she survived an assassination attempt,” Jeremiah replied, but his calmness was no longer soothing. The tears spilled, hot and beyond her control, and dripped down her cheeks as a hard, ugly sob forced itself from her throat. Her vision wavered and the room seemed to recede as the sobs came harder and faster and she collapsed on the bed.

He moved to the side of the bed and sat. She tensed, but he seemed to know that she wasn’t in the mood to be hugged and only placed a hand on her shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze.