by Tiffany Sala
Taken For A Debt
Tiffany Sala
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— Tiffany
Chapter One
When you wake to a hand over your mouth and more hands tugging on your elbows and ankles, dragging you out of bed on a night with no moon, and your first thought is, not again…
Well, it might be time to start thinking seriously about the choices you’ve made in your life.
I didn’t have time to do that right that minute, though. I started kicking and squirming and biting.
My head jerked back so hard from a slap it took me several seconds to confirm my neck was still in one piece.
“We’ll have none of that,” growled a voice I was sure I’d never heard before. “How do you think you’re going to fight three of us off when there’s nobody to come to your rescue?”
Not just opportunist criminals, then, as if the fact that the security alarm wasn’t screaming and they were coming for me instead of raiding the house didn’t give it away. They knew my parents were away, and they’d taken every other precaution to make sure nobody else would know what was happening to me.
Too professional to be an ex-boyfriend and I didn’t deal with the sorts of guys who had money to spend on hired goons: basically, I had no idea who these men were. That meant it wasn’t safe to just let them take me… but as they lifted me, raised my arms over my head, wrapped my wrists and ankles fast and began to carry me off trussed like a pig ready for spit-roast, I realised I didn’t have a choice for the moment.
The men moved me out of my own bedroom like I weighed nothing, a shiver running through me as I floated barely dressed down the hallway, down the stairs towards the back door that led into the yard. There, my head turned for reasons I couldn’t make sense of at first. Something about a shadowy corner had triggered my subconscious…
Not something, someone.
I felt a strange calm fall over me, and took the opportunity to start taking mental inventory of the men I definitely knew were there. Two carrying me and the third helping to guide them while he kept one hand over my mouth as much as possible… yes, that man had lied to me. There were four of them who had come for me, and maybe it was convenient for them to let the one who wasn’t taking direct part in my kidnapping remain in reserve, in the shadows.
Did he know me? Was he avoiding getting too close to me so I wouldn’t notice?
Whether familiar or a stranger, it seemed likely he was the mastermind, the one who could stand back and watch while others got their hands dirty. And once I was whisked away to a location of his choosing… I would find out what he really had in store for me.
Chills ran through my body. A few years ago, I was kidnapped by a boyfriend who’d flipped out because… well, I was a flirt back then and I messed with boys’ heads as a hobby, so I was probably asking for it a bit, but how was I supposed to know he was going to go off like that? Anyway, I’d learned my lesson when it came to teasing men. There’s no safe level.
But though I’d been scared during that experience, I hadn’t been totally hopeless, because I knew the guy who’d taken me and at heart he was a good guy. Someone who could be brought around with a bit of persusasive action, tears and whatever sounded like a good apology.
There’s no shame in crying to a man’s face if it gets you what you want. But this time, the tears were filling my eyes without my choosing to let them. I had no idea if I was going to get through this alive, if they were going to rape me… or something worse I couldn’t even put into words.
I let the tears fall hot across my cheeks and disappear beneath me, because the only thing I could think to do at that moment was to try to get my fear under control before they had me somewhere they would see. If there’s something I know about tears, it’s that the only way to truly suppress them is to let the pressure off now and then. Everyone who manages it cries, or smashes things… or some people make other people cry instead. Anyone who acts like they don’t need an outlet like that is just lying because they’re ashamed of the form it takes for them.
There was a chuckle that sounded muffled by a mask of some kind. “Don’t cry, little girl, you’re going to be looked after.”
One of my tears must have dropped onto him or something. I didn’t try to speak, because a hand was still hovering over my mouth, and I wasn’t sure I could do myself any justice by using my voice at that moment anyway. If they thought I sounded scared, that was just fine with me, but it seemed like I stood a good chance of convincing myself I had no hope of getting out of this, and I couldn’t have that. I needed to lower their suspicions if I wanted any chance of getting away.
My captors carried me straight out the back door, and when they were halfway across the yard I heard a click. The fourth man must have closed the door… but it didn’t seem to me he could have wiped for fingerprints effectively in that time. There was bare skin against my face, not latex, and none of them had been particularly careful.
So, they didn’t mind if they left evidence of their presence. That seemed like another reason for me to be afraid. They had to know from the size of our house that my parents could afford to hire whatever detectives they needed to hunt them down, but if they left obvious prints just the police would suffice. Why would they willingly hand over their identities?
At the end of our yard there was a halt as one of the men climbed over the fence, and then the other two handed me over to him, raising me high over the rear edge of the fence and sending my head swirling as they tipped me almost completely upside-down. I tensed, feeling cold air on my belly as my pyjama shirt started to slide up under the force of gravity. It turned my stomach to think of being exposed to them.
Then a strong body pulled me upright, one arm wrapping right across my chest and another over the bare skin below. Someone caught my feet and helped me to stand, then something cold on the inside of my leg made me flinch against the man behind me, and I was able to shift restlessly as the bonds around my ankles were cut away. I was out in the unused reserve land behind my house, rough dry grass pricking my bare feet.
Two masked figures rose over the line of the fence and dropped in front of me, shaking out their limbs before striding out across the field. I did a quick inventory: the man whose arm was bearing down with a vice-like force on my breasts had to be the silent fourth. When had he climbed over the fence?
One thing was clear to me now: he wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty after all. There was something about his confident grip, the warmth of his body so close, that was making me shake fitfully.
I twitched and yelped at the unexpected scrape of stubble against my armpit. My hands were still tied above my head. The man who had stayed still to watch took a sharp step forward, but I felt the man holding me move, and he froze in place like a weird masked statue.
Masked… What I had just felt was definitely facial hair, not the wool of a balaclava. Now I could feel only a pair of lips brushing against my ear.
“So we’ve got a van to get into, and you can either walk in on your own feet or be thrown in. As you prefer.”
No sweetheart or even assurances that he didn’t care which option I went for… he just seemed to want to speak as little as possible. I knew it was a bad idea but I couldn’t help myself: I turned my head towards him, so our noses brushed, which made him start backwards. I got a
glimpse of a graceful jawline, a surprisingly round pair of eyes that were little more than dark pools in the low light—then the hand that had been on my hip grabbed my own jaw, turning my face forward again.
“Walk,” he said, “or be dragged.”
“I could scream,” I said, staring at the dark shape of my house over my back fence, holding it in my view and trying to make my intention to get back there as strong as possible. It was only a few months ago that I had realised I was no longer afraid to sleep without my bedroom lamp turned up a little.
“I could kill you,” came the reply, straight in my ear… was it my imagination, or was his tone a bit warmer than before?
It was probably my imagination. I was desperate to find any avenue for connecting with this man, but he sounded like he’d done so many kidnappings in his life already he was kind of bored with them now. I didn’t know what I could do to attract his attention as being different from all those other girls, and I didn’t dare try too many random things in case I desensitised him further.
I had no choice but to agree to go. It was a bad choice, but there was no helping that.
“I’ll walk,” I said, and he just turned me around, my house swinging out of view, and started marching me forward without any more words at all. I had to concentrate very hard to avoid putting my feet down on anything that would hurt them, and I was finding it hard to ignore how closely the man with the big eyes was holding me, so no further ideas about how to deal with this situation came to me.
Beyond an old tree at the edge of the reserve slumping sideways to provide a conveniently-shaped cover, there was a van painted black. The two men who had gone ahead opened doors so silent they had probably been oiled about five minutes prior, and my captor pushed me in so I stumbled on the way up and sprawled across the floor on my face, unable to right myself without the use of my hands.
He and the other masked man stepped in after me, and I guess the other two closed up and went around to the cabin, I was too busy squirming on the floor to keep track. I managed to roll myself onto my back at least, staring up at one balaclava-covered face and the pretty face of the man who hadn’t been the first to suggest he could kill me… but was the first I believed could do it and not think twice.
The van started up, the vibrations making my head jitter painfully against the floor.
The pretty man crouched next to my head. My eyes fixed on the crease running down the front of his nearest pant leg: they were proper suit pants, not the ratty trackpants the other man now sitting on a bench in the corner of the space was wearing. He was wearing a business shirt and jacket to match, more rumpled than his pants especially around the collar… probably because of how he’d been holding me.
I stiffened as he pulled out a knife, but I knew crying and pleading wouldn’t divert this man from his intended course of action, so I tried to stare up at him dispassionately. I couldn’t tell how well I was doing, but his lips twitched at something he saw down there.
“We’ll get you into a more dignified position,” he said, “and then we’re going to talk about what you can do to make sure you get out of this situation as quickly and safely as possible.”
That filled me with hope again. “If you want money, my parents will be able to pay. They’ll give you anything you ask for.”
“Hm.” He paused with one hand around my wrists, and his lips moved in a way that actually looked like a smile. “You seem like such a trustworthy girl, so I wonder then why they didn’t give me what I was asking for any of the other times I asked for it over the past four months.”
“I’m sorry?”
He moved the knife so fast he was pulling me to my feet through his grip on my hand by the time I was recoiling from the chill of the blade against my skin. “I’ve been more than patient, wouldn’t you think?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Now that, I believe.” He pushed me into a seat on the opposite side of the van to where the still-masked man was sitting, and sat down near enough to me that I shrank against the glass panel that divided us from the guys up in the front. “Or maybe you would have kept those lights on at night. Well, it doesn’t matter, I would have come for you one way or another. It’s clear there’s something fundamental your dear mother and father never learned: that when it comes to debts, the longer you put them off, the greater the interest… and the more likely it is that someone else will get to decide how it gets paid.”
Chapter Two
“My parents are in debt to you.”
This was a hard story to accept. Mum and Daddy weren’t the type to need to get loans from other people. They had good jobs as university academics that had them travelling to conferences all over the world, frequently funded by institutions that were desperate to have them speak. We already had a gigantic house and a holiday shack and more cars than we actually wanted to drive on a regular basis, and other than those indulgences our tastes were modest. Well maybe my long-standing interest in men wasn’t so modest, but we all have to have our little vices. I was pretty sure Daddy was far more interested in wine than he’d ever been in me, for example.
My good-looking kidnapper nodded his head at me slightly. “Devin O’Hare, a name I suspect you don’t know, but one you might have felt grateful towards, at least before tonight.”
“I’m finding it hard to imagine how.”
Devin O’Hare glanced at the other man across from us, then raised his arm over my head and banged on the glass of the divider. The van pulled over into the end of some rural driveway, the farmhouse up ahead completely darkened, too far away for anyone to notice.
“Get out,” he said. It took me a few seconds to realise he meant me, and even then I hesitated. I felt like I’d seen this in a movie somewhere: the kidnapper lets his prey think she has a chance of running for it… then he shoots her in the back as she flees.
O’Hare rolled those eyes that were far too pretty to belong to a man who talked about killing women the way most men talked about ordering a burger. “Julia Mahoney, I know you watch a lot of television; you don’t leave your house enough voluntarily to have a decent range of hobbies. So I know you are aware of the genre we are entangled in right now and therefore better-informed than to think you should run away from me in an unfamiliar area this far away from any potential sources of help.”
He didn’t even have the decency to display any reaction to my dismay that he seemed to know more about my activities than a few days’ stakeout should have offered. It really creeped me out to think that he might have been watching me for longer than he needed to just to kidnap me. Why had he bothered? There was absolutely no sexual spark from him when he looked at me: I knew what that felt like.
Well, if I wanted to know what this was, I needed to start being a little strategic. Not even strategic: compliant, at least for the moment. He seemed to want to tell me some things, after all.
I stood, and took hesitant steps past O’Hare, over to the doors. He got up and followed me over, opening the doors so the two of us were able to step out side by side into the night.
He slammed the doors, and took hold of my hand. I was staring down at my hand completely enclosed in his and stumbled when he started walking, pulling me along.
“Do you know Rocky Halloran?”
“He’s a local councillor in our area; I don’t know him directly, no.” Was I really walking barefoot and shivering a little in my pyjamas on the edge of some farming property at probably three in the morning, discussing local politics with my kidnapper?
“Do you remember what happened to him, necessitating an extended leave of absence from his council duties?”
It took a while to come to me. It had been all over the local news at the time, but it wasn’t exactly something that had mattered to me personally. “Injury, right? He—his kneecaps, he broke both his kneecaps…” I stopped walking alongside O’Hare, and pulled my hand out of his. It had just been a gory accid
ent at the time, something to avoid thinking about, but now the man who had snatched me out of my bed was asking me about it, I knew without being told there was something more sinister to it.
“More accurately, someone broke them for him.” There was the confirmation. “Who exactly that person was, doesn’t really matter. The main point here is that I’m the one who got that done… but if you’re looking for someone to blame, you don’t need to go further than your lovely mother.”
“My mother,” I repeated. It occurred to me that as seamless as this kidnapping was, it was entirely possible Devin O’Hare just had the wrong house, the wrong family. Maybe he wanted that couple at the end of our street who always wanted to talk about some obscure political happening when I ran into them on the street and had ridiculous numbers of different visitors every week. “My mother won’t even swat a fly, there’s no way she’d—”
“Do it herself?” O’Hare slung an arm across my shoulders, and I felt a shiver going through me he probably felt too. It was definitely wrong, but I couldn’t help it: this was an incredibly attractive man getting close to me, and it had been a while since that had happened. “Of course not, when she can pay someone else to take care of it for her. You may even remember the situation that caused the trouble: our unfortunate friend Rocky had the bright idea of developing the waterfront near your house as a tourism hub, and of course that would have meant your dear old mum would lose her favourite strolling spot, not to mention some of your ocean views.”
God, I remembered that dumb tourist spot proposal. It annoyed me both because it was stupid, anyone could see that, and because I was the one who had to suffer through endless lectures about how it was never going to work, when I already agreed. You didn’t turn next door to a new subdivision with high rents and utterly unhistoric houses into a tourist trap. I still cringed a little when I remembered how Mum had raged at the idea of some outsider coming in and deciding that one of her precious places was going to be changed forever in some misguided attempt to bring money to the area. “All I know is we all dodged a bullet when that plan fell through.”
