Prisoner of War

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  She could smell something burning behind her and swiveled enough to see the edges of the wallpaper where the bullet had buried itself in the wall were glowing red and smoking.

  She turned back to him, shaking badly. The urge to pee was almost overwhelming.

  “Rest assured, a bullet in the body doesn’t have to kill.” He motioned with the revolver, pointing to different parts of her torso. “There are a dozen places where a bullet will only inflict serious pain. Pain will only discommode you, not me. Besides, I am a crack shot, as I just demonstrated. There are ways of grazing the body that will achieve the same level of pain and not seriously disable you.” He cocked the revolver with his thumb and Minnie felt ill as she watched the barrel roll around, bringing the next bullet into the chamber.

  “Do not insist on a demonstration,” he finished. “Take off your clothes.”

  Minnie reached for the zipper of the suit she wore and the cuff jingled against her arm. “I can’t get it off over this.”

  He dug in his pocket and tossed the small key onto the bed next to her. “Unlock it and throw the key back.”

  She obeyed and tossed the key back onto the floor at his feet. The gun and his gaze did not waver as he bent and picked up the key and pocketed it again.

  She stripped the foul-smelling plastic suit from her with a degree of eagerness and dropped it on the floor.

  He pointed with the gun to the cufflink. “Put it back on.”

  She returned the cuff to her wrist.

  “Tighter,” he said. “I won’t have you working your hand out of it when I’m gone.”

  She tightened it more and waited, her heart hammering.

  “I have work to do and meetings to attend,” he said briskly, moving toward the door that led to his office. He stopped at the chair to pick up a brown paper bag and threw it to land on the bed. “You will take a shower while I am gone. You may move around the room, but when I return you must be on the bed, wearing what is in that bag.”

  He stepped out of the room and shut the door.

  Minnie brought her knees to her chest, her ankles crossed and hugged herself, which successfully hid her nakedness from the camera in the corner. Her mind was racing.

  If Duardo must play Zalaya at all times, then he could not openly speak to her as Duardo. Everything he said as Zalaya might hold a message for her—just as his comments about her “ex-lover” being in the army had guided her story.

  Was there a message in what he had said before he left? She could not find any hint of such a message. Then why had he come back to the room at all? To play with her? That would be something that Zalaya would do, certainly. Zalaya would have wanted to know about the boat too. But Duardo’s instructions had been banal, indeed. “Take a shower.”

  She longed for a hot shower anyway. She turned her back on the camera, moved into the bathroom and started the water. Looking back over her shoulder, she discovered that the transom over the door hid the camera from her. At least her shower would be semi-private. She shut the door as far as the chain would allow, just to be certain of it.

  For the next forty minutes, until the water grew cool, she let the heat soak into her body, washing away the stink of fear and exertion. It was one of the best showers she had ever taken.

  She stepped out and reached for a towel and froze.

  Duardo had left her a direct message after all, in ghostly letters outlined by steam on the big mirror over the sink.

  “Mic under the bed. I must stay Zalaya.” Beneath, he had signed his name and her heart clenched at the sight of it.

  Duardo.

  Chapter Twelve

  Serrano switched off the monitor when he heard voices in the anteroom. A quiet tap and his secretary looked around the door. “Colonel Zalaya?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  The secretary withdrew and the door opened to let Zalaya through. The tall security officer lowered himself into the chair and absently rubbed the thigh that had taken the bullet, his other hand still resting on the head of the cane.

  “It’s been confirmed,” Zalaya told him. “It’s Nicolás Escobedo’s boat.”

  “You still think she has nothing to do with him?”

  “We know that Escobedo has those two American women in his household, but she’s Australian.”

  “So she says,” Serrano replied.

  “She’s an accomplished liar,” Zalaya agreed. “I’m inclined to believe the baseline story, though. No one would attempt to sell such a preposterous tale unless it was the truth. Then there are the site passwords and log-in to verify it.”

  Serrano frowned. “Perhaps holding her apart from the bordello may be a wise course, after all. It would be best to preserve her.”

  “In case she is Escobedo’s agent?”

  “Yes.”

  Zalaya smiled. “You mean, use her as leverage against Escobedo if he makes his move?”

  “Oh, he will make a move sooner or later and I’m a great believer in being prepared. We must keep her more or less whole. No wounds...or bullet holes.”

  Zalaya glanced at the blank screen on Serrano’s desk. “I see.” He moved the cane impatiently. “I think you overestimate her value, even if she is Escobedo’s agent. He knows how to cut his losses.”

  “Not for that little firecracker,” Serrano assured him. He picked up the remote again and turned the monitor back on. “My secretary recorded this last night from the television show Star Gazing.”

  “Which has won dozens of awards for its reliable, ethical journalism,” Zalaya responded dryly.

  “Images don’t lie,” Serrano said calmly and backed up the file and hit “play.” He watched the footage again, glancing at Zalaya to see if he picked it up. It had taken Serrano several replays to see what had got his secretary wound up.

  When the report about Adán Caballero’s Acapulco sojourn flashed upon the wedding he had attended, Zalaya threw up his hand. “Wait,” he said softly. “Back it up.”

  Serrano backed it up while Zalaya watched intently.

  “Stop,” Zalaya said. This time his voice was even softer. He tilted his head to look at the fuzzy images on the screen—it was footage from an amateur video camera and the images were jerky. Where Serrano paused it, Caballero was almost out of the frame, which allowed the official wedding party standing on the steps of the cathedral to be seen. “You think that’s her? On the left of the bride in the green dress?” He frowned. “They’re out of focus.”

  “The size and coloring...even the hair is right,” Serrano said.

  “So you did watch the security camera footage,” Zalaya said, glancing at him.

  Serrano winced. Zalaya was quick to spot things like that.

  Zalaya turned his attention back to the screen. “Why come here though? Why send her of all people? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Does it have to? We know he has no decent men except, perhaps, Blanco and he’s been behind a desk for too long. We know he has a gift for doing the unexpected. Would you, in a million years, suspect one like her of being an agent?”

  Zalaya sat back. “It doesn’t matter either way,” he said, smiling. “You and I have both forgotten Escobedo’s weakness. He has a soft spot for the people, the underdog.”

  Serrano shook his head, honestly confused. “So?”

  “Even if the woman in my bedroom wasn’t the one who attended his wedding, we can still use her to manipulate him. He is incapable of turning away from suffering if it is right before his eyes. Look at how he met the American woman he just married—he personally sprung her from jail when he heard she had been picked upon by a pack of jackals during the Luna Festival. We keep this woman tucked away until the timing is perfect, then we parade her in front of him as the price he pays if he tries to move against us. If he’s personally acquainted with her peril, it’ll stay his hand. I guarantee it.”

  Serrano considered it carefully. He didn’t fully trust Zalaya yet, but he had learned to trust the man’s instincts about the
psychology of other men. “Then we must certainly preserve her hide,” Serrano agreed. He held up his hand. “Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  “That scratching sound. Coming from above the ceiling. I’ve been hearing it on and off all day.”

  Zalaya glanced at the ceiling and shrugged. “There’s nothing above you but the roof. It’s nesting season. It could be birds. Or mice.”

  Serrano grimaced. “Spring already. I tell you, Escobedo will move before the summer storms.”

  “And I tell you he won’t be ready that fast. He can’t. He has no money and few men. It is physically impossible to recruit, train and equip a big enough force to take back a country in five months.”

  “Not if he has help,” Serrano said darkly.

  “You’re being paranoid again.” Zalaya got to his feet, moving stiffly as he often did toward the end of the day. “The Americans are refusing to speak to him.”

  “They’re not talking to us either.”

  * * * * *

  Minnie crept into the big bed and hugged herself, warmed and comforted by that one ghostly word on the mirror. The warning about the microphone forced her to merely mouth Duardo’s name to herself. It was enough. She pulled a length of the chain in with her so she could cover herself. The brown paper bag at the foot of the bed crinkled with her movements. It was Zalaya’s bag. She kicked until it fell off the bed then curled herself up into a ball.

  She woke to the feel of lips upon her neck, the caress of a tongue beneath her ear. She thought she was on the edge of dreams again, for Duardo’s hand was caressing her. She sighed her contentment, rolling over to allow him better access. Her shoulder came up against his hard chest, her legs tangled in his. So good, so very good...

  She heard the sound of metal clinking and it reminded her of the chain that she was fast coming to hate. That was when she froze, her heart hammering.

  She wasn’t sleeping at all. This was real. Zalaya was behind her, caressing her. He was in the bed with her and from the little she could feel, as naked as she.

  He caressed her with the gentleness of a real lover. It was Duardo’s touch. “Pretend I am your soldier,” he said and she knew he spoke for the microphone.

  She lay against him in the dark as his hand stroked her. She wept silently. The tears were those of joy and remembrance. She’d risked everything by flying directly into hell on earth just to learn what had become of him and had been rewarded with the most unexpected, ultimate prize—Duardo himself. In this evil place, she had been blessed with a pocket of time to feel his arms around her, his body against her.

  He had pulled down the blinds so not even the starlight could illuminate them for the camera. All she could sense was his hands and the heat of his body against her.

  He wiped her tears and kissed her and at last she knew that this was Duardo, the shell of Zalaya discarded. His touch melted the thousand questions that had pummeled at her. None of them mattered here and now.

  He stroked her throat, her face, the full length of her body. Nothing was spared. Her body responded with an arousal that made her almost dizzy with its power.

  “Yes,” he whispered and rolled her over onto her back.

  Except for inconclusive, unsatisfying dreams, she had not felt Duardo’s hands on her for an eon. She had forgotten the joy of a man’s touch. How could she have foregone this primal pleasure?

  He was baiting her. Coaxing her. With slow seduction, he took her, possessing her with a nearly forgotten mastery.

  It wasn’t until he lay down beside her that she realized both her hands were free. The cuff had been removed while she slept, at the time he had slipped into the bed beside her.

  She held him to her, encouraging him with her hands, caressing him. Her fingers felt the ridges of what could only be a scar, close to his spine, level with his shoulder blade.

  It was not the last coupling that night. He seemed inexhaustible. Driven. Minnie let him take her how he wished and reveled in it all.

  She woke to daylight and stretched like a cat, feeling tendons pop and muscles flex with the delicious ache that came after greedy, abandoned sex. She was forced to abort the movement when the chain around her wrist brought her arm to a halt. She looked down at the cuff and the chain pooled under the sheet with her.

  She didn’t remember him replacing it. She didn’t remember anything beyond her exhausted slide into sleep.

  She quickly rolled over to check the other side of the bed. It was empty. But the sound of running water and the closed bathroom door told her where he was. The water shut off as she listened and her heart pattered harder.

  She scrambled out of the bed and gathered up the hateful chain in her hand. She tried the door handle and it turned without resistance.

  The door was ripped aside, tearing the handle from her hand. He stood before her, fully naked except for the patch over his eye. “You dare interrupt me without permission!” he roared and shoved her hard, back into the bedroom.

  She almost tripped over the chain and scrambled backward to keep her footing as he came after her, shrugging into a bathrobe he pulled from behind the door. Without the cane he limped heavily.

  He must be Zalaya now, she reminded herself. “I just wanted—” she began, but could think of nothing to add. Her surprise had stolen her ability to think.

  “You do not get to satisfy your wants here!” He grabbed the trailing chain and yanked it so she was pulled, stumbling, toward him. He looped the chain around her wrists. They were caught together in the metal tangle. He tugged her toward the bed. “You need to learn who is in charge.”

  He pushed her until she was pressed against the high side of the bed. His hand pressed on her back and the other pulled down on the chain, forcing her to bend her chest to the crumpled coverlet, her hands over her head. A weight settled on her hands, holding them down. His foot kicked at her ankles, spreading her legs.

  She realized that this was how Zalaya would do it. He would take her, right now, bent over in this demeaning position. She recalled the camera in the corner of the room and moaned into the mattress. Of course, Zalaya would do it for the camera. For his own private collection and for whoever else would be watching.

  She had to do the same. She had to be the Minnie she would be if this was Zalaya. Their lives depended on it. What would Zalaya’s Minnie have done?

  Well, she wouldn’t just lie there and take it.

  Minnie shoved back as hard as she could, but her strength was diminished in this position and Duardo—Zalaya—was a strong man. She could only jerk on the chains that bound her hands and her butt rammed into him. It barely moved him.

  “You fucking asshole,” she muttered. “You think this makes you a man?”

  “No, but this does.”

  He slid into her, his movements rough.

  She bit her lip. She knew she must keep up the act but there was an odd sensation of doubling—it was Zalaya, but it was also Duardo who held her down and took his pleasure. Out of nowhere, she felt a touch of excitement. Arousal.

  “I’ve seen dogs do the same,” she husked, maintaining the act. But the huskiness in her voice was real.

  All her life, Minnie had been the one to hold the power over men. Even with Duardo, who was almost old-fashioned in his beliefs about a man’s role in a relationship, she had still been sure of her power over him.

  Now, he held the control. Physical control. She was forced to submit.

  It was novel and it was arousing her in a way she had never experienced before. To be completely at his mercy...

  She moaned into the mattress and pressed her hips back into him, opening herself up to the invasion.

  “Yes, you understand your role here,” he told her and the double meaning was clear to her. Zalaya was confirming her role as a slave. Duardo was agreeing that the role she was playing for the camera was correct.

  Minnie forgot about the camera, forgot that this was supposed to be Zalaya bending her to his will. Sh
e sunk deep into the pool of new sensations Duardo provoked in her.

  Zalaya finished with a groan and shifted away. Her wrists were pulled into the air as he hauled on the chain.

  She straightened up stiffly but was spun around to face the bathroom door. His hand pushed on her shoulder again. “Clean yourself,” he ordered.

  She moved into the bathroom, unraveling loops of chain from around her wrists as she went.

  “Leave the door open,” he told her, when she tried to shut it. “I will not have you slashing your wrists while my back is turned.”

  She looked over her shoulder and saw that he had pulled the straight-backed chair over from the dressing table and had lined it up with the bathroom door. He settled himself in it, his arms crossed. He intended to watch her shower.

  Ah, yes, Zalaya would do that. He would demean his victims in some cold, calculating way that took away their will to live and fight back. She applauded Duardo’s role-playing. Duardo knew, as Zalaya would not, that any attempt to tell her what to do, to control or direct her, would deliver the opposite.

  She must respond in character.

  She turned to face him fully, her shoulders squared, heated fury boiling in her chest. “Slash my wrists over you?” she asked, pouring all her derision into the last word. “You’ve got the wrong girl for that, asshole.”

  He studied her for a long, silent minute. Then he smiled. “It seems I may not tire of you as easily as the others, after all.”

  She spared a thought for the women—and possibly the men—who had been the real Zalaya’s victims and felt deep pity along with the hope that they had not succumbed to the shit Zalaya handed out.

  “Wash yourself,” he commanded.

  She stepped into the shower and turned on the water.

  “Leave the curtain aside,” he added as she reached for it.

  She shrugged and enjoyed the spray of hot water, hampered somewhat by the chain dangling from her wrist. She didn’t concern herself with the water trickling down the length of chain to pool on the floor outside the cubicle. Zalaya’s Minnie wouldn’t.