Page 44 of To Have and to Hold

My kidnapper was in the dark with me.

I held my breath,as if that could somehow prevent him from locating my position, balled in the far corner, my shins kicking up against the mattress on the floor.

His voice was a whisper but possessed the sound of a thousand hissing snakes. “I was wondering when you’d notice.”

I wouldn’t even swallow.

“Not up to talking, I see.”

He rustled, my chin whipping toward the sound, a shifting of fabric that indicated he’d been sitting down, groaning with his efforts as he straightened. An unhurried stretch.

“Unfortunately, chitchat is what I had in mind,” he said, then his tone became that of a circling predator. “Now I guess we have to figure out a way to get your lips moving.”

I cast aside the wrenching alarm, determined to focus, because fear is more blinding than darkness ever would be. Would he have left the door open? Yes, because it locks from the inside. I can’t see him, and he can’t see me. I could jump up and sprint to the right—

Light beamed, and once sightless in black I could now see in only white. I held a protective hand to my face, flinching, vision smearing with painful nocturnal tears.

“There you are.”

He had me in a fluorescent funnel, an animal lit up by a scope.

A flashlight.

“Relax. Such ascared little doe.” His form changed behind the beam, his right side rippling into a wider shadow. “I’m not here to violate you. Ineed you to do me a favor.”

I huddled my knees tighter to my chest, squinting around the halo of burning white.

Artificial blue illuminated his skull, creating a difference between an aching strobe on my face and the gentle glow of a screen on his. He had a phone, and was doing something, muttering, as he held it in one hand and kept the flashlight on me with the other.

I dared not move, not even to lick my cracked lips, because it seemed for a moment that he’d forgotten about me, and I would take moments like that over food or water any day.

The Skull focused his attention. “I am going to call a certain person, and you are only to say his name. And you don’t speak until I tell you to. Understand?”

He waited for me to respond. I managed a tense nod. Anything to get him to take this light off me and into the black again.

“You mutter anything more, whisper it, I will whip you in the head with this phone so hard and fast you’ll forget that little stars can twinkle.”

Again, I nodded, staring steadily above the beam. He may get his rocks off on terror and submission, but I refused to bend to it.

“Good.” A quick, pitched tone sounded, indicating he’d hit the call button before he shoved the phone close to my mouth.

I unraveled from my hunch. Heedless of the Skull’s hand, I clutched the phone closer to my lips, hovering over it with the desperation I thought I’d lost hours ago.

A male voiceanswered. “Hello?”

Dear God, his voice. It brought forth a rendering inside me, the soundless yearning of familiarity. Safety. The idea I was a person and to get back into my world all I had to do was say I was still here.

I opened my lips to scream out for him, but the crack of the phoneagainst my cheek sent me sprawling away from the only connection I had.

“Spencer Rolfe?” the Skull asked blandly, as if his slap were nothing but the brush-off of a fly landing on his thigh.

“Yeah. Who’s calling?”

“Someone important,” my captor said. He hooked my elbow, the spotlight flickering slightly as he hauled me into a seated position and shoved the phone under my chin.

“Okay,” I heard Spencesay slowly. His voice was altered by the digital scratch of being put on speaker, but the pull behind my ribcage told me better than my brain managed that it was really him.

The Skull fumbled with the flashlight so he could free his other hand and unhooked a block of black that was attached to the mouthpiece of the cell phone.

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