Page 8 of Under His Heel: A Kidnapping

He’d tried calling her Ms. Lysander the first time, only she’d gotten bitchy at him, and he couldn’t call her Ms. Tracht because that was just weird, so he’d settled on calling her Anna and letting her twitch in annoyance. That had the added bonus of making Tracht happy because he liked annoying Anna.

The bitch rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I know. So, they gonna care what I do to you or should I just torture the kid instead?”

“Which answer’s gonna make you not kill me?” Alex asked. He hadn’t wished he was Nick in a long time—not since he and Tracht had fucked Nick up good—but man, he would have loved to have his talking skills right around now.

“Ah, good call. ‘Cus if you don’t matter, I might as well kill you now and be done with it. So what’ll it be? Torture or death?”

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck. “Tracht’s gonna care about me,” he answered. He watched warily as the bitch walked over to the desk, picked up a tray, and brought it over.

It held several tools, including the hammer that must have been used on his hand.

Also a scalpel and a set of pliers.

His eyes widened and he couldn’t keep himself from trembling. He clamped his mouth shut.

“Oh, I see you know what some of these are for!” the bitch said. He could hear the smile in her voice, even if he couldn’t see it under the mask.

The dude in the corner shuddered. “Ugh, I don’t want to be here for that. Save it for the cameras.”

Next to him, Johan started sniffling loudly.

==

In the guest room of Anna’s manor, Tracht weighed his options. He ended up calling Espinosa just to get her opinion on the situation, even though he knew she didn’t particularly care for Alex either.

“Sir? Is there an issue?”

The only reasons Tracht ever contacted any of his staff when they were off-duty was due to ship emergencies, so it wasn’t surprising that Espinosa had leapt to that conclusion.

He shook his head and settled into the desk chair. It would have been nicer to be at his own office on the ship, rather than in this uncomfortable, unfamiliar room.

“Ms. Espinosa, what I’m about to tell you must be kept completely confidential, at least for the time being.”

“Of course, Captain,” Espinosa said, and to her credit she didn’t even look annoyed that Tracht had insinuated she might be anything but.

“Somebody has abducted both my nephew and Alex.”

Her expression didn’t change as she said, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“My sister and her husband are looking into the traditional avenues of hostage extradition, but I’m worried about the amount of abuse the perpetrators are going to heap on Alex and my nephew.” If Espinosa noticed the slight hesitation before he added ‘nephew,’ she didn’t say anything.

“I am, however, at a bit of a loss as to how to speed up the investigation.” Tracht tapped his fingers on the desk. “As I value your quick thinking, I was hoping you’d be able to help me come up with some ideas.”

That got a small smile out of her. She was always pleased when he complimented her skills, even after all the years she’d been working on his ship as the Chief Officer.

“I think the first question is why they bothered to grab Alex at all,” Espinosa said. “If they just wanted to ransom your nephew, they would have been safer leaving him behind, or killing him outright.”

“Yes, I wondered about it too. But they did use Alex for a rather… colorful demonstration as to what they would do to Johan if Anna and Vasilis didn’t pay the ransom.” Tracht pulled up copies of all the information he had on what had happened and sent them to Espinosa.

“Yeah, but—think about it. Wouldn’t it be more powerful to simply torture your nephew?” On the other end of the vid screen, Espinosa looked down at her own tablet and tapped on the edges, flipping through the files he had sent her. “Nobody simply assumes that a bondservant is highly valued.”

No, they wouldn’t at that. Bondservants were long-term employees who could be made to do more demeaning tasks than the usual kind of help. Anna employed them because she liked to make sure they couldn’t leave before their contract was up; others because they wanted a long-term lover they didn’t have to care about. Others still, because they wanted to legally hurt somebody.

The station encouraged the system because it meant they didn’t need to set up a debtors’ prison or another system to help people pay off loans.

“The security footage is rather sparse. Apparently the kidnappers disabled the cameras inside the stairwell and on the fifth and sixth floors. And there were so many people going in and out of the school that day, it’s hard to tell who wasn’t supposed to be there.”

Espinosa hmm’ed quietly and read quietly.

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