Page 79 of Dublin's Danger Dancer

He presses the accelerator and I watch as we zoom past the overhead lights and onto the motorway.

Sweat is pouring down my armpits soaking the skin under the sequin gown he’d zipped up hours before. He is taking me to a forest to kill me, shoot me and bury the body.

In this moment, all of my favourite memories race through my mind, skipping between my mum and dad, Harry tickling me until I couldn’t take any more, passing my sergeant exam and coming top of my class, the first night I pole danced with my heart in my mouth, wondering whether anyone would know that the shy girl was actually an undercover police officer. My thoughts twirl into a tornado that threatens to pull me into its oblivion.

I’m struggling to breathe. I tap on the glass, but Liam drives, staring straight. I tap again. I don’t stop tapping until Liam rolls the window down.

“I don’t want to gag you, Ciara, but I will.”

“I can’t breathe.” I say, he looks into the rear-view mirror.

“I really can’t breathe,” I say coughing and choking. I’ve got...” I stop myself. He didn’t need to know that.

He hurls a half full bag of McDonald’s chips back at me. “Breathe into the bag.” I do as he says, exhaling and inhaling the bag, sucking the greasy beef tallow into my mouth. After a few minutes I sit back, breath returning to a pitch I could handle.

Liam rolls down the glass. “Perhaps your cough or panic attack, whatever it is, is karma.”

“If karma existed. Liam O’Shaughnessy. You’d be worse than dead in the ditch.”

Liam wets his lips and raises the glass partition between us.

We drive for what feels like hours with me trying to pinpoint where we’re going to no avail.

He stops in what looks like the entrance to the farm.

“Get out.” He demands taking the lock off the doors. I stumble out, my stiletto heel sinking heel deep into the mud.

“Walk,” he says.

“I can’t. I’m stuck,” I say as he looks down at my shoe. He frees it for me, only for me to take another step and get stuck again. Annoyed, he pushes out a breath and lifts me over his shoulder.

“Where are we going?” I ask dangling.

“Somewhere you won’t be found,” he says, placing me down on the hard cement road.

“Now walk.”

I kick off my shoes and pick them up, carrying them to what I assume is my burial site.

After thirty minutes of walking in silence in the dark with only the rustle of animals in bushes and the wind in the trees to keep us company, I ask again, “Where are we going?”

“Just tell me one thing,” he says, stopping in front of me. “Do you pretend to fall in love with all of your targets? Are you a honey trap undercover Guard?”

“If you want an answer to that, I’d like to know where we are going.”

“Walk,” he says, jabbing the gun into my ribs. I begin to walk forwards, this time spotting lights. We’re nearing a small village. Finally, there’s a pavement to walk along. I hop on, grateful to not be treading on so many stones and cigarette butts that people have thrown out of their car windows.

“We here,” he says, pulling me down a dried field past a gate around the back of what looked like a shelter for JCBs.

He opens the door of a stone building and pushes me inside. There are no lights and I can barely see anything.

He uses his torch to navigate inside. “You’re sleeping here,” he says, pushing me down on a dusty bed which creaks as I fall.

I stand up. “If you going to kill me, kill me now, I’d rather not wait until the morning.”

“You do as I say, unless you want the bullet between your pretty eyes. And right now, I say, sleep.”

I feel dust under my fingertips, and I hear the scraping sounds of a mouse running above us. I reason we must be in some kind of farmhouse, as Liam’s phone had only illuminated wide wooden beams,

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