“Stop that.”
I shut my mouth at the same time my eyes moved to the man who had rolled onto his back at some point over the last few seconds.
“Get yourself together,” he rumbled in that rich, low voice, stretching his arms out across the floor, giving me a view of the cuff on his wrist too.
That grumpy face stared over at me, annoyed, impassive, and dirt-smudged.
But not actually seeming at all pissed off that we were in a fucking room in God knew where after pretty much getting ambushed.
I wanted to cry.
“Do not get… hysterical. I’m not… in the mood,” The Defender grumbled.
I blinked.
He wasn’t in the mood?
Him?
I took my time pressing my lips together, thinking, then asked so, so slowly, so quietly, “Are you shitting me right now?”
He yawned.
Yawned!
“I thought they hurt you!” I hissed, sounding 1000 percent panicked. Because I was. I was scared on top of this. I was so, so scared.
“They used… beanbag rounds,” he explained like he was telling me about the weather. Like we were on the couch at my trailer and not… not here. Having this conversation about being hit by beanbag rounds.
As tears filled my eyes and something terrible formed in my throat, he gave me another one of the irritated looks he’d been shooting my way since we’d met.
I stared at him. I stared at him in disbelief. In terror.
“They didn’t… hurt me,” he said, sounding almost dismissive even as his eyes narrowed. “You’re the one who got hurt. Probably have… bruised ribs.”
That explained a lot, but it didn’t make me feel any better.
“How are you so calm?” I asked him, twisting my head to look around the room just in case I’d missed something a minute ago.
“Why shouldn’t I be?” he asked in that grumbly, crabby voice that was the one I knew best.
“Is this not kind of a jail cell?”
“It is.”
We were in a jail cell.
I’d been shot with beanbag rounds, which totally explained why my back and ribs ached so bad.
And now… now… he was choosing to talk to me.
Fuck.
Fuckkkkk.
I’d tried to live my life quietly. So small. Don’t draw attention. Don’t become too attached to anything. I had kept away from people for not just my own benefit but for theirs too. I tried to be decent. I believed in karma.
But I was still here.
Because I had been a stubborn motherfucker trying to do her best.
I’d ignored the signs like an idiot.
Resentment toward my parents stirred hard in my chest. In my entire soul if I was going to be honest. I didn’t think it was possible to be so damn pissed off, but it was.
My eyes started to sting, and it took me a couple tries before I got my mouth to actually croak, “And you’re okay with that?” Because I wasn’t. This was my nightmare.
He huffed. “It’s not convenient.”
Convenience was a really loose word to describe this.
I slowly and very, very painfully rolled down, holding back whimpering until I was spread out on the floor too. I knit my hands together, ignoring the way they were shaking despite the weight of the cuff, and set them over my chest. I tried to take another breath and stopped when it felt like getting stabbed.
I had to think.
We’d been kidnapped for all intents and purposes. It hadn’t been a dream, and I wasn’t being pessimistic. This was reality.
It was also fucking freezing in here.
Squeezing my eyes closed, I tried to tell myself that this wasn’t the end of the world.
I was still alive, so I was winning on that end. For a minute there, I’d thought it was all over. But it wasn’t.
Once I’d managed to calm myself down as much as I was pretty sure I was capable of considering the situation, I asked in my most polite voice, which honestly sounded like I was deranged and not very polite at all because I was on the verge of panicking, “Are you not losing your shit because you know something I don’t?”
“I know… a lot of things… you don’t” was how he decided to reply, the ball of sunshine.
I gritted my teeth and tried to strangle my patience closer to my heart. I tried my best to calm down and put things into perspective. One step at a time. One minute at a time. I knew better than to freak out. You made mistakes when you acted impulsively, and I was in no position to make more.
First things first: “Do you know where we are?”
“No,” he answered immediately.
Okay. Fortunately, he was responding. “Do you know if there are cameras in here? Microphones?” He had to be able to hear them or sense them or something, I was pretty sure considering he was the one who had known that they had been at the gate.
There was a beat of silence before he replied with “No.” He lifted the cuff on his wrist like that explained everything.
It didn’t, and I wasn’t sure I trusted that there wasn’t something in here that could communicate back to them somehow. We had to be careful with what we said. Another choke rose up in my throat, but I fought it down before trying to ask calmly, “You said you don’t know where we are, but do you have any idea where we could be?”
I dropped my head to the side to focus on him. He still looked almost serene. But some tiny muscle in his cheek moved, and I could tell he thought about how to answer that. I’d known he was full of shit telling me he didn’t know where we were. “I’ve got… a good idea.”
I knew it! I opened my mouth, then closed it. Then I peeked around the room, thinking. Talking to him in Spanish was out of the question. Portuguese was a better choice, but a Spanish speaker could piece together some words.
“How?” I asked him in Korean.
His head slowly turned toward me.
“Do you understand me? I don’t want them to know what we are talking about,” I said, sticking to the language I’d learned from the family that had babysat me until we’d moved away for the first time. I was pretty sure that’s how I’d picked it up so easily, my little brain had been a sponge back then. After we’d moved away, I’d had a Korean American teacher at one school who had worked with me a couple times a week. The rest I’d picked up by streaming every K-drama I could find and listening and reading subtitles over and over again, repeating everything to get the pronunciation right.
The Defender’s gaze narrowed and then, in Korean, he replied, “I wasn’t… sleeping when they… brought us here.”
I rolled onto my side to get a better look at him. He was still on his back, his arms beside his body. His chest rose slowly before falling at the same pace.
Breathe. Calm down. I didn’t need to panic.
Easier said than done though.
“You let them take you?” I had told him to leave. I knew I had. I’d fucking screamed it at the top of my lungs.
His purple eyes flashed for a brief moment before the bright color faded just as quickly as I’d seen it. I’d surprised him, and he’d surprised me by talking to me in flawless Korean right back. “I did not let them… take me. I would not have been… in a position… to be taken if I’d been… healing the way I should’ve. The only reason… you’re here is because you kept this a secret.”