LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER TWO

      BARRIE LAY IN almost total darkness, heavy curtains at the single window blocking out most of whatever light would have entered. She could tell that it was night; the level of street noise outside had slowly diminished, until now there was mostly silence. The men who had kidnapped her had finally gone away, probably to sleep. They had no worries about her being able to escape; she was naked, and tied tightly to the cot on which she lay. Her wrists were bound together, her arms drawn over her head and tied to the frame of the cot. Her ankles were also tied together, then secured to the frame. She could barely move; every muscle in her body ached, but those in her shoulders burned with agony. She would have screamed, she would have begged for someone to come and release the ropes that held her arms over her head, but she knew that the only people who would come would be the very ones who had tied her in this position, and she would do anything, give anything, to keep from ever seeing them again.

      She was cold. They hadn’t even bothered to throw a blanket over her naked body, and long, convulsive shivers kept shaking her, though she couldn’t tell if she was chilled from the night air or from shock. She didn’t suppose it mattered. Cold was cold.

      She tried to think, tried to ignore the pain, tried not to give in to shock and terror. She didn’t know where she was, didn’t know how she could escape, but if the slightest opportunity presented itself, she would have to be ready to take it. She wouldn’t be able to escape tonight; her bonds were too tight, her movements too restricted. But tomorrow— Oh, God, tomorrow.

      Terror tightened her throat, almost choking off her breath. Tomorrow they would be back, and there would be another one with them, the one for whom they waited. A violent shiver racked her as she thought of their rough hands on her bare body, the pinches and slaps and crude probings, and her stomach heaved. She would have vomited, if there had been anything to vomit, but they hadn’t bothered to feed her.

      She couldn’t go through that again.

      Somehow, she had to get away.

      Desperately she fought down her panic. Her thoughts darted around like crazed squirrels as she tried to plan, to think of something, anything, that she could do to protect herself. But what could she do, lying there like a turkey all trussed up for Thanksgiving dinner?

      Humiliation burned through her. They hadn’t raped her, but they had done other things to her, things to shame and terrorize her and break her spirit. Tomorrow, when the leader arrived, she was sure her reprieve would be over. The threat of rape, and then the act of it, would shatter her and leave her malleable in their hands, desperate to do anything to avoid being violated again. At least that was what they planned, she thought. But she would be damned if she would go along with their plan.

      She had been in a fog of terror and shock since they had grabbed her and thrown her into a car, but as she lay there in the darkness, cold and miserable and achingly vulnerable in her nakedness, she felt as if the fog was lifting, or maybe it was being burned away. No one who knew Barrie would ever have described her as hot-tempered, but then, what she felt building in her now wasn’t as volatile and fleeting as mere temper. It was rage, as pure and forceful as lava forcing its way upward from the bowels of the earth until it exploded outward and swept away everything in its path.

      Nothing in her life had prepared her for these past hours. After her mother and brother had died, she had been pampered and protected as few children ever were. She had seen some—most, actually—of her schoolmates as they struggled with the misery of broken parental promises, of rare, stressful visits, of being ignored and shunted out of the way, but she hadn’t been like them. Her father adored her, and she knew it. He was intensely interested in her safety, her friends, her schoolwork. If he said he would call, then the call came exactly when he’d said it would. Every week had brought some small gift in the mail, inexpensive but thoughtful. She’d understood why he worried so much about her safety, why he wanted her to attend the exclusive girls’ school in Switzerland, with its cloistered security, rather than a public school, with its attendant hurly-burly.

      She was all he had left.

      He was all she had left, too. When she’d been a child, after the incident that had halved the family, she had clung fearfully to her father for months, dogging his footsteps when she could, weeping inconsolably when his work took him away from her. Eventually the dread that he, too, would disappear from her life had faded, but the pattern of overprotectiveness had been set.

      She was twenty-five now, a grown woman, and though in the past few years his protectiveness had begun to chafe, she had enjoyed the even tenor of her life too much to really protest. She liked her job at the embassy, so much that she was considering a full-time career in the foreign service. She enjoyed being her father’s hostess. She had the duties and protocol down cold, and there were more and more female ambassadors on the international scene. It was a moneyed and insular community, but by both temperament and pedigree she was suited to the task. She was calm, even serene, and blessed with a considerate and tactful nature.

      But now, lying naked and helpless on a cot, with bruises mottling her pale skin, the rage that consumed her was so deep and primal she felt as if it had altered something basic inside her, a sea change of her very nature. She would not endure what they—nameless, malevolent “they”—had planned for her. If they killed her, so be it. She was prepared for death; no matter what, she would not submit.

      The heavy curtains fluttered.

      The movement caught her eye, and she glanced at the window, but the action was automatic, without curiosity. She was already so cold that even a wind strong enough to move those heavy curtains couldn’t chill her more.

      The wind was black, and had a shape.

      Her breath stopped in her chest.

      Mutely, she watched the big black shape, as silent as a shadow, slip through the window. It couldn’t be human; people made some sound when they moved. Surely, in the total silence of the room, she would have been able to hear the whisper of the curtains as the fabric moved, or the faint, rhythmic sigh of breathing. A shoe scraping on the floor, the rustle of clothing, anything—if it was human.

      After the black shape had passed between them, the curtains didn’t fall back into the perfect alignment that had blocked the light; there was a small opening in them, a slit that allowed a shaft of moonlight, starlight, street light—whatever it was—to relieve the thick darkness. Barrie strained to focus on the dark shape, her eyes burning as she watched it move silently across the floor. She didn’t scream; whoever or whatever approached her, it couldn’t be worse than the only men likely to come to her rescue.

      Perhaps she was really asleep and this was only a dream. It certainly didn’t feel real. But nothing in the long, horrible hours since she had been kidnapped had felt real, and she was too cold to be asleep. No, this was real, all right.

      Noiselessly, the black shape glided to a halt beside the cot. It towered

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