Chapter 229: Chapter 230: Aria Tried To Escape
ARIA’S POV
The zip tie snapped.
The sensation was immediate and overwhelming....blood rushing back into her hands with the specific burning agony of circulation returning to compressed tissue. Her fingers screamed. Her shoulders, released from the sustained strain of having her arms wrenched behind her, protested the sudden freedom with a deep, grinding ache that made her eyes water.
She had approximately three seconds before Harold registered the change.
She used them.
Her ankles were still bound but the debris fragment she’d been working her foot toward for the last twenty minutes had created enough of a nick in the plastic that when she twisted her legs sharply and simultaneously....the movement costing her a flash of white pain as the plastic bit before it gave the tie snapped at the weakened point.
She was on her feet before Harold turned around.
He turned because he heard her, the sound of the snap, the sound of her scrambling upright, the sound of someone who had been sitting still for ninety minutes suddenly moving with desperate, urgent speed.
Their eyes met across eight feet of concrete floor.
For one suspended second neither of them moved.
Then she ran.
Not toward the southeast door....too far, too exposed, he’d be on her before she covered half the distance. The secondary door behind the shelving was closer. Fifteen feet. Maybe twelve. She covered six of them before she heard him move.
She was fast. She’d always been fast....lean and long-legged, built for the kind of speed that came from a decade of running because running had been the only gym membership she could afford through medical school.
Harold was faster than she’d calculated.
Not because he was athletic.....he wasn’t, she could see that. But because he was closer to the shelving than she’d realized, had shifted position while she wasn’t tracking him, and when she feinted left toward the door he was already cutting off the angle.
She pivoted. Tried to go around him.
His hand caught her arm.
She wrenched free, medical school hadn’t come with self-defense training but the years of being a woman navigating the world alone had given her a working knowledge of how to break a grip....twisted her wrist down and outward, felt his fingers lose purchase, kept moving....
The blow came from her right side where she wasn’t looking.
Not his hand. Something else....harder, heavier, connecting with the back of her head with a force that turned the world instantly white and then instantly black and then into something in between that was neither vision nor blindness but a horrible nauseating intermediate where nothing worked properly.
Her legs stopped functioning first them the floor came up.
She was aware of it only distantly.....the impact of her knees hitting concrete, then her palms, then the side of her face against the cold floor. Each impact registered as sensation without fully processing as pain because her brain was doing something else, something scrambled and urgent and not quite keeping up with events.
’’Get up’’, she told herself. ’’Get up get up get up’’
Her arms pushed. Her body responded partially....she got her upper body off the floor, got her elbows under her, got far enough that she could see the room tilting sideways in a way rooms weren’t supposed to tilt.
Harold’s hands closed around her upper arms from behind.
He dragged her back. He dragged her across the concrete floor and she was fighting....she was still fighting, her heels trying to find something to push, her hands trying to find something to grip....but the blow to her head had taken something essential out of her body’s ability to coordinate itself and the fighting was more instinct than function.
He got her back to the chair and pushed her into it.
She was still trying to get up when he retied her wrists.....different this time, rope rather than zip ties, wound multiple times with the grim efficiency of someone who had learned from his miscalculation. Her ankles. Her waist, a loop around the chair back and he made sure it was tight.
Then he stepped back.
She could feel the back of her head....a deep, specific throbbing that pulsed with her heartbeat, her vision still swimming at the edges. She pressed her bound hands against the chair back and focused on breathing. On staying conscious. On keeping her eyes open despite the way the light felt like something sharp.
Concussion, the clinical part of her mind noted distantly. Mild to moderate. Stay awake. Keep your eyes open. Don’t let yourself go under.
Harold was breathing hard. For the first time since she’d woken up in this space, his composure was genuinely gone....she could see it in the way he moved, the way his hands weren’t entirely steady as he reached for his phone, the way his jaw was set with the specific tension of someone suppressing something they didn’t want visible on camera.
He looked at her for a long moment.
"That," he said quietly, "was a mistake."
She said nothing. She was focused on staying upright, on keeping her breathing even, on not letting him see how badly the blow had landed.
She failed at the last one.
He could see it....she watched him register her state, watched something move across his face that was complicated and dark and not entirely composed of the cold calculation she’d been managing throughout. There was anger in it. Real anger, the kind that came from being embarrassed, from almost losing control of a situation he’d invested everything in controlling.
He raised his phone.
Opened the camera.
"Look at me," he said.
She looked at him. Kept her chin level. Kept her eyes steady despite the way the room was still moving gently at its edges.
He recorded for thirty seconds. Just her face....her swollen, clearly pained, clearly injured face, against the backdrop of the chair and the rope and the warehouse.
Then he lowered the phone and sent it.
"Now," Harold said quietly, pulling his chair close and sitting down directly in front of her, "we’re done with the conversation portion of the evening."
