The soft click of a cell phone snapping shut. “Whatever it takes,” says the voice, flatly. Villiers curls against himself, palm flat on the mattress in front of him. “Doesn’t look like any permanent damage, but he’s been tortured.” A pause, then, “I haven’t checked.” “Alive,” he hears a smooth voice, from the other side of the room. “Let’s get started.”Īnd opens his eyes, squinting against the darkness of the room. Lines up the sights, and he’s not startled at all to see a white, crisp shirt in the path of the bullet, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, a face red with heat and exertion. The gun slips into his hand, and he hefts it, points it at the wall across from him. Villiers is surprised, vaguely, abstractly. He keeps his desk spotless, he always does, but right now there’s soda cans and candy wrappers and crumpled paper and phones, and –
Villiers searches through the detritus on the desk, though it’s unusually deep. And after page sixteen it skips to page twenty-seven… He flips through them, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven – the others are upside-down.
Better than being awake, some part of him mutters, and Villiers twists idly, half-aware of the sheets tangled around his waist, half caught up in a warped reality that he doesn’t want to leave.Ĭrisp sheets of paper flutter under his fingertips the pages, they’re out of order.
