Breathe...
She clenched her fists, then released them again, fingertips pressing against whatever it was that covered her head.
Leather. Felt like leather. Something thick, held together with stitches. Not a bag: amask.
Still couldn’t move her wrists.
Didn’t matter – one thing at a time.
Yeah, but it was quite a big bloody thing.
She jerked her hands to one side, then the other, then in opposite directions, and every time something dug into her neck. Like it was surrounded by a band of steel.
Sticking her right elbow in the air meant her fingertips could feel their way along the collar: metal, a good two-inches thick, with rings set into it, and a sort of handcuff thing around her left wrist to hold that in place. It was the same on the right.
Shackled.
Sweat trickled down her cheek.
Christ it was like a bloody oven in here.
Elbows down again, she traced the outline of her mouth, only it wasn’t her mouth it was a zip. With some sort ofthingattached to the pull tab, stopping it from moving. Something metal. Heart-shaped.
Like this was a fuckingjoke.
OK, further up...another pair of zips, one over each eye. Only these ones weren’t fixed shut. She pulled the right one open and light flooded the world.
Then the other.
Fuck.
Not sure if that made things better or worse.
Natasha blinked away the sticky gunk and squinted up at the wooden beams and grey corrugated roof above her head.
Bluebottles droned through the hot dead air.
It was some sort of tumbledown outbuilding, maybe a dozen foot square, built from chunks of stone, held together with crumbling mortar and smaller rocks. It had one of those heavy sliding doors, rust-streaked and hanging from a buckled metal rail. But it wasn’t much of a barrier, given the great-big hole in the wall next to it – some sort of partially collapsed window – that let the sun stream in.
Her eyes drifted down, across the scabs and scrapes and bruises that rampaged over her naked stomach and thighs.
The bastard had taken her dress, but at least he’d left the underwear. That was something, right?
Maybe.
All she had to do now was climb out through the hole, get the hell out of here, find help, get Detective Sergeant Dickhead Davis arrested, then arrange for someone to rape the bastard to death in the prison showers.
See how he fucking liked it.
Come on, Natasha: up.
She rolled over onto her side, shoving at the dirt floor with her elbows, getting both legs under her. Heaving herself upright. Which wasn’t bloody easy, with both arms out of action.
She only managed two steps towards the window before something grabbed her throat and jerked her to a stop.
That rattling, clanking noise rang out again.
Natasha turned.