Claimed in transit

Chapter Five: The Rope

She started shifting in the trunk about forty minutes past the diner, small movements at first, easy to mistake for discomfort, for the ache of a body held too long in one position. Kane noticed anyway. He noticed everything now, some part of him tuned to the trunk the way a man listens for a sound he's afraid of hearing again.

By the time the movements turned into something more deliberate, a rhythmic shifting, a muffled sound pushing against the tape that wasn't pain exactly but wasn't nothing either, Kane understood what she needed before he let himself fully admit it.

He pulled off at the next stretch of road with enough tree cover to count as private, some forgotten turnoff that led nowhere anyone would be looking, and cut the engine.

The trunk again. Her eyes found him immediately, the way they always did now, and this time there was something more urgent behind them, a kind of desperate embarrassment that made Kane's chest tighten in a way he didn't examine too closely.

He peeled the tape back enough for her to speak.

"I need," she started, voice raw and cracked from disuse, and stopped, color rising in her face even through the fear. "Please. I need to use the bathroom."

Kane looked at her for a long moment. There was no bathroom out here, nothing but trees and dark and the distant hush of highway traffic. There was also no version of this where he simply let her walk off into the woods alone, not when his entire job depended on delivering her intact, not when some colder part of him, one he didn't like acknowledging, understood exactly how easily a moment like this could become the moment she ran.

He found rope in the trunk's side compartment, kept for cargo straps, and didn't let himself think too hard about what he was about to do with it.

"I'm going to let you out," he said. "But I'm keeping hold of this." He held up the rope. "You understand?"

She nodded, quick, desperate, past the point of caring what indignity came attached to relief.

He cut the tape from her wrists, kept the rope looped loose but firm around her neck like a leash, and helped her out of the trunk. Her legs buckled the moment they took her weight, hours folded into that small space leaving her unsteady, and Kane caught her elbow before she went down, an automatic reflex he regretted the second her whole body flinched away from the contact.

"There," he said, nodding toward a thicket a short distance off. "That's as much privacy as I can give you."

He walked her there, rope held loose in his hand, and turned his back when she asked him to, staring out at the dark tree line, uncomfortable in a way that had nothing to do with the cold.

He felt the rope go slack before he understood why.

He spun in time to see her already ten feet away, sprinting through the trees with a speed that shouldn't have been possible from someone who could barely stand a minute ago, the rope trailing loose and abandoned in the leaves where she'd worked it free.

Kane swore and ran.

He was faster. He'd always been faster, trained for exactly this kind of pursuit in a life he no longer talked about, and he closed the gap through the dark trees with a grim, focused speed that had nothing left in it of the man who'd bought her a soda an hour ago. She was fast, fueled by pure terror, but terror could only carry a body so far, and he caught her at the edge of a shallow ditch, one hand closing around her arm, and they went down together into the wet grass, her fighting him with everything she had left, which by then was not much at all.

"Stop," he said, holding her down with more restraint than force, careful even now, even furious, not to hurt her. "Stop, I'm not going to hurt you."

"You're taking me to be killed," she gasped, the first full sentence she'd managed since the trunk, raw and broken and true enough that Kane had no answer for it. "You know that, don't you? You know what happens to people like me."

He didn't answer. He didn't have an answer that wasn't a lie.

"Please," she said, and the fight had gone out of her now, leaving something worse in its place, a kind of hollow, exhausted pleading. "Please, just let me go. I won't tell anyone. I'll disappear, I'll never come back, just let me—"

"I can't," Kane said, and hated how true it was. "I can't do that."

She stared up at him from the wet grass, eyes full of a hatred that had fear tangled all through it, and Kane looked back at her and understood, with a certainty that settled somewhere he couldn't easily reach, that whatever he told himself about surviving this job clean, some part of him would carry the look on her face for a long time after tonight was over.

He got her to her feet, retied the rope, gentler this time, and walked her back to the car in silence, and neither of them spoke again for the rest of the drive.