Claimed in transit

Chapter Four: Cargo

He didn't remember deciding to close the trunk. One moment he was standing there, staring down at eyes that hadn't blinked once, and the next his hands had already lowered the lid, slow, careful, as though sudden movement might make the last minute stop being real.

It didn't work. Nothing about the last minute stopped being real.

Kane finished the tire change on autopilot, hands moving through a task they'd done a hundred times while his mind circled the same three facts over and over, refusing to arrange themselves into anything he could act on. There was a woman in his trunk. She was bound and gagged and clearly hadn't put herself there. He had three hours to deliver her to an address he'd been told not to ask questions about.

He got back into the driver's seat and sat with his hands on the wheel for longer than he should have, engine idling, the flat gray light of almost morning doing nothing to make any of this feel less like a decision he was already too far inside of to undo.

He thought about the men at the warehouse. He thought about what happened to drivers who opened cargo they weren't cleared to open, who asked questions that weren't theirs to ask, who decided halfway through a job that the job wasn't one they wanted anymore. He thought, distantly and without much comfort, about Dominic, about the version of tonight where he called someone, where this became a different kind of story with a different kind of ending, and dismissed it almost as fast as it arrived. He knew exactly how far his word would get against the men who ran cargo like this. He knew exactly what would happen to him, and likely to her, the moment anyone found out he'd broken the seal on a job that wasn't his to question.

So he drove.

He told himself it was the only choice, the only survivable one, and some cold, practical part of him even believed it. But he took the next exit instead of staying on the highway, and he didn't examine too closely why, and twenty minutes later he was pulling into the mostly empty lot of a diner that stayed open all night for truckers and men like him who kept hours nobody else wanted.

He didn't go inside. He sat in the car with the engine off, staring at the neon sign flickering red against the dark, and thought about the eyes he'd seen in the trunk, open, aware, fixed on him with something that wasn't quite pleading and wasn't quite anything Kane had a name for.

He went inside. Ordered food he didn't want, black coffee he drank without tasting, and on his way back to the car, stopped at the counter and bought a bottle of water and, after a pause he couldn't fully account for, a can of soda with a straw still sealed in its wrapper.

He didn't let himself think about why. He carried both back to the car like a man completing a task, not a man making a choice, though some part of him understood, even then, that those were no longer separate things.

He pulled around to the dark side of the lot, away from the diner's windows, cut the engine, and sat there for a full minute before he made himself get out.

The trunk opened slower this time. She hadn't moved, or hadn't been able to, but the eyes found him immediately, wide, tracking his every motion the way prey tracks the thing that might or might not be a threat. Kane crouched at the edge of the trunk, close enough now to see the tape wound tight across her mouth, the rope binding her wrists, the way her whole body had gone rigid at the sight of him, bracing for whatever came next.

"I'm not going to hurt you," he said, and heard how little that meant, coming from the man who'd shut the trunk on her not twenty minutes ago.

She didn't relax. He hadn't expected her to.

He found the edge of the tape near her cheek, and with more care than he'd used on anything in longer than he could remember, worked a small tear into it, just enough to open a gap above her lip. Her breathing came faster the moment her mouth was partially free, sharp through her nose, like she was fighting not to make a sound.

"Drink," he said, and held the straw to the gap, tipping the can just enough.

For a moment she didn't move at all, eyes locked on his, some calculation happening behind them that Kane couldn't read and didn't try to. Then, slowly, she leaned toward the straw and drank, small careful sips, never once looking away from his face, as though looking away might be the thing that let him become dangerous again.

He let her finish what she wanted, then pressed the tape back down, gently, over her mouth.

"We'll stop again," he said, not sure why he was telling her that, not sure what he expected it to change. "Before we get there."

She didn't answer, couldn't, but something in her eyes shifted, not trust, nothing close to trust, but the smallest possible fracture in the terror that had been there since he'd opened the trunk the first time.

Kane closed it again, got back into the driver's seat, and pulled out onto the highway with the taste of coffee gone bitter in his mouth and the growing, unwelcome understanding that he had just done something that couldn't be undone, and that whatever kind of man delivered cargo without asking questions, he wasn't entirely that man anymore.