Shadow of Betrayal

She felt around the walls, looking for a window. Maybe there was one that was covered. Or if she had gone blind, maybe it was filling the room with light she could not see. Either way, it was a possible route of escape. But there was no window. Nothing but solid wall.

And a door.

And a mattress.

She wanted to lie back down, curl up, and let the tears that were screaming to pour out stream down her face. But she couldn’t let herself, she just couldn’t.

Iris.

Iris needed her. God knows what they had done to the child. If anything happened to Iris, it would be Marion’s fault. There was no other way for her to spin it. Iris’s life was Marion’s to care for, Marion’s responsibility. That was what Frau Roslyn expected.

Marion worked her way back to the door and felt for the knob, her palms moving frantically over the surface where it should have been. But there was no knob. She moved her hand along the edges of the door. No hinges, either. It must open outward, she realized.

So she did the only thing she could. She began pounding on the door.

“Help!” she yelled. “Help!”

Maybe she had been abandoned somewhere. Perhaps no one knew she was there.

“Help!” she screamed again.

Light. Faint, and seeping around the edges of the door. One second it hadn’t been there, then the next it was, like someone had flipped a switch.

“Let me out! Please, anyone. Let me out!”

Something banged against the door from the other side, loud and sharp, shocking her into silence.

“Step back,” a muffled voice said. It was male, and not sympathetic.

She shuffled backward and almost tripped over the mattress.

There were several clicks along the right edge of the door, then the distinct sound of a latch opening. Light streamed into the room, stinging Marion’s eyes and forcing her to cover them with her hands.

She heard steps, more than she could count, enter the room and approach her. She blinked again and peeked between her fingers. The light coming from behind her visitors was still too bright to make out anything more than several silhouettes. Three? Four?

She never saw the hand that slapped her cheek. It rocked her to the left. Her foot caught on the mattress and she went down to her knees. One of her hands grazed the wall as she tried to stop her fall, but she only bruised her palm and scraped the flesh at the base of her thumb.

Someone reached down, grabbed her, and pulled her to her feet. She tried to cover her face with her hands, not wanting to be slapped again, but her hands were shoved away.

She could see them now. Three, not four. All men. The two nearest her were big and unsmiling and unfamiliar. But the one behind them she had no trouble recognizing. It was the man from the parking garage, the one who had taken her.

He stared at her for a moment, then looked at the man nearest him. “Let’s go,” he said.

The two larger men grabbed Marion by the arms and pulled her toward the door.

“What do you want with me?” she said, voice trembling. “What are you going to do?”

No one even looked at her.

“Where’s Iris?”

She’d aimed her words at the man from the parking garage, but he remained silent.

“Where is she?”

She tried to plant her feet just short of the doorway, not wanting to go anywhere with them until they answered her questions. But it took only a halfhearted shove from the guy on her left to keep her moving across the threshold and into a narrow hallway.

The corridor was only wide enough for one man to walk beside her, so one of the brutes moved behind her, while the garage man took the lead. There were two light fixtures hanging from the ceiling, metal reflectors with dome wire cages on the bottom. Above them several pipes ran the length of the hallway, covering most of the actual ceiling. As they walked, she kept being bumped into the wall. It was hard and cold like the door of her cell. Metal, she realized.

The garage man opened the door at the end of the hallway, then stepped through. Marion and her escort followed.

They were in another corridor, this one considerably wider. Its walls were also gray and made of metal. A ship? Maybe military? There was no sensation of movement, so if it was a ship, they didn’t appear to be out at sea. Only something wasn’t right.

The doorways, that was it. Don’t navy ships have those doors that sealed shut in case of an emergency? There were no such doors here. But if she wasn’t on a ship, then where was she?

A door ahead opened and two men dressed in military fatigues and armed with rifles stepped out. As Marion and her escort neared, the men moved to the side of the hall, and nodded at the garage man like he was someone important.

Farther down the corridor, another soldier appeared, then another behind him.

Marion could feel her hands and feet go cold.

Whatever hope of escape she’d been clinging to slipped away like it had never been there at all.

“Who have you told?” Mr. Rose asked again.