Captive by A. J. Grainger

Author:A. J. Grainger [Grainger, A. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471122934
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

ELEVEN

The light bulb snaps on, spilling light as loud as a drum over me. I have been sleeping fitfully. I half sit up. For a second, I am in the hospital in Paris, stretched out under a blanket on the couch in the nurses’ station. It’s very early in the morning, and I’m refusing to go home. I will not leave Dad until I know he’s going to be okay. Until I know that he’s going to live . . .

I blink – and I’m back in my white box.

Talon is standing over me. ‘We’re going outside,’ he says.

My eyes flicker to the tiny window. Grey cobwebs of sky signal that it is early, very early. But who cares? I haven’t seen the sky in nine days. I am wide awake now and scrabbling out of bed.

‘You have to promise me you won’t run,’ Talon says.

Lying only takes a second. ‘I promise.’

The air is brittle and pierces my throat with every breath, but it is the most wonderful sensation ever. I am alive. I am breathing fresh air again. I don’t care that it is pre-dawn and freezing cold. I’m outside, with hard-packed earth below me and a sky as clear and white as fresh snow above me. It is something I never thought I’d do again.

Talon tied my hands behind my back, thankfully with a strip of fabric and not those horrible flexes. My wrists are still tender and bruised from them. After walking up the now familiar staircase from the basement into the kitchen, we headed down the corridor and out of the front door, which opens on to a gravel driveway that disappears into a fence of trees. I was reminded again how different everything might have been if I’d turned left instead of right all that time ago.

Now Talon leads me around the side of the house – a large, two-storey, white-stoned cottage, washed slate grey in the half-light. It is ugly and unkempt, with tiles missing from its roof. Grass and weeds push up between the stones of the tiny driveway, which is overhung on all sides by trees and hedges. Through a narrow gap between them I can just make out a road. The hedges continue around to the garden at the back of the house, beyond which are the beginnings of a wood. Bracken-covered paths weave through trees that are intricate black stencils against the lightening day.

No wonder no one has found me here. Why would anyone look in such a tiny, remote place?

We enter the wood. The first few trees are spread apart, but they quickly grow so closely together that there is barely any space between them. I try to listen for the sounds of cars that would suggest a road is nearby. There is nothing except for the odd tweet of the birds in the shrubbery around us and our own breathing.

‘Can you hear it? There’s a bird – a sparrow, I think. Up in the tree behind you.’

‘You said you couldn’t take me outside,’ I say.

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