The Problem with Peace (Greenstone Security 3)

Even though it hadn’t actually hit me that I was in this.

That I was in a dated, obviously cheap and thankfully clean hotel room, and chained to the bed. With a black eye. Well, I didn’t know for sure that it was actually black. It felt hot, it was throbbing, and the skin below and above my eye felt tight and swollen.

The back of my head was throbbing too, and it felt sticky and hot. From me cutting it as I hit the floor.

That was from Craig punching me in the face.

I’d told myself, I’d promised myself that he wouldn’t lay a hand on me again. But such things weren’t exactly within my control when he turned up at the door and said hello—and goodbye—with his fist.

I’d come home from Heath’s after deciding I couldn’t wait in that apartment for a second longer. Not like I did last time.

Last time I spent the whole day there, entertaining the fantasy that Heath didn’t get on a plane, he came back, picked me up and we spent a life together, on the run. From war. From peace.

Of course, my sister had called frantic that I’d been in some kind of “Vegan Coma”—her words— and I’d had to leave.

I couldn’t stay like last time, nurturing a hope that might get shattered. I forced myself to get an Uber home. I was still wearing Heath’s tee. I hadn’t showered. I smelled like him. Like us.

I’d answered the door smiling because I thought it was him.

But it wasn’t.

It was Craig. Smiling wickedly, coldly and then…nothing.

And I woke up here. Chained to a bed.

I wasn’t quite sure it was just the punch and the head wound that had knocked me out, because there was a heavy and blurry quality to my thoughts that hinted that I’d been injected with something.

Since drugs could knock me out for an hour or a day, I didn’t know how long I’d been here.

Though in addition to my throbbing eye, my arms screamed from their position above my head, my wrists felt raw from the rubbing of the cuffs, my bladder was uncomfortably full—to the point of bursting—and my stomach was painfully empty.

I would hazard a guess to say I’d been here for a while.

And I couldn’t even fathom that I was actually here. Sure, that break from reality probably had something to do with whatever chemicals were coursing through my system, but a lot of it was pure naive disbelief.

Because although violence and kidnapping were somewhat of a regular occurrence with my extended family, it was something that never happened in my life. My life was designed around peace. Chaos, too, but a peaceful kind of chaos. The chaos that had me deciding to camp in the desert with four friends for five days, not the kind of chaos that would get me chained to a bed with a bruised face.

And there was surprise that Craig would actually do this. I shouldn’t have been surprised, considering he had no qualms hitting me in the face when I was his wife, so it stood to reason that kidnapping me and hitting me in the face was not a problem now that I was his ex-wife.

But I was still surprised.

Because there was something off inside him, something broken.

But I had been under the impression that there was still something inside of him. Something that he’d shown me to make me fall in love with him, something human and vulnerable and something that somewhere along the way had been ruined and broken by someone else.

It wasn’t a thought process I was proud of. But I liked to believe the best in people. The world did enough for us as a society to expect the worst in everyone. Our very media was saturated with human brutality, with fathers killing children, women killing husbands, with senseless violence, genocide, war. It was so much so that it was our default to brace against the brutality of our race.

Because we were never shown the kindness. Never shown the woman who spent her time and money volunteering in children’s shelters after she’d lost her only child to cancer. The couple that had been together for fifty years and died within minutes of each other because they couldn’t stand to breathe in a world where the other didn’t exist.

Kindness didn’t sell newspapers.

Because people didn’t believe it. They were conditioned to expect, consume and crave violence on some level.

And I rebelled against that.

My entire life.

I was lucky I had a family that nurtured this belief, even if they didn’t completely agree with it.

I missed my family with an ache that was bone deep right now. I wondered how long I’d been gone. If they were worrying. If Lucy was worrying so much that it hurt the baby. I prayed no one had noticed I was gone, if only to save them from that.