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“Who’s coming?”

“Four men who know how to find people no one else can.”

“Police?”

“Better.”

I turn my back toward the girls.

“I need someone with small fingers to reach between my wrists.”

The youngest girl kneels behind me.

“There’s a thin place in the plastic,” I tell her. “Pull it as hard as you can.”

She grips the damaged restraint.

I brace myself.

“Again.”

She pulls.

The plastic cuts deeper into my skin.

“Again.”

It snaps.

My hands fall apart.

The girls stare at me.

I rub the feeling back into my fingers and crawl toward the narrow window in the door. Two guards stand at the end of the corridor.

The dark-haired girl joins me.

“What are you going to do?”

“Get all of you out.”

“There are men everywhere.”

“I know.”

“They have guns.”

“I know that too.”

“You really think those four men will come?”

One man.

Sean was nineteen the last time I saw him.

He held me beneath the oak tree and promised nothing would ever keep us apart. I believed him until my parents locked me away and told me he had left without looking back.

I spent eighteen years trying to convince myself I no longer needed him.