Chapter Text
“Oh, what the fuck!” Darcy scrambled up from a mess of blankets on the floor and slapped both hands over her ears to block out the ear-shattering alarm filling the air. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” She stumbled around in the dark, tripping over shoes, laundry, her purse, and scattered books.
“Emergency protocol A7 has been activated. All non-essential personnel are to report to their secure posts immediately.” The robotic voice broke through the alarm and was followed by the glow of dim red auxiliary lighting.
Darcy hung on the handle of her bedroom door, hoping there would be more to the announcement, but was disappointed when the voice started to repeat on a loop over the still-sounding alarm. “Emergency protocol A7…”
“Yes, yes,” she muttered. “Report to secure posts.” For her, that meant the saferoom in basement sublevel 14C. It also meant the elevators would not be functioning for security reasons. AND there was a 50/50 chance she would get most of the way down there only for the all-clear to sound because it had all been a drill, to begin with. If it was a drill, it would be the fourth one in three months. If it wasn’t a drill, she’d probably die if she didn’t make it to the safe room. She’d probably die either way; it wasn’t like she was the fastest.
Speaking of, she’d been standing in the doorway to her bedroom thinking it through for at least a minute too long. She sighed to herself. A gazillion stairs at 2 am, it was. She padded out into the living room, glad she’d started sleeping in yoga pants after the second drill so she didn’t have to bother getting dressed on top of everything else. She snatched up her backpack from the kitchen table just in case she did make it to the saferoom and things got boring, slipped on her shoes, pulled open the door to her apartment, and stepped into —
Absolute chaos.
“Darcy-girl, down!” Clint’s voice rang out over the still-blaring alarm, and she dropped like a stone just in time for a bolt to whiz over her head and bury itself in the chest of a man in full combat gear coming through the stairwell door at the other end of the hall.
“Oh, what the ever-loving fuck!” she shouted, and Clint skidded to stop in front of her, his uniform only half done up. “Not a false alarm?” she asked wryly as he pulled her to her feet.
“Not even a little,” he agreed with a grimace. He was bleeding from a shallow cut on his temple and looked tired. “They blew up the helipad,” he shouted over the alarm. “We’re trying to clear them from the top down to get support staff a way to the panic rooms.” He was motioning with his hands as he talked, and she only caught every third word, but she nodded along, her heart rate picking up as understanding settled in.
They were under attack. Actually under attack.
“What do we—”
She was cut off as Clint yanked her to the side and fired another shot from his bow over her shoulder. Then, she was being pushed toward the stairwell at the other end of the hall. “Go, Darcy, go go, run! Any safe room!” He gave her a rough shove, and she stumbled away, looking back long enough to see him fire again, hitting another man in combat gear.
She could hear her heart in her ears as she raced for the stairs, breathing loud even over the alarm. She was two steps from the stairwell door when it was ripped open, and her scream cut off when she recognized Nat barrelling out, a gun in each hand. The Black Widow looked a little worse for wear, hair mussed and suit torn at the shoulder, but her face was calm, and she scanned Darcy from head to toe.
“East stairs are clear to the 12th floor, but then you’ll have to cut over to the south. Here,” Nat tugged a small gun from her waist and held it out, “take this, go.” Then she was moving away, leaving a stunned Darcy in her wake, holding the gun.
It was the sudden sound of gunfire that got her moving again. Shocking her into movement, she spun just in time to see Nat start firing on more men in black combat gear, pouring in from the opposite end of the hall. Clint, next to her, was firing bolt after bolt with his bow. Darcy didn’t wait to see what was going to happen next. She had orders from the Black Widow herself. She darted through the east stairwell door and started the long climb down.
She lived on the 20th floor with the other Avengers support staff, the Avengers lived on floors 21 to 25, the floors above were common areas, labs, and Tony’s private spaces. That meant she had eight floors to go before cutting to the south stairwell.
By the 18th floor, she was quietly panicking about leaving Clint and Nat to fend for themselves. By the 16th, she was becoming increasingly worried about not having seen anyone else evacuating. On the 15th-floor landing, she found blood smeared across one wall and the doorjamb. Just before the 14th-floor landing, there was a deep shuddering boom that shook the entire building, and the alarm cut out, then, so did the red auxiliary lights.
She froze, her hand clutching the railing. Her breath was loud in the sudden silence. It was pitch black in the stairwell as she waited, counting silently in her head to try and calm herself enough to move. “Just one foot in front of the other. Two more floors, then over to the south.” She tucked the gun Nat had given her into the waistband of her yoga pants and reached back to dig her phone out of the side pocket of her backpack, using the flashlight to illuminate a narrow space in front of her. The sound of more gunfire came from above, and she started to move.
The 14th-floor landing had more blood; she didn’t shine her light around to try and discover a source. The 12th-floor landing arrived almost too soon, and she forced herself to only take three deep breaths before she carefully eased the door open. With no more need to hold onto the stair railing, she pulled the gun from her waistband and held it in her free hand, keeping the still-illuminated phone low to prevent being too much of a target.
The 12th floor was mostly unoccupied office space. It used to be rented to on-site SHIELD coordinators but had gone empty in the year since the whole SHIELD is Hydra reveal in DC. Once she was away from the stairs, she turned off the phone light, the big plate-glass windows letting in enough night-time city light to see the outline of cubicles and offices in the open floorplan. The eerie silence was broken by the occasional distant explosion and the now almost constant sound of gunfire coming from other floors. This was clearly an all-out assault on the tower. Thank god Jane was off-site with Thor. She darted down cubicle aisles, keeping low for cover. She was almost to the south stairwell when there was a blast right outside the windows, level with her floor, that lit up the entire space.
She crouched beside a rolling chair and watched in awe as Iron Man shot repulsor blasts at a hovering aircraft. Tony dodged, the whine of his suit audible even through the thick glass of the building, and the small aircraft kept pace with him, firing shot after shot. She gasped as a particularly close blast almost took him out, but then she was diving for cover as a massive blur of green and purple fell from the sky. The Hulk landed on the enemy aircraft just as Iron Man went in for the attack, and all three were suddenly careening toward the fragile windows that were the only barrier between her and safety.
She was up and running, throwing herself the last three feet through the south stairwell door so hard she missed the first few steps and went down, landing in a heap halfway down the flight. It still wasn’t far enough. She heard the Hulk’s yell of rage, the power up of a repulsor, and she was scrambling on bruised hands and knees down more stairs and then more and more. Half running, half falling, until the heat of the explosion washed over her, she dropped with a scream, cowering as the boom followed.
“I dropped the gun.” It was the dumbest possible thing to be worried about, considering she’d just avoided being blown up by the Hulk and Iron Man and had half fallen down three flights of stairs, but that didn’t make it any less of a problem. She carefully lifted her head from her crouched position in the corner of the landing, turned on the phone light, and looked up to find the way back to the upper floors blocked by debris. So, going back was not an option. “Nat’s going to be pissed,” she muttered to herself.
She used the nearest railing to pull herself back to standing and took stock. She was definitely bruised but could still walk, even run if she had to. She still had her backpack and phone. The gun was gone. She was on the 9th floor. Technically, she was supposed to go all the way to basement level 14, but that was starting to feel like a pipe dream. Getting to the ground floor and finding a way onto the street seemed the better option. Nat only gave her instructions to 12, but she looked back to the debris blocking her way up; it wasn’t like there was anywhere to go but down.
So down she went. Down and down. She blocked out the continued booming explosions that sounded every few minutes and tried not to think about how every new one seemed to shake the building more than the last. She was on the 3rd-floor landing and starting to feel more optimistic about her chances of actually making it to the street, although increasingly concerned about her friends, when the door to the 3rd floor flew open, and two men tumbled through, followed by the sound of active combat.
Her scream of surprise was cut off by a hand over her mouth as one of the men pinned her to the wall with inhuman strength. “Darcy, it’s me. It’s me. It’s Steve.”
Steve Rogers kitted out in full gear, ripped the hood off his head and slowly pulled his hand down from her mouth. The dark-haired man at his back kept a gun trained on the door to 3rd floor and his eyes on them. “Steve? What the fuck? What?” She was shaking as she tried to grip his forearms around her phone; her backpack pressed uncomfortably between her and the wall. “Put me down.”
“Right.” Steve set her on her feet instantly. “Are you okay? Why aren’t you in a saferoom?”
“I’m trying! I ran into some trouble on my floor and 12 and, well, everywhere.” She trailed off, trying not to let her eyes linger on the unfamiliar man, still training a weapon on the door.
“You need to get out of here.” As if to emphasize Steve’s point, another explosion sounded, and the building shook ominously around them, dust raining down from the ceiling.
“Are the basement saferooms even safe anymore?” The stairwell shook again, and Steve grimaced. The gunfire behind the door sounded closer.
“Need to move.” The mystery man grunted, and Steve spared him a glance. There was a shout from beyond the door, and then the comm on Steve’s shoulder crackled and buzzed. Steve’s face went pale and then stern.
“What? What is it?” She could feel a new wave of panic rising. “I saw Tony and Bruce fighting up on 12, but they’ve been through worse. Nat and Clint were on 20, but they —”
“Move!” Steve’s shout was the only warning before her feet weren’t on the floor anymore. Instead, she was practically carried down the next flight of stairs, both men pounding along beside her. She clung to Steve’s arm, trying to keep up as her toes barely touched the floor, and they took the turns at a breakneck pace. Then the gunshots were closer, too close.
She screamed as they rounded a turn on the 2nd floor, and the mystery man stopped to fire up into the stairwell behind them. Steve kept pushing her along in front of him. There was shouting at their backs, loud and in a language she couldn’t understand. Another boom shook the tower, and suddenly, they were on the ground floor, pouring out of the stairwell into the back entrance of the lobby just in time to see the Hulk burst through the large glass doors at the front with a roar, a dozen men in black firing at him with massive guns.
She screamed again and dropped into a crouch, aware of Steve’s bulk hovering over her. The deafening sound of semi-automatic gunfire rattled over everything as Steve’s mystery friend used his own massive gun to return fire. There was another boom, and Steve was pushing her to take cover as he stood to throw his shield, and then more men in all black were pouring into the destroyed lobby entrance. There was a shout, and an arrow took out an enemy, followed by more gunfire, then Steve was back, dragging the mystery man behind him.
“You can’t be here, Buck!” He was yelling over the sounds of the raging fight. “She can’t either.”
“This team is not prepared to win this fight a man down.” The mystery man said before turning to shoot a man about to stab Clint. Her eyes widened. He’d barely aimed.
Steve’s mouth thinned into a grim line, “Mission parameters.”
“Member of the Avengers. Follow Captain Roger’s orders.” The mystery man recited back robotically.
“New mission parameters: Keep Darcy safe. Follow her,” Steve said, and then he turned to her, “Darcy, take Bucky and get out of here. Get to Jane and Thor. Don’t come back until you hear from us. Let him keep you safe. Don’t —” Steve was interrupted as the Hulk shrieked in pain, and a fireball lit up the room, the entire south side of the glass lobby shattering. She suddenly found herself under the weight of the mystery man as he lunged to put himself between her and the wall of flying glass and debris that filled the room. “GO!” Steve roared.
And then they were up. It was a repeat of the stairwell. Her feet barely touched the floor as the man, Bucky, half carried her through what used to be a door at the back of the lobby, down an extended access corridor, and deeper into the bowels of the building. They exploded out a back door into Tony’s private parking garage, and she bent over double, hands braced on her knees, trying to catch her breath. The panic that had been a constant since she’d been pulled from sleep no more than thirty minutes before was starting to overwhelm everything else. She had a feeling she was starting to legitimately go into shock, but that wasn’t really an option.
“We must move.” His voice was hard, and she glared at him. He was already holding a set of keys and standing by a car. “You need to drive.” He held the keys out.
She darted across the room and snatched the keys, sliding into the driver’s seat as another rumble shook the building. “You can’t drive?” she asked as he climbed into the passenger seat, and she chucked her backpack into the back seat.
“I would prefer to be free to shoot things if needed,” he said simply, and then he was leaning out the window with one of his big guns.
“Wait, there’s a —” She was interrupted when he fired, and she let out a cut off yelp as the grenade he launched took out a car-sized chunk of wall directly in front of their SUV.
As the smoke cleared, he slid back into his seat, looking over as though waiting for her to thank him for the assist. She flexed her hands on the wheel, took a deep breath, reached up, and pressed the garage open button built into the rearview mirror, waiting patiently as the door opened immediately to the left of the newly made grenade hole.
She cut her eyes over to him, and he shrugged. “Drive,” he said.
“Don’t fucking test me, mystery man. It’s been a bad night,” she snapped.
It was smart to leave through Tony’s private garage; it opened a block away from the tower, so while they weren’t out of the woods, they also weren’t trying to drive directly through the worst of the combat zone. Still, the city was alive with activity, emergency responders racing past them toward the Tower, and alarms blaring. They were six blocks away, and she could see the top of the Tower in the rearview mirror, flames pouring from the roof, glass sheet windows dropping from high floors.
“Take a left.” She followed the order without thought. She was barely watching the road, eyes on the flaming building behind them. Another fireball shot out of what had to be one of the higher lab floors. “Right.” She turned, and did it look like the building was leaning? She’d hardly seen anyone on those stairs on her way down. How could anyone else have made it to the basement levels? It wasn’t like the tower had a lot of residents full-time. Only trusted staff, but that was still close to a hundred people, plus the Avengers. Not to mention morning workers and anyone in the labs overnight. “Left.”
But she didn’t take the turn. She slammed on the brakes, barely remembering to put the car in park before she was out of her seat, stumbling out her door and tripping into the middle of the road. “No--" She gasped; she couldn’t feel her legs. She couldn’t feel. A thick arm was banded around her middle, supporting all her weight.
It didn’t matter; she couldn’t take her eyes off the spot in the New York City skyline where Stark Tower used to be.
“We have to go back. We have to go back.” She struggled against his hold, slamming her fist into his arm, but it was like hitting steel. “Put me down; we have to go. We have to go back. We have to.”
“The mission is to keep Darcy safe and follow her,” he recited Steve’s last orders mechanically, and she shrieked, struggling against his hold until he lifted her off her feet entirely, holding her smaller frame against his chest.
“Fine! Follow Darcy back to the Tower! Follow me back!” she screamed, but he carried her back to the car like she was nothing.
“That would violate the first order. The Tower would not be safe.” He ripped open the passenger door and deposited her in the seat. “Stay.”
She waited for him to close the door and start toward the driver’s side before she tore the door open and made a break for it. She wasn’t going to stay here with Steve’s crazy friend when her friends, Clint, Nat, Tony, Steve, and Bruce, could all be dead or dying in the rubble. All her coworkers. Everyone she lived with and loved for the last three years was dying in fire and violence while she was running away with a mystery robo-soldier.
She ran hard, pumping her arms and pushing her already strained body to its limits, but she was no match for her new bodyguard. She made it an embarrassing 20 feet past the back of the SUV before he caught her with another arm around her middle. Scooping her up like she weighed almost nothing and slinging her over his shoulder to carry her back to the car. This time, he opened the back passenger door and dropped her across the bench seat like luggage before reaching into one of his many pockets to pull out a set of zip ties.
“Don’t you fucking dare!” she shouted. “Don’t you fucking dare! Don’t you care? Don’t you care that they might be dead?” She kicked at him, but he grabbed her ankles and held her still until he caught her wrists in the zip ties and tightened them down. “Let me go.”
He stopped and considered her for a moment, “What is your plan?”
“We have to go help them.”
“Then no. That’s not safe. We will acquire a safe house to regroup.” He paused again and then nodded to himself.
“Don’t you dare leave me back here! I will—” He closed the door, and she screamed in frustration. “I hate you,” she said when he climbed back in the driver’s seat a few seconds later.
He shrugged, turned the key, and started to drive.
—
Darcy lay in the backseat of the SUV, hands zip-tied together, panting, glaring at the back of Bucky’s head, silently plotting as he drove them out of the city. The sky slowly lightened as dawn broke, and the sun started to peek through the passenger side windows. She rolled over onto her back and stared at the roof of the car, watching the play of early morning light on the headliner.
The tower was gone.
One second, she’d been watching it burn in the rearview mirror, and the next — it was just collapsing in on itself. The top floors caving down, leaving a gaping hole where they should have been in the skyline. That was her home. Her apartment was on those top floors. The N64 with proof she could beat Clint at Mario Kart was up there—all of her and Jane’s research. She took a shuddering breath.
Everyone — the Avengers — her friends; they’d all been in the lobby the last time she’d seen them. All of them now at the bottom of countless tons of steel and cement. She sucked in another breath, but her chest felt tight. Tears were leaking from her eyes down into her hair. Could any of them have made it out alive? They were the Avengers; they’d been through worse. Bruce, for sure, and Tony if he was in the suit. He’d had a whole house dropped on him once. Clint and Nat were survivors, right?
She rolled back onto her side. Bucky was still driving, staring blankly out of the windshield. He was another mystery. She knew Steve and the team had been searching for something important for the last few months. They’d been going out on covert missions and keeping very hush-hush about what they were after. She’d picked up hints here or there that it had something to do with the events in DC last year but not much else. Then, two weeks ago, the tower had been a hive of activity, and her badge had stopped working on the upper floors. Clint told her he was going to look into it and not to worry.
Now she narrowed her eyes at the man driving in suspicion. Without all the anxiety of a firefight, he was starting to look very familiar for all the wrong reasons. The dark, shaggy hair. The straight nose. The scruff covering a strong jaw. She lifted her bound hands and covered the bottom half of his face, trying to imagine dark paint smeared around his eyes - and gasped.
“You’re the Winter Soldier.”
“Yes,” he replied instantly and without concern. “But you can call me Bucky. Steve Rogers does.”
“Oh, what the fuck,” she groaned and ignored her protesting muscles to roll into a seated position. “You’re the mother fucking Winter Soldier. You blew up the Triskelion and tried to kill Steve!”
“Yes, but now I am on the team,” he said, calmly changing lanes to pass a slow Prius.
“You work for Hydra!”
“I am a member of the Avengers. I report to Steve Rogers; I keep Darcy safe and follow her.” He repeated the orders robotically, and she shrieked, kicking at the back of his seat with both feet in violent frustration.
“Stop.” Kick. “Saying.” Kick. “The.” Kick. “Same.” Kick. “Useless.” Kick. “Nonsense.” Kick.
“Yes.”
She let out another strangled shout and collapsed back against the bench seat, panting. What the absolute fuck was going on? Why would Steve have passed her off to the Winter Soldier? Why would the Winter Soldier know Steve? Why was any of this happening?
“If you follow me, then I order you to untie me and take me back to New York.” She held her breath.
“No.”
Why not?”
“It’s not safe.”
“To untie me or take me back to New York?”
There was a long pause.”
“Both.”
“You’re an asshole.”
She leaned back into the seat and contemplated the back of his head. This would obviously take a different approach to get the desired result. He was the Winter Soldier. He had a mission. What was it Steve had said in the lobby of the tower? She wracked her brain for the adrenaline-logged details.
“State mission?”
Silence.
“Mission objective?”
Nothing.
“Oh, oh! Mission Parameters.”
His shoulders went tense, and the steering wheel gave an ominous groan, almost like he was fighting it. She raised an eyebrow but then, “Member of the Avengers. Follow Captain Roger’s Orders. Last orders: Keep Darcy safe. Follow Darcy.”
“Follow Darcy; that’s pretty vague, don’t you think?”
“No.”
“Well, where are you following me to?” The silence that followed the question was deafening. “And what does keep me safe mean?”
“It means to keep you safe from harm. Alive and whole.” He seemed relieved to have been asked a question he could easily answer.
“Okay, so leaving me tied up in the backseat of a car, not wearing a seatbelt, while doing 80mph down a highway. Does that seem safe to you? Because I’d like to point out that I am not a super soldier, and if someone were to cut us off and I went through that windshield, I’d be dead meat.”
The curse word he muttered was 100% not English, and she had to brace herself with both feet on the back of his seat as he swerved wildly onto the shoulder of the highway, bringing the SUV to an immediate stop. He turned to glare at her through a curtain of shaggy hair, and she was ashamed she hadn’t realized who he was immediately. The resemblance to the man who threw a truck at Steve on the 6 o’clock news last year was uncanny. She supposed she’d had other things on her mind.
“Are you ready to actually follow orders and go back to New York?” She asked.
He arched a brow, and she had a feeling she would not like where this was going.
Ten minutes, two escape attempts, and one shouting match later found her safely buckled into the front seat with both her hands and feet carefully zip tied. Her protests about cutting off circulation to important extremities had resulted in several facts about how long she could remain restrained without permanent damage and a promise to regularly check the pulse in her fingers and ankles. She glared at the side of his face.
“This still doesn’t answer my question about how you’re following me if you won’t let me give you orders,” she snapped after they’d merged back into traffic.
“You have yet to issue an order that wouldn’t almost certainly result in your death,” he replied calmly as he carefully moved them into the middle lane.
She opened her mouth and then snapped it shut. She’d been going about this brute force, probably because she was operating on about four hours of sleep and a fuck-ton of adrenaline, but that’s not what this situation needed. Obviously, she was dealing with someone who wasn’t all there. The Winter Soldier, or Bucky as Steve called him, was still a huge question mark in this entire situation, and he was functioning with a logic outside the complex rational human thought of an average person. The more they interacted, the more it sounded like — programming.
Almost like Asimov’s laws of robotics, where no order could conflict with one that came before it. So he could follow her, but only until it conflicted with keeping her safe, which meant he would follow her and her orders until they risked putting her in danger. It also potentially meant he would neither follow her nor keep her safe the second a higher-level order from Steve or the team that she was unaware of popped up, but that felt a lot like a future Darcy problem. She cut her eyes over to examine his profile. The easiest way to test this new hypothesis was to give him an order that put her in absolutely zero danger.
“Turn on the radio.”
He didn’t even take his eyes off the road; he just reached out with one hand to hit the on button and adjusted the volume dial until the SUV filled with audible soft rock. She bit down hard on her lip to contain her reaction. It was so automatic. It hadn’t even looked like it was a conscious thing. It made her stomach turn over, and even after everything that had happened in the last four hours, this was what had her tasting bile in the back of her throat.
“Change the station.”
He did.
“Turn it up.”
He did.
“Find a country song.”
He did.
“Put it on AM.”
He did.
“Turn it off.”
He did.
“Touch your nose.”
He did.
“Stop.”
He did.
He didn’t react to any of it. Just kept driving. She turned to stare out the passenger window and tried not to let the situation overwhelm her. What the fuck had Steve gotten her into? This wasn’t a soldier in combat mode. This was something more. Something so much worse. What did it take to make a person like this? What else was there to the situation that she didn’t yet understand?
She took a deep breath through her nose and let it out through her mouth. So she was on the road with the former (?) Winter Soldier, who currently went by Bucky and was possibly a new(ish) member of the Avengers. The Avengers, who had been attacked the night before by an unknown enemy and, were probably all dead. Her home was gone. She had her backpack, her phone (if it hadn’t been destroyed in the lobby somehow), a little cash, dying orders from Captain America himself to go to Jane, and no other plans. She had no idea how much danger they were still in or if they were going to be followed. She looked back to Bucky — the Winter Soldier — no, he said she could call him Bucky.
“Bucky, where are you driving us?”
“I have been making increasingly larger loops around the city as an evasive maneuver while you determine our destination,” he said calmly, and she felt her heart rate pick up. So, despite being in zip ties, she really was the one in charge here. That was — troubling.
“Before,” she started hesitantly, “in the city, you said we needed to acquire a safe house to regroup. Do you know how to do that?”
“Yes.”
“Can you acquire us a safe house so we can regroup, please?” The familiar-sounding order seemed to give him purpose because his shoulders squared up almost instantly.
“Yes. Do we require any tactical defenses?”
“Uhhh?” Her eyes darted around the SUV as though an answer would materialize. “I trust you to know what we’ll need?” She tried out, “We want somewhere we can be safe for the night. With, uh, beds! And, umm, food. And I’d like access to the internet.”
His forehead scrunched up a bit, but he nodded. “Understood. It will take four hours to reach the nearest location that meets those specifications and is known to be secure and off-grid.”
“Oookay?” She’d assumed he would find a hotel, but it sounded like he was operating off of some kind of internal database. God, she hoped he wasn’t about to take her to some known Hydra hangout. “Good. Could you untie me so I could look some things up on my phone on the way?”
It was a repeat of the seatbelt comment with the swerving and the braking as the SUV skidded to a stop on the shoulder yet again. “You have a phone?”
“No?”
He was already reaching into the backseat for her backpack, pulling it into his lap. She struggled against the zip ties as he found her phone in the side pocket and held it up, tapping on the screen to light it up. She felt her shoulders slump when she saw the screen devoid of any notifications. She’d been holding on to a slim hope that she’d find a text from Clint letting her know everyone was okay.
“This can be tracked,” Bucky said before he crushed it in his gloved left hand. She yelped in surprise, lunging for it with her bound hands even though it was useless.
“I needed that!”
“We can acquire a new one.”
“I needed things on that one.”
“I have to keep you—”
“Safe. Yes, I know. I know,” she moaned and dropped her head back against the seat’s headrest. “I know.” He rolled down the window and threw the remains of the phone out onto the road.
“Do you have other tracking devices?”
She thought of the laptop nestled inside the backpack and shook her head no. He narrowed his eyes at her and tugged open the zipper anyway.
“Does this have cellular access?” He was holding up her sleek Stark laptop, and she sighed.
“No, but it does connect to wifi. Look, I know what I’m doing with tech. No one is tracking that computer unless I want them to.” She met his eyes, “I promise.” He slid it back into her bag and dropped it in the backseat. “Will you just untie me now? I’ve barely slept, I haven’t eaten, and I just need to rest. I can’t —” Her voice broke, and she ducked her head, embarrassed. “It’s just been a bad day, okay. Untie me; I’m not going to try to do anything unsafe.”
Those seemed to be the magic words because he produced a giant knife from nowhere and instantly cut the zip ties. She pushed herself as far into the passenger door as she could, bracing against the curved paneling, and reclined the seat as far as it would go.
“Wake me up when we get there or if something explodes,” she ordered.
“Yes.”
Her last hysterical thought before she fell asleep was that he probably thought she meant that literally, and even more hysterically, she kind of did.