When I went back inside, the stove was still burning low.
My backpack was where they’d left it.
That was their first real mistake.
I crouched to check it and found everything intact.
Before I could straighten up, I heard the door behind me open.
I turned.
The bearded man stood there aiming a crude hunting shotgun straight at my chest.
His face was red with rage, but underneath that I saw it clearly for the first time.
Fear.
“You hurt my brothers,” he said. “Who the hell are you?”
I smiled faintly.
“Just a helpless girl you planned to sell for a good price.”
He spat on the floor.
“I don’t care who you are. You think you can beat a gun?”
Instead of backing away, I stepped closer.
That unsettled him.
So I stepped closer again.
I had been stared down by professionals with military-grade weapons. A homemade mountain shotgun didn’t impress me.
What mattered was the barrel.
What mattered was moisture.
A few minutes earlier, while checking my bag, I had already slipped out an emergency glucose pouch, sliced it, and palmed the liquid.
Now, as he threatened me, I let my hand hover near the muzzle long enough to make him focus on the wrong thing.
He thought I was bluffing.
He thought I was crazy enough to try and block the barrel with my finger.
I wasn’t.
But while he ranted, that liquid had already done its job.
He snarled, finger tightening on the trigger.
“Then die.”
The shot exploded.
But not the way he expected.
The gun burst in his hands with a sharp, ugly crack.
He screamed and dropped it.
I moved before the echo finished bouncing off the walls.
By the time he understood what had happened, he was on the floor, tied up like the other two.
Hours later, all three men were back inside the house.
The bearded one was the first to fully wake.
I tossed a torn emergency glucose pouch in front of him.
He stared at it, then at me, and finally understood.
His face drained of color.
“You… what are you?”
I ignored the question.
Instead, I splashed cold water on the camouflage man until he groaned awake, then held up a photo of a young woman.
Pretty. Well-dressed. Big eyes. The kind of girl who had probably never imagined the world could be this cruel.
“This girl,” I said. “You took her, didn’t you?”
The bald one looked down.
The camouflage man said nothing.
The bearded one shook his head too fast.
But faces tell the truth long before mouths do.
Yes.
It was them.
I walked outside, siphoned gasoline from their vehicle into a plastic bottle, and came back in.
Then I poured it lightly over all three of them.
Their breathing changed immediately.
Now they believed me.
“Tell me where she is,” I said, flicking my lighter open. “If you answer right, you live. If you don’t, this house becomes your grave.”
The bald one broke first.
He nearly folded in half trying to beg.
“She’s in Maple Ridge Village,” he blurted out. “About twenty-five miles from here. Please, please—”
“That close?” I asked. “You usually sell women farther away.”
The camouflage man stammered, “She… she fought too much. We were afraid sending her far would cause trouble.”
So she had survived.
But not easily.
I crouched in front of them, taking in every twitch, every tremble.
“Tomorrow,” I said, “you’re driving me there.”
Then I took a slim blade hidden inside one of my makeup pencils and looked from one man to the next.
“I said the one who answered correctly gets to live.”
The room went silent.
The bald man understood first.
He started crying.
By two in the morning, he was outside digging.