Chapter 3: Chapter 3
”
Izzy watched him beg. She listened until he was just repeating the word, a helpless, broken mantra. Then she nodded to Marcus.
“Get him up. We’re going for a drive.”
Marcus’s hands weren’t rough this time. They were efficient, final. He hauled Peter upright like a sack of grain, the motion sending fresh jabs of pain through his ribs. Peter tried to find his feet, but his legs were rubber. He stumbled, his shoulder scraping against the rough brick. Marcus held him steady, his grip impersonal and absolute.
They moved him down the alley, away from the faint light. A black van, older, nondescript, was idling, its rear doors yawned open to swallow the dark. The sight of it pulsed a new, primal terror through Peter’s veins. This was real. This was a point of no return.
“No, wait, just—just take my phone, my cards, here—” Peter babbled, fumbling for his pockets.
Izzy walked ahead, not turning. “Get in the van, Peter.”
“I’ll do anything you want, I swear, you don’t have to—”
A sharp push from Marcus cut him off, propelling him forward. He half-fell into the van’s cargo hold, catching himself on his hands and knees on the cold, ridged metal floor. The door slid shut behind him with a definitive, metallic slam. The world shrunk to a pitch-black box, smelling of oil and stale cigarette smoke and now, the coppery tang of his own blood from his split lip.
A dome light flicked on. Izzy was in the passenger seat up front. Marcus got behind the wheel. Peter scrambled to sit up, his back against the side panel. There were no seats back here. Just empty space.
The engine grumbled and they pulled out of the alley, the movement lurching him sideways. Streetlights began to strobe through the small, dirty windows in the rear doors, painting bars of sickly yellow across Izzy’s impassive profile, then plunging them back into near-darkness.
“Where are we going?” Peter’s voice sounded small, childlike.
Izzy didn’t answer. She pulled out her phone, her thumbs tapping the screen. The glow illuminated her face. She looked bored.
“Look, we can talk. We can work this out.” He was reaching for the old tools, the negotiation, the deal, but the words were hollow and they all knew it.
“The first passcode,” Izzy said, still looking at her phone. “Your main checking. The one linked to your debit card.”
Peter opened his mouth, a lie already forming—a fake number, a delay.
Izzy glanced at Marcus. The van slowed.
“You can give it to me now,” Izzy said, her tone conversational. “Or he pulls over, I get in the back with you, and we start with your teeth. One at a time. It’s a long drive. We have time.”
Her eyes met his in the rearview mirror. They weren’t filled with rage anymore. They were empty. Transactional. She meant every single word.
A cold sweat broke out all over Peter’s body. He recited the six-digit code, his voice trembling.
She typed it in. A pause. “Now the password for the app itself.”
He gave it.
She worked in silence for a minute. The van accelerated again, merging into faster traffic. Peter watched the city he owned, the playground of his cons, slide by the windows. He was being erased from it, taken away.
“Eighteen thousand, four hundred and twenty-two dollars,” Izzy read aloud. “That’s from Lauren’s eight, plus what you bled from that grad student, Mark Tillman, for the fake concert promotion. I’m keeping a tab.” She looked back at him. “Savings account. The one you think is cleverly hidden.”
He felt dizzy. How did she know about Mark? How did she know about the separate account? A numbing cold was spreading from his core. This wasn’t a impulsive ambush. This was an audit.
He gave her the information. His mind was racing, yet utterly blank. There was no angle. No play. She knew everything.
“Good,” she murmured, tapping. “There’s the rest. Not as much as you’d think, for a king like you.”
“What are you going to do with it?” he whispered.
“Wire it. Now. To an account you’ll never see.” She didn’t elaborate. The van took a sharp turn, throwing him against the wall. He cried out, the pain in his ribs a white-hot flare.
“Hurts?” Izzy asked.
He just nodded, breathing shallowly.
“Good. You need to remember what pain feels like. Real pain. Not the little scratches you give people.”
She put her phone away and half-turned in her seat, looking at him directly for the first time since they’d gotten in the van. The strobe of passing lights made her expression flicker—stern, then ghostly, then utterly grim.
“You’re a parasite, Peter. You find a host, you attach, you drain it, you drop off. You think you leave no mark because you’re so smooth. But you leave a wound. Every single time. A wound that gets infected. My sister… she almost died from that infection.”
“I didn’t know,” he said, and it was almost true. He never stuck around to find out.
“You didn’t look,” Izzy corrected, her voice low and deadly. “That’s your signature move. The not-looking. Well, look now.”
She held up her phone again. On the screen was a photo of Lauren. Not the shy girl he remembered, but a gaunt, hollow-eyed version lying in a stark hospital bed, wrist bandaged, eyes staring at nothing.
Peter flinched.
“Look at her!” Izzy’s voice cracked like a whip in the confined space.
He looked. The guilt he had always been able to shrug off, to intellectualize, to ignore, landed on him with the physical weight of Marcus’s fists. It sat in his gut, a solid, sickening stone.
“Now you see,” Izzy said, putting the phone away. “This isn’t about money. The money is just a token. This is about balance. You took a person. So now, we take you. Your money, your freedom, your smug little sense of superiority. All of it. Gone.”
The van exited the highway. They were in an industrial zone, warehouses looming like sleeping giants in the darkness, streetlights few and far between.
“Who are you?” Peter asked, the question escaping him. He wasn’t just asking her name.
“I’m the bill collector,” Izzy said. “And you are officially in arrears.”
The van turned into a deserted lot, gravel crunching under the tires, and rolled to a stop behind a vast, windowless building. The dome light went off, plunging them into near total darkness. Peter heard the front doors open and shut. Then the rear doors slid open.
Izzy stood framed in the opening, a silhouette against the bruised night sky. She held something in her hand. Not the knife. A small, metallic object that caught a sliver of distant light.
A key.
“Get out,” she said.
Peter shuffled forward, every movement agony. He stumbled out onto the gravel, the cold night air biting his sweat-soaked skin. Marcus stood nearby, a silent monolith.
Izzy walked past him toward a roll-up garage door on the side of the warehouse. She inserted the key into a padlock, twisted it open with a sharp clack that echoed in the vast silence. With a grunt, she heaved the door up a few feet. Blackness gaped beyond.
“In,” she said.
Peter didn’t move. This was it. The dark space. The end.
Marcus took a step toward him.
Peter lurched forward, ducking under the metal door. The space inside was cooler, smelling of concrete dust and mold. The door rattled down behind him, sealing him in with a final, deafening crash.
A single, bare bulb flickered on overhead, powered by a battery pack. It illuminated a small, cleared space in the cavernous warehouse. In the center was a metal chair. Next to it, a plastic gallon jug of water. A blanket folded on the seat. Against the far wall, a bucket.
That was it.
Izzy walked in, standing between him and the chair. “This is your new home. Until we say otherwise. You will be told what to do, and you will do it. You will be fed. You will be allowed to sleep. If you comply, you will not be hurt again. If you try anything—if you so much as look at me the wrong way—the hurt will make tonight feel like a spa day.”
Peter just stared at the chair. The sheer, brutal simplicity of it broke the last of him. This was no dramatic dungeon. It was just a chair in an empty space. A place to be nobody.
“Why?” he whispered, the question meant for the universe.
Izzy stepped close, so close he could see the flecks of gold in her hard, brown eyes. She spoke softly, each word a precisely driven nail.
“Because Lauren had to rebuild herself from nothing. In a room almost exactly like this. So that’s where you start. From zero. From nothing. You don’t get to be Peter Burrage anymore. You’re just a debt that needs paying.”
She turned and walked back to the door, ducking under it. Before she left, she looked back at him, a final verdict in her gaze.
IZZY'S REVENGE BEGINS.