04

First off, I apologize for the long delay between this part and the last. It turns out law school is pretty frigging time-consuming. I do plan to continue the story (and eventually finish), but there will be periods of intense studying that get in the way. You have been warned!

If you're jumping in at this point, there are certain plot points that probably won't make sense. I would recommend going back and reading chapters 1 and 2 if you want the full picture.

The next part will reveal once and for all who she really is -- I promise. This part has some heaving hinting though. And it's finally getting a bit steamier, although we're still building towards the climax... (hah!)

Thanks always to LaRacasse for the added insight, and thanks for reading!

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If Mark was feeling worry about the next two days, it was as nothing compared to what was going on inside Arley. She stumbled down the stairs beside Chris, his grip on her arm and wrist both holding her upright and dragging her onward. Her head was a whirl of panic, and her heart was thudding so hard in her chest that it made her whole body tremble. She had failed. She had failed to convince them that she was not Nadia Christensen.

Arley put up a real fight as they approached the door that led back into the little room with the mattress. Arms pinned in Chris' iron grasp, she kicked out at him. It only made her lose her balance as her foot glanced off of his thigh. Pain shot through her arm and wrist as his hands tightened still further, holding her up, but she didn't care. With a cry of rage and fear, she twisted about and drove her knee up between his legs as high as she could manage. She missed his balls, but did slam into his groin, making him grunt with pain. Swearing, Chris flipped her around so her back was to him, and gathered her wrists at the small of her back, where he kept them pinned with one massive hand. His other hand clamped down on the back of her her neck. Using his large body like a wall behind her, he thrust her forward into the room.

It seemed smaller than it had before. The colourless walls seemed to press in on Arley and she felt suddenly like she was going to suffocate. "No!" she shouted, squirming uselessly against Chris' hold. He released her and spun her around to face him again, pulling her hands in front of her. She saw that he had a length of rope in his hands.

Where the fuck did that come from?

she thought frantically as she tried to wrench her hands away, her body writhing madly. Having no success, she tried to kick him again.

"GOD FUCKING DAMN IT, ARLEY!" he shouted at her. He lunged at her and she was suddenly flying backwards from the collision of his body with hers. She fell hard on her back onto the thin mattress, hard enough to be momentarily winded. Chris clambered on top of her, straddling her waist as she tried to suck air back into her deflated lungs, her head spinning. By the time she was struggling in earnest again, he had already wrapped the rope several times around her wrists and was knotting it firmly. She thrashed beneath him, trying to knee him in the back, but he only settled his weight back over her pelvis, pinning her thighs down, and finished binding her hands.

She lay there, panting, defeated, the thin blue dress twisted in disarray around her, as he got off her and headed for the door. One thought whirled in the front of her frazzled mind: Chris had called her Arley. In the moment he had lost control, he had said Arley, not Nadia. That must mean that somewhere in the back of his mind he still thought of her as his classmate, not a German fugitive.

How could she use this?

"Chris, wait!" She scrambled up off the mattress. He turned to face her as she came near, his expression hard. He was obviously angry from the fight she had given him. She quailed inside when she saw the look of fury on his features, but pressed on recklessly. She had to try.

"Please. I'm not this person, I'm not Nadia." She was still breathing hard from their struggle, and her voice came out raspy. She stepped closer. "I was telling the truth. Chris, you have to believe me. Please!"

But the anger in his eyes did not abate. He grabbed her shoulder roughly and spun her around, then pushed her, hard, back towards the mattress. She fell to her knees, colliding with the edge of the bed.

"Nice try, Nadia. Save it for the stage."

She heard the doorknob rattle, heard the swing of the hinges. Pushing herself to her feet with her tied hands, she turned and ran to the door after him, desperate now. He swung it shut from the other side just as she reached it and she collided with the rough wooden surface.

"NO!" she screamed, slamming her bound fists against the door. "No! Let me out! Chris! Mark! Someone, please! Let me out, LET ME OUT!"

It was hopeless. She sagged against the door and focused on breathing for several minutes, trying to get a grip, trying to hold back the swelling fear.

What now?

She turned back to face the small room. Her eyes fell on the tattered remains of her dress, still lying on the floor where Michael had ripped it from her, and then on the mattress, rumpled from where Chris had held her down and bound her. Such terrible memories already, in such a plain space. She unconsciously tugged at the rope around her wrists as a nervous whine started to buzz in her brain. She felt as though she was teetering on the edge of a black abyss.

Calm down, it's fine, it will be fine, just calm down

. Her breathing was becoming erratic, too fast and too shallow.

I will always find you. And bring you back to where you belong -- with me

.

Her heart pounded faster and faster, drumming out a sickening crescendo of panic.

You're in luck, kid. He's going to be buying you after all

.

And then the wall inside her, the one that was shoring up all her fear, broke apart. She collapsed onto the mattress, sobbing wildly. The panic swept over her, carrying her away, and she let herself drift on the tide, surfacing only to gasp for breath. She cried with abandon, huge sobs shaking through her entire body.

She cried, and cried, and then cried some more. Finally, some of the fear began to ebb away. Slowly, it drained from her body, flowing out of her along with her tears. And just as slowly, she discovered something left in its wake. Something hard that had crystallized in her heart, unnoticed beneath the churning panic. Something that held on quietly as the waves washed over her and had not been swept away. Arley sat hunched on the mattress, taking great, shuddering breaths, and examined this new hardness within her.

What should she call it? There was anger there, certainly, but Arley was wise enough to know that anger was a secondary emotion, one that rose out of more basic emotions such as fear and hurt. She sifted through the anger to examine the hard core that it surrounded. It felt a lot like determination; it looked in some respects like certainty. It was a kind of knowledge and a kind of faith. Both fact and belief. It was the truth -- the truth of her identity.

Why this truth should give her strength, why it should be a source of comfort, she did not know. It was beyond her ability to put reason to at that time. It was not a happy truth. But there it was, her rock and her defence. Hers, and hers alone.

Slowly, carefully, Arley reviewed each potential event in her immediate future, holding it up to the light of this new truth. How did it direct her actions going forward? There was much she didn't know about what was coming, but some things were certain. She would have to face Michael again at some point, she thought with a shiver. The skin over her face seemed to pulse angrily where he had struck her. Ignoring this and the world of darkness it opened, Arley decided she had to keep appealing to him, keep trying to convince him that she was not Nadia. It was worth at least one more try.

Of course there was the possibility that even if he did believe her, he would still hand her over anyways. This brought her mind to the man in the screen, and what she was to do upon meeting him. What

could

she do? Was there anything she could say? This was harder to plan for, and her mind slid uneasily over the different arguments she might make, unsatisfied with all of them.

Then of course, there was still Plan A: escape before any further harm came to her. But she couldn't see how. A straight fight was not the answer -- Arley was quickly realizing that physically, she was hopelessly outmatched. Both Michael and Chris had been able to subdue her one-on-one with little effort. And there were four of them, and only one of her. She needed some sort of opening, but none had been presented so far.

She curled up on the mattress, her exhausted mind mulling over escape plans, each more desperate and unlikely than the last. Too tired to stay awake and yet too disturbed to sleep, she drifted into a fitful doze.

She was not sure how much time had passed when she was jerked out of her reverie by the sound of a key in the lock. Dredging up the last of her strength, she sat up with difficulty as the door handle turned and Mark entered the room. He relocked the door and then came to the mattress and sat down beside her, looking at her closely. She shifted away from him a little, but noticed as she did so that his nearness didn't make her chest tighten with apprehension the way it did when Michael or Chris approached her.

Mark held in one hand a bowl with a cloth inside it.

"This is for you," he said, picking up the cloth. He unwrapped the fabric and Arley saw that it contained a bag of frozen peas.

"It will help reduce the swelling."

She only looked at him wearily. It occurred to her that she should try to convince him, as she had tried to convince Chris, that she was who she said she was. But she couldn't summon the energy. The desperate fight that had raged through her earlier had burned out while she slept, and the dampness of the basement room had settled in her bones, leaving her cold and dejected. Her limbs felt heavy, her body was sore. Her cheek throbbed angrily.

"Come on," Mark said, his voice low and gentle.

He leaned forward and raised the makeshift ice pack to her face. Her body gave an involuntary jolt as the cloth met her cheek and its cold spiked through her. She started to shiver.

Fuck this stupid thin dress

, she thought bitterly, her head bowed.

Fuck this dress, fuck this room, fuck these goddamn peas, fuck Mark, fuck all of them

.

Mark moved closer to her as her shivering became more violent and her breath started to hitch. He took hold of her bound hands and raised them to the cloth-wrapped peas, which she automatically took and continued to hold against her skin. Then he slid behind her. Planting his back against the wall, he wrapped one large arm around her waist and pulled her back up against his chest. His other hand came up to cover hers and keep the peas against her face as she instinctively strained away from him, startled by the embrace. Arley felt a flutter of panic at the meeting of her bodies, but she took a deep breath and told herself to be still. He would only force her to him if she struggled.

Mark's legs extended on either side of her, the inside of his thighs brushing against the outside of hers. Warmth radiated from his legs, from his arms wrapped around her, from his chest at her back. His heat surrounded her, seeping into her cold and tired body. After a few minutes, Arley realized drowsily that she was no longer shivering.

He felt so immovable, so

solid

, behind her. She could feel the rise and fall of his chest against the bare skin of her back and found the rhythm soothing. Her hands fell down from her face. The skin on her cheek had become numb from the freezing, but it didn't ache so horribly any more. She was only half-aware of the cold cloth being reapplied over her cheekbone, her brain now blurred by sleep. Without consciously choosing to do so, she let her head fall back onto the firm, warm surface behind her, seeking its comfort. Her eyes closed.

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Mark felt the girl drift into sleep, her body finally relaxing against his. He adjusted the frozen peas over her cheek, making sure they were still on top of the reddened skin. It felt good to hold her, and good too to ease some of her pain.

He rested her head back against the wall and pondered the woman now lying peacefully in his arms. Was she really a runaway from Berlin, hiding from her past in the halls of the law school? He thought about the past months they had shared at the school, when he had thought her simply another fellow student. What did he really know about her?

There wasn't much to go on. It hadn't even been three months since the hundred men and women of their year had amassed and partied their way through a week's worth of orientation activities. After that first frenzied burst of socialization, he had seen little of her. Three months of casual conversations outside classrooms and in pubs, three months of polite hello's in the library or on campus sidewalks. Most of the time there were others around.

There was only one incident between them that could really be called personal. Mark thought about the day his father had found out he was in law school. He had just received his first law school grade from a mid-term assignment and had stepped outside to try to digest what was the lowest mark he had ever received in his academic career, when his phone rang and he answered it to hear his father's voice on the other end. He had expected indignation, even anger. Especially since he had lied to his father, telling him that he was returning to school to continue his studies in philosophy and history. What he had not been prepared for was the ferocity -- the totality -- of the damnation that fell upon him. His father spoke in the language of absolutes: he had no interest in knowing such a son.

Mark had been sitting on a bench a short way up the street from the law building, his head in his hands, when she had walked past him. He didn't register her presence until he saw, out of the corner of his eye, her stop and turn to look back at him. After a moment or two she came and sat next to him on the bench.

They sat in silence for a little while. The late autumn sun still had some warmth left as it shone down on them, the golden light scattered throughout the red and yellow leaves in the trees above and on the ground below. A crisp breeze occasionally brushed past, picking up the fallen leaves and twirling them along the sidewalk. Mark noticed that he didn't mind Arley sitting with him, even though she was nearly a stranger. It should have been intrusive, her breaking into his unhappy reflections. But it wasn't, somehow.

He straightened then, and looked over at her. She was gazing across the street at the large maple tree that stood next to the social sciences building, ablaze with riotous colour. Her expression was calm, content. She turned to meet his eyes as he looked at her.

"My father has disowned me. For studying law," he said.

She continued to look at him, still calm, and her blue eyes seemed to soften.

"He hates lawyers, all lawyers. And I can't blame him, he has valid reasons for it." He wasn't sure why he was telling her this. It was too much to share with a stranger, too personal. But Mark suddenly needed to tell someone, to unburden himself of the terrible weight pressing on his heart. She continued to listen, and her quiet attentiveness seemed to pull more words out of him.

"When I was a lot younger, my grandmother had a piece of lakefront property about an hour out of town. It was a really beautiful spot. My father used to take me and my brother there all the time when I was a kid and we would go fishing and camping. Sometimes sailing. There wasn't much on the property, but my father wanted to build a cottage for the whole family. Saved up all the money he could."

Mark was now looking at the fiery tree across the street, but he wasn't really seeing it.

"Then one day, I must have been around thirteen or fourteen, some guy from the municipality contacts my grandmother, and tells her there's some sort of problem with her ownership. She tells my dad, and my dad hires this lawyer to look into it, because it sounded complicated. The lawyer said some legal mumbo-jumbo that meant nothing to us, but we didn't know any better, so we believed him when he said that he could fix it if my grandmother sold the property to him -- the lawyer -- after which he would sell it to my father. Like, somehow the sale would fix whatever the issue was, I don't know, we haven't covered real estate yet in property class."

"My father didn't have enough money to actually buy the property, so they arranged for the lawyer to buy it for one hundred dollars, and then for my father to buy it for that same amount. But after the property was transferred to the lawyer's name, he disappeared. He was gone for an entire year, just vanished. My dad spent that whole year looking for him. And then, over a year later, bam -- my father runs into the guy in the grocery store. He acted like he had never met my father, said he had no idea what my father was talking about. My dad nearly went nuts and the store had to call the police."

Mark glanced at Arley and saw that she was looking down into her lap now. He knew she was still listening. Processing.

"He complained to the bar society. They didn't do anything about it. He tried to sue the lawyer. But none of the other lawyers in town were willing to go against the guy. They didn't say that -- they just gave my dad fee rates that they knew were miles higher than he could afford."

Mark paused. He felt once more the grief and helplessness of his father settling over his heart. He remembered the broken look on his father's face when he had accepted that the cause was lost.

"There are condos on the property now. It turned out that man from the municipality was actually a real estate developer working with the lawyer, just looking for a sucker. They must have made a killing."

Silence fell for a moment or two as Mark wrestled yet again with his anger for the man who had caused his family so much grief. Arley didn't say anything, but her quiet company seemed to steady him, giving him a foothold in the present to hold on to and keep from falling into the past.

"So you can see why he hates me for coming to law school. 'Joining the ranks of the scumbags,' is what he said." He couldn't keep the edge from his voice. He cast her an uneasy look, wondering if he had said too much.

Her head lifted, and she looked up at him with gentle eyes. He felt an odd sensation in his chest, as though soft fingers had brushed him there.

"I'm sorry for what happened to your father. And to you," she said quietly. "It's no secret that lawyers are given a lot of power in our society, and when they abuse that power, the results are awful. You both have every right to feel sorrow and anger for what that man did. I wish it hadn't happened -- I wish I could take it away for you."

He couldn't think of anything to say and so he said nothing. Despite the fact that she hardly knew him, she seemed genuinely upset on his behalf. He looked away again, suddenly unable to look any longer into the bright blue of her eyes.

"But Mark," she said, her voice kind. "You are not that lawyer. You are not responsible for what he did. And it is not your job to heal your father's pain."

He closed his eyes, his breath catching a little as her words hit home.

"Your father's pain may be justified. But that does not make it okay for him to take it out on you. I don't know why you chose law, but I am certain you did not do so to hurt your father. And if he can't see that..." She paused, and he knew she was searching for the right words.