Home - COD Simon Ghost Riley X Female OC

Chapter 1

 It was cold that night. She was barely wearing anything. A sackcloth that had been handed down to her from whatever woman lay there before. Over a year, she knew, because two Christmases had passed. She had been chained to this man for over a year. He went by Halcon. The Hawk. And he answered to the higher power, known only to MJ as "ella". She.

MJ had a life once, cushy by modern American standards, but it had come to her on the so-called wet back of her father and the gentle, praying hands of her mother. Her father, Gabriel Ricardo had come into the country as a teenager, gained his citizenship, and become an incredibly valuable diplomat to his home country of Mexico. And MJ, she had followed in her father's harrowing legal footsteps, becoming a powerful young attorney in her home of New York.

All of that good had changed two years before she was taken when her mother and father were tragically killed on a boating trip off the coast of Florida. It was called an accident, but MJ knew better. She devoted her time, her pain, her anger, toward finding the truth. And she succeeded. Cartel. She began a case, she took it up all the right flagpoles, to all the right ears but it was slow, frustrating, and often blind work. Nothing moved fast enough.

In the days before her disappearance, her friends and coworkers would have called her paranoid, erratic. In the days after, they would say that the empty pill bottles strewn about, the wallet and phone left in the apartment, the car, keys still in the ignition parked on the bridge, pointed to a sad but predictable end. It had, really. Just not in the way they had thought. Because for fifteen months, she had survived, but now she seemed to have been forgotten. Halcon hadn't been by in days. Her water had nearly run out. And there was barely enough for her to even need the waste bucket he had left. This had been going on for months now and she had given up on the thought of escape for now, knowing her legs might not even hold her up from where she lay to the doorway.

It made sense though, that she had been forgotten for now. Every night, the gunfire drew closer and louder. Something was going on out there. War, she hoped. The end of this. Only tonight, he had been back briefly, sitting at a computer in the same room where she was shackled, looking distraught. MJ had heard him as for backup, for protection. Words she understood. Then he left with a threatening look, and an "I'll be back for you tonight."

For most of her stay here in Mexico, she had been Halcon's pet. He didn't use her for much besides a display of power to his cohorts and subordinates. She would be made to walk with a collar and kneel beside him as he spoke in a language he knew she couldn't fully understand. And in private, she was often his punching bag. Like a stray dog. Sometimes she was his playtoy, although it seemed to only come to that if he were particularly frustrated. Or drunk. But now he was distracted. Now, like a stray dog, she had been left to die.

It was cold that night. She could hear the gunfire again, and a few were so close that she pulled her knees into her chest and prayed one might hit her captor square between the eyes. She was careful not to jostle her arm where the steel shackle had begun to bite into to swollen, infected skin. She hadn't bathed in a while. Images of old movies with skeletons still shackled to the walls of a prison filled her mind almost comically. They would find her like that. Then they would know she was right. Maybe her death would finally bring her parents some justice.

Eyes tight shut, it was in the middle of her half imagination, half dream, that she heard something unusual. Halcon always entered from the south door. The north door, adjacent to the wall she was chained to, was locked and rarely used since it went out the back and into the alley. But there, behind that north door, she heard footfalls. They were heavy, booted, but soft. Nearly silent. Her tired, fearful ears could pick them out perfectly. Halcon had requested backup, which meant he might be in danger. It was fair to say that maybe his hideout had been compromised, that that's why he had promised to come and get her. So he could leave no trace. But by the speed of the footsteps approaching, it seemed he was too late. Her heart rate sped up in both fear of what her enemy's enemy might do to her and in excitement that maybe her earlier wish had come true. Maybe her enemy was dead.