#Leon Bailey | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

maccreadysbaby · 2 months ago

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OPERATION: ULTRAVIOLET

alex rider + oc insert

tw: violence, because it’s a maccreadysbaby fic

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

dont get between a boy and his housekeeper, that’s all I have to say

part three

❝ RANSOM ❞

WEDNESDAY — MAY 4, 2001 — 1:28AM

THE FIRST THING KAI FELT, WAS COLD. An overarching, deep cold that seemed to originate from deep inside of him, pooling like dread in various parts of his body.

He was sitting up, but not of his own accord. He could feel that his arms and legs were all strapped down, and his head was the only thing he could freely move, lulling to the side limply.

His limbs were still heavy and a little numb from whatever drug he’d been suffocated with. He let his sticky eyelids slide open, but he was greeted by darkness. Why couldn’t he see? What had happened to his eyes?

He lifted his head up, and the movement made him dizzy when nothing in his field of vision moved to accompany it. He tried to bring his arms up to his face; but he couldn’t thanks to the something that was binding his wrists — to the arms of a chair? He couldn’t move much more than his hands, up and down, and his head. Was he still at home?

No, he couldn’t be. Even if he couldn’t see, this didn’t feel like his home. The air was sticky and wet, with a humid moisture that was clinging to his skin and dampening his hair. There was a light hum in the background — the white noise of some machine that he definitely never heard in his penthouse.

But, if he was, indeed, somewhere else, how had they gotten him out of the building? He guessed that it would have been hard for the men to get him out of the highly populated and secure skyscraper… but they’d gotten in, so he had to assume they had a way to get out again. And where was Lionel?

That sent a sudden surge of panic streaking through him. If they had left the penthouse, they most certainly wouldn’t have left Lionel behind. At least not alive. He hated to wish it, but he couldn’t help but hope the butler was strapped up next to him. Because then, he’d be alive.

“He’s awake,”

Kai flinched at the man’s voice. It was one he hadn’t heard before; it sounded young, a smooth tenor with a faint Southern accent, like someone from Alabama or Louisiana.

Suddenly, Kai could see.

A bag had been ripped off of his head.

It wasn’t bright, but there was light. He blinked against the dim illumination, his brown eyes flicking around the place he’d found himself in.

It looked like… a bedroom, or something. The walls had peeling yellow wallpaper with small, fading flowers, pale and worn by time. The ceiling was covered with tin tiles, and the floor was an old, nasty wood, rotted and splitting, maybe water damaged. There were no windows and no furniture in the room except the dining chair Kai’s wrists and ankles were zip-tied to, and only one door — a thick, metal looking one that didn’t fit the room at all. There was only a single naked light bulb dangling over his head. Lionel wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

There was a man standing in front of him. In all back, with a ski mask, but not the same one from the penthouse. Maybe it was the second one who had been there, who’d drugged him? He wasn’t looking at Kai, but setting something up right in front of the boy instead. Some kind of camcorder, it looked like, that he was attaching to a tripod.

Someone emerged from behind his chair.

It was the man from his penthouse. Kai could see blood from when he hit him with the gun running over his lips under the ski mask, staining the black material even darker.

“Is it rolling?”

It was the same rough voice from the penthouse, the same one who’d demanded Kai’s location out of Lionel. He hadn’t noticed before, but the teenager sort of recognized it — he couldn’t place from where.

“Yes,” The younger, smaller one responded, backing away from the camera and letting his hands drift away from the device.

Suddenly, the larger man turned on a dime, his fist coming in harsh contact with the side of Kai’s head with no warning at all. The teenager cried out when a too-harsh pain exploded there, and the force of the strike was so strong the chair nearly toppled over, wobbling from side to side a few times before it settled again.

Kai’s head was swimming. His ears were ringing, and dots danced in his vision, his left temple throbbing with a stabbing, searing pain. The man’s hand flashed in his line of sight — brass knuckles.

Kai had been kidnapped. Like, actually kidnapped. What was the procedure for this? What had Lionel always told him to do in times of crisis?

Panicking wouldn’t help anything, he knew that much. These guys probably wanted him for ransom money, or information, or maybe vengeance. It was already obvious that they wouldn’t hesitate to hurt him — crying or begging or all the things his childish instincts wanted him to do wouldn’t make any difference. What he needed to do was think.

He didn’t have the time to think, though, before the brass knuckles switched hands and were slammed into the opposite side of his head. He couldn’t help the reflex tears that sprung to his eyes from the pain, and the chair rocked again, the floor cracking and making the chair tilt to the side under the weight of it crashing back down. He could feel blood leaking down the right side of his head a mere few seconds after the impact.

His breaths were coming out shaky, though he tried his best to keep them steady, even. The man settled in front of him with cold, gray eyes. Cold gray eyes that Kai recognized.

“Hey there, Malachi,”

When he heard his name was when Kai realized who it was. The eyes, the accent, the build.

It was Sergeant Wilhelm, the man who trained him on base at Fort Bragg. The only other person in the whole world who knew Kai existed. How had he gotten in the penthouse? How had he known where he lived? How did he get him out of the building unseen?

Suddenly, Kai felt a slew of emotions. Anger, because he knew this man, betrayal, because it was the trainer he trusted… and despair. Because he knew that he stood absolutely no chance against him, if he decided Kai should die.

Kai didn’t dare speak.

The man licked his bloody lips, and Kai only had a half second to flinch before his fist (luckily the one without the knuckles this time,) slammed straight into the center of his face, just like when Kai had hit him with the gun. The teenager couldn’t help but cry out again when pain rippled out from his nose and made his eyes spill over with reflex tears. Blood started pouring out both sides of his nose so quickly he had no hope of choking it back.

“Don’t be afraid,” The Sergeant said, as though he wasn’t trying to literally beat Kai to a pulp. “I just have a little message for your daddy. If he comes through, no further harm will be done.”

The sergeant stepped over to his right, so Kai’s face was right in the camera, bloody and already bruised. The second man, the younger one, stayed on the other side of the device, probably to stop its recording when the sergeant said.

“Well, Joe, you see now what I’ve got my hands on,” The sergeant said. Kai didn’t look into the camera, he just angled his brown eyes down at the floor, trying to look blank. “All I want is for you to keep paying my bills. It’s simple, really.”

Keep paying his bills? Kai wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that. He assumed his father paid him for the secret training Kai received. And he did a good job training him — it wouldn’t make sense for his father to quit paying him unless he planned for Kai to stop training. Was he going to stop training?

Kai’s mind was slammed back into reality when something cold touched his right temple. He hadn’t seen the sergeant pull out the gun, but his whole body went rigid when the cool metal was pressed against his skin, pushing his head slightly to the side. “If you don’t, well… I think you get the gist.”

The barrel of the gun resting against his temple made Kai feel sick. The sergeant pulled back the hammer and clicked the safety off, pushing the gun into Kai’s skin so hard it kind of hurt. He tried to keep the fear off of his face, but he could feel himself shaking and he knew it would be visible on the camera. His eyes were still watering from the punch, too, so it looked like he was crying.

“You have six hours to respond. If you do, the boy will be returned peacefully to your home. If you don’t… the CIA is welcome to look for the body,” The sergeant said, his southern drawl suddenly sounding really, really dark. “We’ll see what you love more… your son, or your money.”

Suddenly, a gruff hand had him by the chin, and his head was lifted up so he stared directly into the camera. The barrel of the gun suddenly moved, cold against the bottom of his chin. “You got anything you wanna say to your daddy, Malachi?”

Kai did nothing but subtly shake his head. He wouldn’t have known what to say anyhow, but the gun made it even harder to think. He didn’t trust himself to open his mouth anyways. His hands were shaking and he grabbed the arms of the chair in a bid to hide it, so tight his knuckles turned white.

After a long silence, the younger man moved forward and cut off the camcorder. A small wave of relief washed over the teenager when the gun was removed, and the safety was clicked back on. But even if the gun was gone, the threat of death was still hanging thick in the air like smoke.

“I hate to be this way, Malachi,” The sergeant sighed, shoving the gun into the rear waistband of his black pants. “But I’m afraid there’s no alternative.”

Kai didn’t say a word. The man reached out and patted his cheek, and he jerked his head away like his touch was toxic.

The sergeant huffed in response, turning to the younger of the two men. “See to it that he gets the video as soon as possible. I have to go deal with the housekeeper. He locked himself up behind the bookcase at the penthouse,” He said.

Lionel was still at home, alive? Locked up at the penthouse — had he pressed the panic button? Locked himself in Kai’s room?

That was smart. There was a phone in Kai’s room. He would be safe and live long enough to get help. Maybe Kai’s stepfather already knew what happened. Maybe they were already on their way. At least, that’s what he had to tell himself.

The sergeant looked at Kai with a twisted smile. “Let’s hope your stepfather pays up. Otherwise, next time you see me… will be your last.”

The young man collected the camcorder, and both of them left through the metal bedroom door, closing it behind them. The sound of locks turning from the other side came and went.

As soon as they left the room, Kai folded over on himself and exhaled heavily, taking deep, shaky, long breaths, trying to calm himself down.

Lionel. He was going to deal with Lionel. He didn’t think he’d be able to get into his room, but what if he could? He’d already broken into the highly secure building, and then broken out again. What if he could get inside?

Kai had to physically fight away the panic that was clawing at his throat, threatening to make the air around him too thin to breathe. He had no idea where he was. Even if he did, he didn’t have the faintest clue about direction — how to get home or how long it would take the sergeant to get there. He could have five hours, or five minutes, before Lionel was possibly dead.

A string of curse words bounced around in his skull as he tried to wiggle his arms and legs around. The zip-ties were too tight for him to slide out of, and too strong to simply break by pulling against them. He looked around the room again, but there was nothing. Not that he’d be able to grab anything anyways.

Think. Think. He’d been taught how to get out of zip-ties, but not when they were attached to chairs. He could try and break the chair itself, but with his arms and legs attached like they were, he didn’t have a large enough range of motion to even think about doing anything. Best and worst case, he’d just fall over.

What could he do? What could he do?

He sat up slightly, fighting back a burn that threatened to surface in his eyes, glancing at his wrists. He didn’t have anything on him that could cut stuff. Even if he did, he wouldn’t be able to reach it.

One thing he’d been taught was adaptability. How to use objects on or around him to his advantage. But what good was that when he couldn’t move?

With no other clear option, he started writhing in the chair, slamming his weight side to side, forward and back so the legs kept lifting up and slamming down again with loud bangs. The floor crunched beneath him and the chair fell through, tilting sideways.

When he jerked again, it didn’t go anywhere.

Great.

He had to find a way. If there was the slightest chance Lionel could die, he had to stop it. He had to.

Suddenly, the lock turned, and the younger man stepped in with a pistol clutched tightly in front of him.

His grey eyes flicked around the room anxiously, lingering on Kai, then sliding down to the broken floor and chair’s left legs poking through. “Stop slamming around.”

His hand with the gun was shaking, almost like he hated holding the thing. He spoke softly. He wasn’t confident — no, he was scared. He was inexperienced, and Kai could smell the fear of what would happen after this all over him.

He might be able to use that.

“Let me out of here,” He ordered with much more confidence and determination than the young man had. “Let me go. If you do, I can tell my father. I can make sure you don’t get-“

The man closed the door and locked it again.

With a grunt of frustration, Kai jerked and thrashed in the chair like a madman, hoping he might break it or acquire new strength to rip the zip-ties, to no avail. It was completely stuck, sideways and fallen into the floor.

There had to be a way. There was always a way, that’s something Lionel had taught him. There was always a way in, or out, or to live, or to die, or to escape, or to win. There was always, always a way. His job was just to find it.

There was a way to break the zip ties, he just had to find it.

He scoured the room for any sign of help, but there was none. Nothing he could grab. Nothing he could use. He couldn’t even knock the chair over anymore.

Was it really just up to his father now?

Sometimes the way out isn’t obvious. That’d been something Wilhelm had taught him while pretending to kidnap him and hold him hostage. Sometimes, you can’t even see the solution. You just have to try.

Sometimes, he couldn’t even see the solution. Maybe it wasn’t around him. Maybe it wasn’t on him.

Maybe it was in him.

With no other options left in his mind, he leaned over, and started chewing on the zip-ties.

He wasn’t sure how long it took. He couldn’t even seem to comprehend time. By the time he broke through both zip-ties on his wrists, he could taste blood in his mouth, and he was pretty sure he’d need braces to fix the damage he’d done to his front teeth — they didn’t feel right anymore.

A sense of victory seemed to take hold of him when his arms were free. He was able to stand — wobbly, because he was still attached to the chair that was falling through the floor — and pick it up. It took him a second to pull it free from the holes he’d made, but when he did, it made a loud crunch of rotted wood.

If the guy outside had heard it, there was no time. He jerked up on the chair and started shaking it frantically, slowly weaseling the chair legs out of the zip-ties until, finally, it came loose and the ties were left around his ankles like bracelets.

He was free. Suddenly, his mind spun and he threatened to faint. He was free.

He sat the chair off to the side and shook his hands out by his sides. He couldn’t go out the door. There was no way he could bust the metal thing down, and even if he could, the younger of the two men was probably just outside. He’d get shot before he even got a chance to leave.

He looked around the room. There were no windows, and he couldn’t go busting through a wall without making any noise — besides, that would take forever, if he could even do it. He looked up at the ceiling. He may have been able to pull down the tile, but it would be loud, then he’d have to bust through the ceiling and somehow get himself up inside of it without just falling right back through the drywall.

Kai exhaled heavily, raking his hands through his hair, trying to think, to breathe, to make a plan.

He glanced down at the crumbling floor that had caved beneath his chair.

Yes. He wasn’t sure where exactly he was, but he knew Miami was a coastal city — and he’d learned via television that houses in coastal cities were often built high off the ground, or at least on stilts in case of floods. If he could somehow get through the floor, and through whatever was under the floor, he could crawl out from under the house and be home free.

With an exhale, he grabbed the chair and walked it back over to the hole the legs had made in the rotted wood. He tipped the whole chair up and balanced just one leg of it against the hardwood right beside the hole, and on a mental count of three, put all his weight on it.

The rotted hardwood creaked, groaned, and then cracked, the leg of the chair falling through and thudding against something else that also cracked.

He lifted the piece of furniture out, and did it again. Crack! And again, and again, over and over all around the hole until it was big enough that maybe, he could fit through. There seemed to be beamwork and electrical wires running through the floor, but it was all old and rotted out. There was a thin layer of what looked like particle board beneath it, covered in the chipped and rotted floor he’d been breaking out, and it had a few holes peppered in it from the chair leg hitting it.

Slowly, Kai put down the chair and, dusting his hands off, dropped his foot into the hole. The particle board cracked under his weight, then broke, and he lowered himself down and down until his foot hit something solid. He had to put his other leg in, too, to fully reach the bottom. He wiggled his socked toes around — mushy dirt.

Suddenly, the sound of the lock turning came.

“Hey!”

Kai ducked down just as the man jumped at him, arms wide and poised to grab him. The teenager had no choice but to throw himself down, crashing straight through the particle board and slamming stomach-down in the dirt under the house. Dust and debris rained down on him, and he felt the man’s hand groping at the back of his t-shirt.

“Stop! Get back up here!”

Kai rolled further under the house to wrench the man’s hand out of his shirt, and there was a crash as the man fell headfirst in the hole that wasn’t quite big enough for him.

There was probably only two feet of room down there, so Kai had to lay on his stomach and army crawl if he wanted to move. He couldn’t see a thing, and the sound of crickets and katydids started assaulting his ears, along with the scrambles and cracking of the man trying to force himself back into the house. It was all pitch black. Kai blinked, straining his eyes against the darkness, and —

A subtle glow, right in front of him. It was just bright enough to turn the posts holding up the beach house into silhouettes, and the more his eyes grew used to it, the more he realized he was out. That light was coming from something outside.

He shimmied on his stomach in an army crawl, one hand in front of the next, toward the light. Thirty feet. Twenty. Ten. He heard the man’s feet slamming somewhere above him, inside the house.

His hands hit soft grass.

With an exhale of satisfaction, he rolled out from under the house and forced himself onto his feet, swaying slightly from slight disorientation. It was pitch black and humid, with the Miami stars twinkling overhead..

He was out.

The light he’d been seeing was the exterior lighting of another beach bungalow not so far away, yellow with a bright white door. It had a light post outside near the road — a quiet road, small, surrounded with trees — that’s what he’d been seeing. There were no more buildings that he could see, and he could’ve swore he could hear the ocean in the distance.

The house he’d been in was a fading blue bungalow with a terracotta roof. It was old, and trashed on the outside, looking abandoned far before Kai had ever been there.

He heard the door of the house slam open. It sounded close, but he couldn’t tell what direction it came from, or what direction the man was going to go. He looked over at the other beach house — the lights were on and there were cars outside. That was the only place around where he could find help. But if he ran there, the man with the gun would see him.

Kai turned on his heel and ran the opposite direction, around what he thought was the back of the house. Away from the light. Away from the civilization.

When he turned the corner, the man, and the gun, was right in his face.

“Hey!”

Kai whirled around to run, but not fast enough. The man grabbed him by the left arm and jerked him back. In a split second decision, Kai cried out loudly, grinding to a halt and clutching his left shoulder, twisting his face up in agony.

The young man took pause, obviously stunned that he had caused the boy so much pain. And when he was caught off-guard was when Kai struck.

He brought his hands suddenly forward. His left snapped around the barrel of the pistol while his right slammed against the man’s wrist, and he used all of his strength to force them away from each other. The gun came right out of the man’s hand and Kai spun it around, aiming the barrel at him instead.

The young man looked horrified.

“Let me go,” Kai ordered, holding the gun tightly in his hands, aiming it at the kidnapper’s heart. “Let me go. Now.”

The man, his grey eyes blown wide, brought his hands up next to his head. “Malachi-“

“Let me go!” He ordered, flicking the gun’s safety off. “Go back inside and stay there. Now!”

The man started to back away slowly. Kai followed him all the way around the house and back into the front door with the gun, before shutting the door and leaving, the weapon still clasped tight in his hand.

Kai half wondered what was going through the nextdoor homeowner’s mind when a fourteen year old boy, bruised, bloody, dirty, with zip-ties around his ankles and a gun in his hand, banged on their door, begging to use their phone. He’d dialed one of the two phone numbers he had committed perfectly to memory.

He was calling his father.

The CIA would be there soon, and they’d probably be at the penthouse before Kai could count to twenty.

Lionel was safe.

—

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