Pete and his team were waiting in position around the door when Amy came home to her apartment. The 26-year old dark skinned woman wasn’t suspecting anything amiss as she unlocked the door and walked in, thinking about what she was going to cook for dinner, what movie she’d watch to relax and unwind before bed. She’d certainly never expected to see three men in ski-masks and dark jackets waiting in the dark room to jump her as soon as she’d flipped on the lights.

 Everything proceeded smoothly from there, at least from the perspective of the four men. They were old pros and had done this sort of “removal” dozens of times before. Like clockwork, one man circled around the side to get behind the young woman and grab her arms. Another went in low, getting his arms around her legs at the knees. The third stepped forward and clamped a hand over her mouth to muffle her screams. Working together, they picked her up and carried her to the apartment’s couch, which they’d chosen while waiting for their victim to come home.

 For Amy, the next few seconds were a blur of shock and terror as she was grabbed and swept off her feet. They next thing she knew, she was thrown down, roughly, onto her couch. While one man put a hand on the back of her head and pressed it down into one of the soft pillows, muffling her screams, and another held her ankles together, the third wrenched her arms painfully behind her back, crossing her wrists.

 She heard a rip and a second later felt tape being wrapped around her wrists, each loop pulled tight to leave as little give for her to work with as possible. The process was then repeated with her ankles. The hand holding her head down now took a handful of her long curly hair and pulled back. As her head came up, Amy opened her mouth to scream, from pain and terror, but her cry was stilled by a thick wad of cloth being rammed between her open teeth. The men forced her mouth shut and sealed her lips with tape.

 “Jones…” Pete said, once the package had been secured. “Search her bag.” The other man nodded and went to look through the young woman’s messenger bag where it had fallen, just inside the door, when she’d been grabbed and dragged to the couch. Pete turned back to Amy who had quickly realized struggling against the tape was a futile effort and was now looking up at her captors, eyes wide with fear. “Sorry about this, miss…” Pete told her, “But I’m afraid some very important people want the story you’re working on buried, and so they’ve hired us.”

The young reporter squirmed and struggled on the couch, grunting through the tape in fright. Beneath his mask, Smith grinned. “Oh don’t worry, we’re not going to bury you along with it...long as you cooperate we don’t need to kill you.” He laughed. “Besides, it’d be a waste, considering what some men will pay for a good looking gal like you on the dark web.”

This didn’t seem to calm Amy down, nor did the large black dufflebag they brought over, clearly meant for her. But with her hands and feet taped, there was nothing she could do as Pete and Grant lifted her from the couch and set her down in the open bag, pushing until she was forced to curl into a tight ball to fit in. The bag was zipped shut, leaving no sign of its occupant but the occasional tremble and muffled sob coming from inside.

 Grant heft the bag up onto one shoulder, pulling his mask off. It might attract the wrong sort of attention as they left the apartment building. “We good here, Jones?” Pete called, grabbing a  second dufflebag. Jones nodded, bringing over the small laptop he’d taken from the reporter’s bag. It was deposited inside along with all the other materials they’d found in the apartment pertaining to this story the higher ups wanted buried. The three men, with Amy curled inside the bag, stepped out of the apartment and into the night...