Chapter 17: Helena

“Don’t you fucking scream,” was the only command Helena heard as she was pinned to the gritty, dirty floor of the van, and a hand covered with a patchwork of calluses folded over her mouth. “We won’t kill you but there’s a million ways we could hurt you if you don’t cooperate.”

Whoever this was, he didn’t ask if she ‘got the picture’ or ‘understood him’ the way they did in movies. There was no time for anything beyond the hissed warning as the door of the van slid shut, and the vehicle lurched into motion. The driver was fumbling with the gear shift, panicking more and more with each crunching noise of a gear slipping its catch.

“God damn it, Kyle. You said you could drive a stick!” another man shouted as he bounced over Helena and jammed the van into gear.

“I can! This fucking van is a piece of shit!”

Helena hoped that this took long enough for Genevive to come out and scream for Tom to help her. At the very least, Genevive was observant and quick thinking with a near faultless memory. Make, model, and license plate would be easily gleaned information. But Helena stopped hoping for that when she felt the van move forward then clumsily round a corner that led them out to the main road. Now it was too late to entertain any naive rescue attempt.

The man who was covering her mouth let go and positioned himself across from her on the hump of the wheel well. He was staring at her as she pulled herself to her knees and timidly scanned the faces in front of her.

“Aren’t you going to say something like please don’t do this or my daddy has so much money and he’ll give you whatever you want?” he asked, fighting what seemed to be a natural urge to sneer.

“I have a feeling you already know that about my father,” Helena replied quietly.

“We do,” the man told her. “We know all about your daddy.”

The driver, Kyle she thought she heard the other one say, glanced over his shoulder at her with a shit-eating grin. In another situation, she would have pepper sprayed him just because he made her uncomfortable when he looked at her. In her current situation, she averted her eyes, and hoped this would be over soon.

“Are you going to ransom me?” she asked.

“Not really,” came a voice from the back of the van. Helena started. She hadn’t seen the fourth man sitting alone in the corner with his fingers tented and his eyes narrowed. It took her a moment to place him but then she recognized him: the man who was watching her in the parking lot. The man who kept nodding to her like they were old friends. “Actually, what we do with you depends entirely on your old man.”

“If you ransomed me, he’d pay,” Helena promised, and the man sitting across from her slapped his sandpaper hands together.

“There we go! That’s the line.” He widened his eyes to give himself an innocent, dopey appearance. “My daddy will give you whatever you want.”

“Daniel, knock it off,” the man in the back corner said. “For god sakes, what else do you expect someone who’s just been abducted to say?”

Daniel sneered; his face relaxed into that position like that’s where it was supposed to be. He pounded the back of Kyle’s seat and told him to hurry up. “I wanna get home and get this little princess locked up.”

Helena’s purse had swung off her shoulder when she was pulled into the van, and its contents were vomited across the grit and rubber mats on the floor. She began to gather her items, moving slowly as if to demonstrate she wasn’t a threat. A small cylinder had rolled too close to Daniel, and when she reached for it, he snatched it away.

“That’s mine,” she said, sharply even though she instantly regretted it.

“Is this some pretty perfume your daddy bought you?” Daniel mocked, uncapping to top and turning the nozzle towards himself. He pressed the white top, and Helena winced as a stream of pepper spray extended out into his face.

Daniel screamed and dropped the canister. The van swerved as Kyle startled and tried to look at what the commotion was. Helena scrambled to grab the pepper spray back as Daniel writhed in pain, breathing through clenched teeth like a snorting bull.

“You’re a goddamned idiot, Daniel,” the man in the back of the van was saying. “Control yourself or I’ll beat the life out of you when we get back.”

Daniel’s hips lifted upwards, and his entire body roiled in waves. The breathing became harder, and Helena watched in stunned silence as fur sprouted along the outside of his hands, creeping up his neck. He twisted, making snarling noises as his spine extended and his feet pushed against the restraints of his shoes. His clothes were starting to tear; the exposed flesh was quickly covered in the same fur that was coating his hands and neck.

“What the hell is going on?” Helena asked in a voice that was hardly above a whisper. When Daniel pulled his hands away from his face, she screamed. “What are you people?!”

“Your father knows us,” the man in the back corner said. “We’ve been working with him for years.”

Daniel was now settled on his haunches, his face elongated into a snout and his teeth bared at the rise of Helena’s scent. He sniffed as he took a step towards her but a slap landed across his wolf-like nose before he could get any closer. The man in the corner moved swiftly and was sitting back down before Helena even knew he had stood up.

“What’s your plan here, Daniel?” he chided. His voice was spiked yet tired like he had had this conversation too many times. “Gonna rip her apart right after we grab her? Then what?”

Daniel cowered and settled against the driver’s seat. With a low moan, he began to shift back. His clothes were tattered on the floor but he didn’t seem to mind sitting there naked. In fact, considering how frightened Helena looked at the sight of him, he rather enjoyed it.

“Look at her face,” he laughed. “Princess over here probably thinks I’m gonna rape her.”

“Or she’s never seen someone shift before,” the man in the corner said. “Now for your own good, shut up and sit down or I’ll throw you out of this van myself.”

Daniel squatted uncomfortably where he was, his eyes still on Helena. After a long moment, Helena went back to gathering her things but her hands were visibly shaking, giving her fear away with each tremor.

“We’re getting on the bridge so everyone stay down,” Kyle called from the front seat. “Especially the abducted girl and the naked, sweaty man.”

Helena crouched against the door of the van, glancing over it with flashing eyes to see if there was a way for her to open it once they were going slower by the toll booths. Even if she hurt herself when she jumped out, there was no way anyone was going to ignore her cries for help. Especially if she was followed by Daniel, violent and naked and freely swinging his dick at her.

“Don’t try it, Helena,” came the rumbled voice from the back of the van. “You’ll never be faster than any of us.”

So she didn’t. She did the one thing she wasn’t used to doing: sitting quietly and waiting for someone to tell her what to do. The air rushing out of her quivered loudly; no matter how she tried, it wouldn’t steady.

How many years had she spent wondering where her father’s money came from? How he handled conflicts that were deemed unwinnable? It wasn’t that this was out of the realm of possibility. Flashes of worst case scenarios inside of anxiety attacks reminded her that if her father was sinning, she was guilty by association. That quivering air got louder as every terrible thing she ever thought could happen flooded her at once.

Like most people, she had always assumed that in an insane situation like the one in which she currently found herself, the survival instinct inside of her would be triggered. She had thought it would be kind of like the movies where she’d leap out of the van at the last second before it pulled onto the freeway, tumbling along the shoulder of the road and getting bloodied just enough to denote damage. Of course, she never believed it would be exactly like the movies, and she had accepted the possibility of a broken bone or two, a concussion, something ultimately repairable. What she never imagined was that she would feel relief when the voice from the back told her not to make a break for it. She didn’t want to be kidnapped but she also didn’t want to hurl herself out of the side of a moving van. By then, she felt how fast they were going. At forty miles per hour the interior of the vehicle was a rocket for anyone contemplating a jump.

Through the top of the windshield, Helena watched the passing signs hanging from bridges and overpasses. Under one of them, she could see pedestrians walking and desperately tried to make eye contact. She didn’t have a thought for what she would do after eye contact was established but surrendering to this fate wasn’t coming easily. It was more than the danger, the threat of being maimed or killed or god only knows. Helena was used to being in control. The only times someone else got to call the shots was when her father was in the picture but until quite recently, he had pretty much let her do whatever she wanted. Which made the push for her to work with him even odder. Helena refused to let her mind wander to the sudden and unwelcome idea that her father was the one behind this.

Daniel’s eyes narrowed at her from across the van. He shifted on the balls of his feet, the ropey thighs in his muscles straining in the position. “We should have blindfolded her, man. She’s gonna know where we’re going. She can fucking see right out the windshield.”

“That doesn’t make a difference,” the man in the corner said.

“Why doesn’t it make a difference?” Helena asked in a small voice. When the man didn’t answer, she slapped her open palm hard against the rubber mats on the floor, angry at herself for the outburst as soon as she did it. “Why doesn’t it make a difference?!”

“Because we expect your father to cooperate quickly,” the man said without making eye contact with her.

“He will.” Helena clutched her purse to her chest. “I’m pretty sure he loves me.”

“Pretty sure.”

The man chuckled into the empty space in front of him. His gaze moved slowly along the molded metal interior of the van, the windows tinted too dark to be legal then to Helena who was breathing steadily despite how badly she was shaking.

“What?” Helena asked in the same small voice when his eyes stopped at her. “What is it?”

The man shrugged. “Just wondering what you were thinking right now. Like maybe you thought your father knew what was going on.”

“He can’t be behind this,” she said softly, giving away the doubt that had sprung forth in her chest and had begun a spiral inside of her, growing with each rotation. “He’s not that awful.”

“But he sure could have stopped it, baby doll,” the man told her with a hack to clear his throat. “He made his decisions, and he knew the consequences would include you.”