Chapter Thirty-seven

LUNA

In a last-ditch attempt to save my life, I raised my hand and sent two of my fingers into his eyes as hard as I could. He screamed and dropped me.

I crawled across the floor, holding my phone in a death grip, opened the bathroom door, struggled to my feet, and began running through the mall coughing and gasping for air.

I finally made it out and immediately Steve and Joshua saw me and ran to me, and I fell into them. All the guards surrounded me at once, and Joshua scooped me into his arms and took me to the car. He screamed at two of the guards to go in there.

“Are you okay, miss?” I opened my mouth and tried to speak, but words couldn’t make it out. And for a second, I thought that my windpipe was crushed. I just lay in the backseat, gasping for air, and trying to focus my vision.

All through the ride, I kept looking out the window, hoping that we weren’t being followed.

“You’re okay. You’re safe,” Steve said, trying to reassure me. I wasn’t reassured.

My mouth opened in a scream when I saw a huge black jeep coming straight at us from the front. I closed my eyes and braced for impact.

The jeep connected to ours, and my head hit the roof of the car while my body was thrown into the driver’s seat. I groaned. My neck hurt so much, it felt like something broke, and my back felt like my spine had been compressed together.

I could hear gunshots going off in the background, and panic immediately set in me. My brain just registered that the car was now upside down. I reached for the door handle, but someone else beat me to it. I wasn’t very enthused to see that it was the same man that I had nearly made blind. He smiled sickly at me, and yanked me out by my hair, dragging me to my feet, and towards another car. An SUV.

“No!!!” I screamed, but my resistance was met with a heavy-handed slap to the side of my face. My eyes saw stars and everything became a blur. I held on to his hand to reduce the pressure on my scalp while he pulled me along with him, then tossed me into the backseat like a ragdoll and shut the door. I tried opening the door and running out, but strong arms of steel held me from behind and pulled me into the last row of seats in the SUV.

“No!!!”

“Yes!!!” he laughed. I looked at him and he smiled at me, exposing a mouth with grills, and making his several scars stretch in a very ugly manner.

“I can now see why the boss would go through so much to have you. You are a pretty little thing. Better than all his other toys, if I do say so myself…”

I didn’t know what I was thinking. Or maybe I wasn’t thinking. I gathered saliva in my mouth and spat in his face. The action must have shocked him because his brain took a few seconds to register the offense, and when he did, he growled at me. His face morphed into that of a wolf.

“How dare you?” He sent his right fist into my face, and my head banged against the glass. I could hear a slight crack. My head began to feel light and my vision was getting blurry. Even with that, I could see when the bastard back at the mall slid into the driver’s seat covered in blood.

“Don’t rough her up too much,” he said to the guy in the back.

“The bitch spat at me!!!” the guy whined while wiping the saliva off of his face with a handkerchief.

“She poked her fingers in my eyes too. We can’t kill her, the boss wants her alive. And all her body parts intact. Unfortunately.”

“Hmm…but accidents happen, don’t they?”

“Put her to sleep.” I raised my hand over my head when the guy in back raised his hand again. I could feel blood trickling down my nose.

“Not like that,” he groaned, and mumbled something under his breath.

“Fine.” He brought out a piece of tissue from a sealed plastic bag and covered my nose with it.

I tried fighting it, holding my breath for as long as I could. But it was only a matter of time before I breathed in the chemical, and was sent into a dreamless, restless slumber…

When I came about, I was in a bed that wasn’t mine, and in a room that looked like it might have been a palace in the dark ages. The walls were stone, although the room had modern appliances I could see like the air conditioner, the television with some soap operas playing on it, as well as the water dispenser standing next to the window.

I tried getting up from the bed and immediately fell back down. My head hurt, and I groaned from the instant headache that plagued me. I grabbed my head and could feel the dry, clotted blood.

I took a deep breath and tried again, this time slowly and carefully. Every part of my body hurt. My back, my chest, my face. My neck. Everywhere. I sighed when I was able to successfully sit upright on the bed, and then I took a look around the room I was in again. It was fully furnished. It looked like a cross between medieval times and 21st-century interior design.

My bed was queen-sized, and I could see a vanity in the corner of the room. A huge, round table was in the center of the room, and I could see some books on it. it had a huge chair, and the edges of the chair looked like they were carved out of gold.

The room screamed wealth.

I saw three doors in the distance and thought to myself the first one must be the exit, the other the bathroom, and the third one the wardrobe.

I managed to get up from the bed and, using the furniture and wall for support, began to move around the room. I was only able to get to the vanity and then found that I was physically unable to anymore. I dragged my right leg and looked down when it didn’t budge. I saw a chain strapped to my leg, and tears immediately came to my eyes.

I choked back the tears and wiped my eyes, lifted my head and looked in the mirror. I gasped in shock when the monstrosity looked back at me. My hair was tangled, dirty with sweat and dust. I had bled through my nose and had dried blood that had stopped right above my upper lip. As though that wasn’t bad enough, my nose had shifted to the side from the force of the slaps I had received, and I couldn’t tell if it was broken or not.

My lips were busted open with red, purple, blue, and black bruises all over them. One side of my mouth was swollen. My eyes were a different and worse story. My right eye were so swollen, and it now made sense why it was hard for me to see with it. There were bruises all over my face.