Page 10 of Burn

I squeezed my eyes closed as grief wrapped around my throat. The man in the bed kept talking aboutme. What if they took Amorette first thinking she was me? What if…

No, I couldn’t think like that.

It didn’t matter how much I tried to push it away, the dark thoughts continued to swirl with all the terrible possibilities. Sleep seemed elusive, yet I must have passed out at some point.

Between one blink and the next, there was light in the room and the blanket was pulled away. “Get up,” my captor said. Dressed only in pants, he tugged me up from the pallet. My sleep-fogged brain fought to catch up to where we were.

“I’m sorry,” I started to say. He’d said he would call me and I needed to kneel, but he only shook his head and gave me a shake.

“Silence. I am taking your shackle off, you will come with me and stay with me, do you understand?”

Not even a little bit. Rather than argue, though, I just nodded. He moved to where the shackle locked around my ankle and he unlocked it.

“Dress.” He pointed to my abandoned clothes. “Now.” The snap got me moving. I managed to get the bra, panties, and t-shirt on, before he gripped my arm and hurried me to the door leaving my jeans behind.

Well, at least I had panties on.

When he opened the door and let more light spill in, two things hit me at once. He had a gun in his free hand and there were shouts coming from down the hall.

Shouts and?—

The pop-pop-pop sound echoed toward us. Ice then heat flashed through me. The guard who’d been out there the night before was gone. Instead of heading back to where the beds, women, and men had been, my captor hurried me the other way down the hall.

His grip on my arm had more iron than the shackle that had been around my ankle. A string of invectives left him. At least I thought they were, I didn’t understand the language. The tone, however, wasveryclear.

More than once, I banged my toes off the uneven cement pavers. Gunfire carried up the hall, then something whistled past and slammed into the wall. Every muscle in my body locked up as a hole appeared in the wall just ahead of us.

Not seeming to realize I’d stopped moving, my captor hauled me along. Then he pushed me toward the other wall as he turned. I’d seen guns before. Even held one in a couple of shoots.

I’d never been right next to one when it was fired. The sound from down the hall had nothing to being right on top of it. The bangs were loud, and seemed to redouble in the narrow hall.

I followed his aim to see who he was shooting at. It wasn’t quite real. There were actually people shooting atus. One man went down when half of the back of his head painted the wall. Another doubled over. There was a grunt from my captor and I swung my head back to see a red stripe across his shoulder. There was a second along his ribs.

“Come,” he ordered, dragging me again. This time it was real dragging. I couldn’t seem to get my legs to work. I kept staring down the hall at the pair of men who weren’t moving anymore.

He’d killed them.

Shouts carried toward us. More were coming.

My captor hauled me closer, then gave me a hard shake. “Run.”

I wasn’t even sure I could run.

One glance behind us showed more men approaching. If I said nothing, would they kill him? Would they kill me? What I wanted to do was get away from all of them.

His gun roared again. Then there was plaster from the wall splintering. Something hot scraped against me and it burned. The grip on my arm vanished. It took a moment to sink in that my captor was retreating down the hall ahead of us firing back at the men who were running toward us.

As much as I wanted to do something, anything, I didn’t move. I juststoodthere.

Two of the men ran past me, shooting after my captor. The roars of the guns made my ears hurt. Another man skidded to a halt in front of me. Then he said something in garbled language.

His mouth moved, but no sound registered. Was he actually talking to me? Why couldn’t I hear him? His scowl deepened and he caught me with the back of his hand. Honestly, it was a relief when my head hit the wall and darkness fell like a curtain.

The next time I opened my eyes, it was to darkness, a dank smell, and the sound of breathing around me. Low voices called out to each other. A mixture of Spanish and English. Enough that I could understand.

There was an old man. A young boy. A woman. A different, second woman. A third woman said something but she wasn’t speaking Spanish, it was French. More like Montreal French rather than Paris.

I cataloged the different sounds and accents. The voices in the dark told me a few things. The primary one was we were definitely not in the warehouse anymore. The second was we were moving. The third was someone had to relieve themselves and they’d made use of a pail.

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