Page 15 of Sinful Scars

What began as curiosity has turned into something much more serious, to the point where she consumes my every thought. Days go by without me even sleeping because I’m so afraid if I take my eyes off her, something bad might happen.

Tonight is proof of that, and I won’t make the same mistake again.

5

ELLE

I boltupright in bed to find the room cast in darkness, my body drenched in sweat. I reach for the blankets and pull them up to my chin as I glance over at the window to my left. The curtains are open, but there is no orange light being cast over the bed from the streetlamps outside. There are no sirens blaring and for once, I can’t hear the neighbor’s cat screeching outside my window, begging to be let inside?—

“Oh my god,” I gasp, my hand going to my heart as it all comes flooding back to me.

The kidnapping.

The gunshots.

All of it hits me like a ton of bricks, and I fall back against the pillows as I try to catch my breath, to calm the panic that has my heart racing in my chest and the phantom gunshots ringing in my ears.

I’m safe.

I take a breath, and a rich, musky scent hits my nose.Hisscent.

I bury myself deeper under the blankets and let my eyesflutter closed as my body starts to calm down as I become engulfed by my captor's scent.

Though perhaps he’s not my captor. After all, he’s the reason that I made it out of that motel room alive with nothing more than a ripped blouse.

I should be grateful and yet, I can’t decide whether or not I trust him fully.

How can I when he insisted on locking me inside this room?

He said it was for my own safety, but I can’t help but wonder whether it was to keep me safe fromhim.

“I should be freaking out,” I whisper into the darkness. And yet…I’m not.

Maybe the trauma of last night has put me into a state of shock and at some point in the coming hours, it will hit me properly. I mean, I’m not exactly fitting the profile of someone who has been kidnapped by two different people in one night.

I’m too calm, too at ease given the strange bed and the even stranger man waiting on the other side of the door.

If Lucia was here, she would be laughing and making crude jokes about how it takes a kidnapping to get me alone in a room with a man because that’s how averse to dating I’ve become.

The thought almost makes me smile, but then the tears start to well in my eyes as I think of my cousin, and the spiral starts to pull me under.

From how dark the sky is, it’s likely I slept the whole day away which means two things. The two men in the motel will have been discovered by now, so whoever put out the hit on me will be trying to piece together a trail that could lead to wherever the hell it is I am. For all I know, mydeath might be imminent in the coming hours, which is not exactly a comforting thought.

The second is that I still have no idea whether Lucia is safe.

I can only hope that her name was used as a ploy to keep me quiet because the alternative has my heart threatening to crack in two.

Sinking deeper beneath the blankets, I start working through a grounding technique that a therapist taught me years ago that helps to pull me out of my catastrophizing thoughts. It doesn’t always work but, seeing as I’m locked in a room with no other options, I try it anyway.

“Okay, five things I see…” I try to distinguish something through the utter darkness around me, then I turn to look up at the ceiling. “Absolutely nothing. Great start.”

Next!

Four things I can feel.

The silk of my blouse. The soft cotton of the blanket. The smooth wood of the headboard?—

“Don’t want to think about headboards.” I absentmindedly rub at the sore skin around my wrists, trying not to think of how close I came to being assaulted. “Ugh, this isn’t working.”

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