Page 16 of Ugly Truths
“She’s really fighting those sedatives,” a familiar voice says somewhere nearby. There’s a faint note of amusement threaded through it.
“She should enjoy them while they last,” a female voice replies. “I can’t imagine what they’re going to do with her once we get back.”
A cold wave moves through me, but my body doesn’t respond. I try to lift a hand, shift my head, but it’s like being pinned beneath my own weight.
My mind screams at me to stay awake, to memorize their voices, to find an exit, but the pull of unconsciousness drags harder.
My eyes flicker shut before I can stop them, swallowed by the dark once again.
—
When I wake for the final time, the first thing I notice is the silence, because the ringing in my ears is almost deafening.
My head throbs with a slow, pulsing ache radiating from the base of my skull. Nausea surges up fast, curling through my gut. I turn my head just in time to retch bile onto the floor, the acid burning the back of my throat and nose. Thin bands of pressure cinch against my wrists, chest, and calves, digging into skin already rubbed raw.
My vision swims as I blink and force my gaze downward. I’m tied to a chair. Coarse rope winds around my limbs, pinningme to the arms, legs, and back of it. The wood creaks beneath me as I shift, but the bindings don’t budge.
It takes several minutes for my mind to stop spinning long enough to absorb the rest of it. The room is bare with concrete walls. No windows or furniture aside from the chair I’m in. A single fluorescent light flickers above, casting harsh shadows and an unsettling hum that buzzes under my skin.
My chest tightens.
I pull at my arms again, but the ropes only dig deeper, cutting off circulation and leaving more angry, red marks in their wake. Terror rushes in to fill the space, flooding my veins like fire. My fingers go numb. My toes, too.
I force myself to count my breaths.
One. Two. Three.
I can’t lose it. Not now.
Before I can steady myself, there’s a sound outside the door. A low rumble, then the sharp screech of metal scraping metal.
“Well, well, well.”
My lungs seize. The breath I’ve just managed to take vanishes as my body locks up on instinct. I don’t need to see his face to know who it is.
My gaze drops to the floor before the door even fully opens, like some part of me remembers exactly how to protect itself.
“Look who’s back from the dead,” he announces, voice laced with both amusement and pure venom.
I don’t have to look up to feel it—his fury, thick and oppressive, trickling into the room ahead of him like smoke before a fire. His shadow stretches across the floor. It crawls over the concrete, swallowing the light until it touches me.
Not skin, not breath, not voice. Just the weight of him. The presence. The promise. It wraps around me and chokes.
Silent and inescapable.
Chapter 8
Elena
My eyes are fixed on the raw marks forming around my wrists, on my jeans stained from my shift at Bluebird’s, on the cement directly in front of me. Anywhere but him.
Even with all our careful planning, he still found me.
Why did I expect anything less?
Footsteps echo, each one a fraying thread in a rope of a guillotine. My body refuses to move, even when the tips of his polished shoes enter my line of sight.
The rage rolls off of him in waves, pummeling me.
