Page 77 of Glass Wings
Why did you come back? How could you be so stupid?
The regret of not using yesterday, a day where she went unsupervised, to find her phone, had begun building in her as she made her way down the hallway and to the top of the stairs. Her stomach had begun to turn, and nausea crept in from the pain of forcing herself to stand upright. She debated whether or not she could descend the stairs on her hands and knees. Her head was just so heavy.
Pulling her strength together and focusing on supporting most of her weight with the railing, Hadley put one foot in front of the otheruntil she touched the first floor, still undetected. Creeping along the wide hallway directly in front of her, she emerged into the entryway, the pentagram ceiling more sinister than ever over her head.
Go out the door. Run.
She did it. She was here. Where would she go? She didn’t know, but if she could just find somebody, anybody, who would let her use their phone for just a minute, she could get Hector back over here.
With a deep breath, Hadley placed her hands on the door handle and pushed, stepping out onto the smooth stone with freedom finally in front of her. Her body hovered momentarily, a low pull of desire trying to prevent her from leaving Sheng’s scent, but she pushed through and nearly skipped down the path, passing the fountain and hitting the driveway.
Run.
Hadley picked up her feet, pumping her legs faster, her strides longer and longer until she had broken out into a full sprint during the mid-November morning. Her slip was riding up as she kept going, harder and stronger. She didn’t care. She couldn’t care. She was no longer under his spell, and she would never come back.
With birds singing in the nearby trees of Sheng’s neighbors, she felt like she was in a cartoon nightmare. It was over now. She would run until she couldn’t any longer and find a phone, a person, a woman, anyone that could help her get home. She wouldn’t be a victim.
Her muscles throbbed, and she almost toppled over as she turned the block. The heavy feeling in her head moved down to her upper back. The pain took her breath away.
She moaned loudly, falling on the sidewalk, scratching her face on the rough cement in the process. That fire, the pain that she felt, was like someone was chopping into her with an axe. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe. She could only whimper and hope that someone would see her and call an ambulance.
“Help,” she managed to scream meekly under a rush of air to her lungs as that invisible axe hit her again and again.
“Help,” she whispered, trying to crawl forward.
Find a driveway. Find a door.
Arms scooped Hadley up off the sidewalk as nausea hit her again. Her head and her body hung limp; whoever had run up to help held her weight easily.
The invisible axe hit her back again, and she cried out, opening her eyes to see the blue sky with dark gray clouds rolling in from a distance.
“Thank you,” she whispered into those arms. “I thought I was going to die. I thought that I would die and no one would care.”
Hadley closed her eyes, feeling her stomach turn and her back ache, not paying any attention to the fact that the feet carrying her did not seem to be taking her nearby. No police sirens or an ambulance were pulling up to a victim screaming for help on the sidewalk, but Hadley was too defeated to notice. She was exhausted.
“I would care,” Amis’ voice said softly as he carried Hadley back up to Sheng’s property. “We would all be devastated if you died.”
Panic filled Hadley’s veins the next time she opened her eyes. She wasn’t being carried, and she was no longer outside. Her situation was quite the opposite.
Where am I?
She was laying out in pitch-black darkness.
“Hello?” she shouted before screaming; more pain, more axes hitting her shoulder blades. Hadley let the wave pass over her before she stood, holding her arms out in front of her, trying to feel her way through the darkness. She stepped and stumbled, hearing the sound of a chain and the discomfort of metal hitting her toes. That chain was around her ankle.
Her hands grasped the shackle and tried to claw at it, praying it was not locked. It was immovable.
Panicked, she crawled on her hands and knees, still not able to see anything. There had to be something in this room to give her a clue, an idea of where she was.
Hadley ran headfirst into a very solid structure and felt like someone had just slammed her face with a baseball bat. She whimpered for a few moments, feeling the blood gush down from hernose, pooling in her mouth. She spit it out and realized how soft the floor was. Wherever she was had plush carpet.
Letting her hands explore, Hadley touched the surface she had run into, feeling wood carved and painted over. Her fingers delicately caressed over familiar, thin metal handles spread an even distance apart.
The lights turned on, blinding her. After a few moments of exaggerated blinking, Hadley’s suspicions were confirmed. She was in her own closet inside Sheng’s house. The chain shackled to her ankle was fastened to something behind the left side clothing rack and looked as if it had a good five or six feet worth of slack to it. She might be able to reach the door.
Her eyes flickered to the exit, the hidden door behind Sheng’s closet, to see the man who had brought her here. Amis stood there, wearing his normal attire of a button-down dress shirt and slacks. The look on his face was something that she could not decipher. Was it a surprise? Was it satisfaction? Was it lust?
It seemed like a combination of all three.
