Page 4 of The Bodyguard Undone

I remember the explosion, which had felt like an earthquake but wasn’t, I knew that then.

Kayne finally reaches me when what seems to be more mini explosives go off around us. He cocoons my body with his, protecting me, guarding my body only with his own as a shield.

Oh god.

I close my eyes and clearly remember the face of the paramedic who sticks a needle into my arm. I’m begging him to find Kayne, but he laughs. A cynical, untypical laugh before blackness overwhelms me and I wake up here, in this place.

I whirl around the odd room, with its pink furniture, littered with the smell of disinfectant. I find a door and turn the knob but nothing happens.

“Kayne,” I scream as I alternate banging on the door and trying to break it down with my fists.

I try until my hands start aching. I use my shoulder to try and push it open but that action sets into motion a flood of pain that rolls over all of me.

Breathing heavily, I take a step back.

I don’t know where Kayne is. I don’t know where I am. My head hurts and a sluggish feeling overwhelms my senses as if thinking is too hard a task.

I lower myself back into the bed and force myself to breathe. Deep breaths. In and out.

There’s a part of me that I’m protecting. Daunting thoughts that would make my reality a nightmare but I’m too scared to open the lid of that particular box because the truth will kill me.

But I can’t stop avoiding it and slowly I allow myself to be in the shadows of those hellish thoughts.

Someone took me away from Kayne and brought me here. I don’t know where Kayne is and it fortifies my panic.

Instinctively I know he’s alive. I can still feel him, still feel his heartbeat against my palm as he laid over me, while the whole apartment building rained down all around us.

I glance around the room.

Made of stone, there’s a chill in the air that I hadn’t noticed before but now it slithers under my skin into my bones and festers like a disease.

A bed. A dresser filled with generic cosmetics. A hairbrush. A bottle of perfume, but the bottle is made of plastic.

Next to a small desk is a chair. The ground at my feet is nothing but stone, its unevenness hurts my bare feet.

Everything around me is pink. The covers on the bed. The color of the dresser. The cushion on the chair.

I stall my full-scale panic once more as I lift the pajama top. My body bears ugly purple bruises. There look to be hundreds of cuts on my legs but the bigger ones seem tended to, covered with band-aids.

I’m right. A lot of time has passed. Days. Maybe even a week, I shudder to think.

Have I been unconscious that whole time? Was I in a coma because of the explosion? Who tended to me? Who treated my wounds?

Where is Kayne? That question makes me pace the floor once again and start banging on the door.

I’m not with friends, this I know. I’m not being kept with friendly intentions. And I don’t know where I am.

I grab the chair, my intention to slam it against the steel door of the windowless room. My body cries out at the exertion but I ignore it. I’ll withstand anything if it means getting to Kayne.

The chair bounces back at me. I pick it up again and haul it to the door.

In a frenzy of trepidation, I start searching the stone walls for a secret button, another hidden door. I check the ground for loose stones, something I can dislodge that will open up and allow me to exit this place.

I come up with nothing except the chaos I have now left in the room. The bed has been moved, the desk toppled over, and the drawers ripped open as I search for a key, a clue to anything to help me escape so I can find Kayne.

Kayne.

I start to sob hysterically for the first time.

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