“The night we got arrested?”
“Yes,” she says. “Julian, Cole and Liam all bested Sean and that enraged him even further. I mean, Julian beat him up pretty badly that night after Sean said something to him that made him snap and he vowed to make him pay.”
“Through me,” I whisper, seeing it all now. She nods, her eyes wide. “That’s why they beat me?”
She nods again.
“What did they use?”
“Trust me, Mia, you don’t want to know.”
What could that mean? My mind starts racing with all sorts of possibilities, trying to categorize the pain I’m in but also dreading the answer.
“What about this gash to my head?” I whisper. “You were there when they abducted me, right?”
“I was tied up at the back of the van, but I did see you put up one hell of a fight, like a banshee out of hell, you even punched Sean who then knocked you out with a blow to the head,” she says.
“God,” I whisper.
“Mia… I also overhead him tell them to do that.”
“What?”
“Hitting you over the head, I heard him tell them to do that to you.”
The thundering of my heart threatens to drown out her words, but I heard them loud and clear. But still, like I’m addicted to my own pain, I still ask.
“Overheard who?”
“Your father,” she whispers, a frown on her face that makes her bruises prominent. “Why would he do that? Why would he give such a specific instruction?”
Because he knows what happened to me the last time I sustained a blunt force injury to the head.
I lost my memory.
And now, my father wants the same thing to happen… so he can control me all over again.
“I don’t know,” I mutter, my voice hoarse and cracked.
Kristine doesn’t say a word. She just peers down at me silently assessing.
“Well, it’s stopped bleeding, but it still looks bad, but I don’t think we’re going to get out of here.”
We need to get out. Even if it’s the last thing we do.
“What else happened to me, Kristine?” I whisper, dread choking me up. “Did they—”
“Just don’t, Ice Queen,” she says softly. “Don’t do that to yourself. Right now, you need to focus on staying alive more than anything else.”
Silence.
I can’t stop the horrors in my mind or the scenarios of what happened to me when I was knocked out. Anything could’ve happened. Maybe they already raped me…
I start gasping, feeling like the walls are closing in on me. I can’t stay here a second longer. I need out.
“Kristine, we need to get out of here,” I seethe.
“You’re not listening to me,” Kristine says. “It’s impossible.”
“You just said they’re not here.”
“Yes, but they locked us in, and have you seen the windows? They’re all the way up there! Spiders and fucking rats can escape, not us.”
Looking up, I can see what she means but I refuse to think there’s no way out.
“There must be another place to escape, a hidden door they didn’t check or a window at the back.”
“I checked everywhere, as soon as they left to set up a trap for the Fitz brothers—”
“What?” I demand, snapping my head to look at her. That’s a bad move as agony rips me a new one. I’d rather someone behead me than feel this acute any second longer, but Julian… “What do you mean ‘to set a trap’?”
Kristine looks uncomfortable now, her one eye shifting from one side of the warehouse to another, and me? I can’t breathe right anymore.
My boys are in danger.
“Kristine, please. You have to tell me.”
“And then what, Mia? What are you going to do? Climb up there to get out through those tiny-ass windows so you can save those more than capable gods, when in fact, they should be saving you?” Kristine spits, getting up now, her body trembling. She looks wild and unhinged. “Look around you, Mia. Those bastards chose their stage well. There’s no leaving this hellhole until they say so and even then, I think it’ll be in body bags.”
A shudder goes down my spine.
The truth is, she’s right. About everything, but that still doesn’t stop my heart from yearning with the need to protect them.
“What are they planning for Julian?”
“Some mind game before they kill him, Mia, what do you think?” she snaps. “Right now, they’re hosting some kind of back-to-school party bullshit at their mansion and they invited Julian, Liam and Cole through that video of you. I heard bits and pieces of their plan.”
“And what is it?”
“Mia—”
“We don’t have time for this, Kristine! What’s their fucking plan?”
“You really don’t want to know.”
“I’m naked, bleeding, half frozen and fucking in the middle of hell where no one would care to find me, what is their fucking plan?”
She’s silent for a beat but doesn’t look away. “They want to prolong your torture. The things they’re planning for you…”
She trails off but I get the warning. I get the message. It finally sinks in.
I’m not just bait, I’m the torture device. And knowing Julian, he’ll go full-on devil-Hercules on them. He’ll snap and be on a war path that I’m pretty sure will make blood flow. And looking at this slaughterhouse, it might be his blood. Or Cole. Or even Liam. I can’t have that.
“Mia, they plan to make you suffer in the most excruciating, humiliating way and I just… I’m pretty sure neither one of us will make it.”
“But you’re pregnant!”
“Like that matters,” she spits, but the sad note in her voice is hard to miss as she cradles her baby bump.
“Who’s the father, Kristine?” I whisper, my heart racing.
She shakes her head, tears streaming down her face all over again.
“Just don’t, okay,” she snaps. “I just woke you because you were doing this weird thing of shivering and scratching at your self-inflicted cuts on your wrists.”
Silence.
“I’m not perfect, okay!” I snap.
“I see that now,” she mutters. “Anyway, you were shivering, scratching and then you stopped and muttered something unintelligible right before you went stone cold, like you were dead. It freaked me out.”
“Dying,” I sigh. “It would help right about now.”
I feel her gaze on me, and from the corner of my eye, I see her eyeing my arms now exposed over the sheet, holding it to me. “You’re all sorts of messed up, aren’t you? Not so perfect as we all thought.”
“I never painted myself in a perfect light, Kristine,” I snap, tired of her narrative of me. “I was just a girl, trying to go through high school—”
“Which you didn’t need. Roxy Bishop said that about you. She said you were just dumbing down, letting us think you were like us when in fact, you’re like a freaking genius.”
“My mother was dying!” I yell, pain slamming me in the chest once more but this time, I let myself feel it. “The woman I thought was my mother was dying from ALS and all I knew was I wasn’t going anywhere because she needed me. So, forgive me if I didn’t give you the attention you wanted, Kristine. Forgive me for keeping my emotions tightly reigned in, which all went up in flames the moment Julian set his piercing gaze on me. Forgive me for being human and like you said, being fucked up because you know what? I’m still fighting,” I say, breathing hard and fast, pain swooshing through my body in waves. “I might hurt myself and think of dying more often than not but I’m not allowed to die. He will never allow me to and that makes it my will to stay alive at any costs because I love him! I love Julian with all my heart, against my better judgement and you know what? We might never be anything beyond a summer fling and enemies for the rest of our lives because of all the hate, but I want to live! So we need to fucking get out of here!”