his breath
assaults my face. It’s disgusting. Smelling of tooth decay and garlic. My stomach
roils, the vomit is rising into my throat. I quickly take a deep breath, trying
to calm my stomach but not upsetting this man with my movements.
“I don’t have anything to do with
Dean, he’s keeping me captive.”
The man releases my neck and slaps
me. Hard. “Learn quickly you do not lie, and you do not speak unless spoke too.
I won’t warn you again. Next time there will be a bullet in your head. Now, we
both know that you are not captive. You are sleeping on a couch that is worth
more than my apartment. You’re dating Dean, we all know this but despite his
hard work…” The man stops for a moment rethinking his words “Despite the
bridges he has burned, I have you now. And you are coming with me.”
He reaches down onto the floor and
grabs my black flip flops. Placing them roughly onto my feet.
He forcefully pulls me up off the
couch, dragging me across the room. His fingers are sinking into my arm, I can
tell there is going to be some serious bruising.
We walk into the hall and that is
when I see Marco, lying unconscious, with a bullet wound in his shoulder.
The man notices me looking at him.
“He aint dead, but you will be if you don’t walk faster.”
My ability to refrain from being
sick up to this point ends suddenly I bend over quickly and throw up. I can’t
stop. The man seems really disgusted by my action. He spins away from me trying
to avoid being splattered. He grabs the back of my head, I can feel the strands
of hair being pulled from my scalp.
“Fucking disgusting, I don’t get
paid enough for this shit.”
I finally finish, and he grabs me
again, stepping around the mess I have made a few feet from Marco.
I start to think of Dean, is he
going to know who took me. Is he going to care? And what about my baby. Are
these people going to kill me?
I realize now, that my fear of
being held captive by Dean was minimal to what I am now feeling being led away
by this man. He is not good. Whoever he is working for is going to be so much
worse. I have no idea what is going to happen to me, I have no idea what I am
going to do.
Chapter 8
The man leads me back down a dark
hallway. He knows his way around this building. Do Ryan and Dean know him?
He pulls out a cell phone. One of
those disposable phones that you see in the drug store on display; ‘pay as you
go.’
“Yeah boss, I got her.”
He mumbles a few more things, and
then hangs up the phone. He lets go of me long enough to dismantle the phone
into several pieces. He throws the pieces to the ground and steps on them. The
sound of crunching plastic echo’s against the heavy cement walls.
He grips my arm forcefully once
more, and pulls me towards a black van with dark tinted windows. When he opens
the door, two men with guns are sitting on the inside. Neither of them look any
friendlier than the man beside me. None of them look like they give a shit what
happens to me.
I risk a glance behind me, the way
that we came through. I think of Dean. I think of how I can show him I have
been here?
Suddenly I think of the only thing
I can leave behind that will tell him I was here. I carefully as though not to
attract attention to the men who surround me as to my real motives, stumble.
When I do, the man with the bad teeth grabs me picking me up and tosses me into
the van giving me the chance to accidentally “drop” my flip flops off.
The men are so annoyed when I
scream at the action of being thrown that they don’t notice. The man gets in
behind me and quickly slams the door shut. The woman driving the van pulls out
quickly.
She’s pretty. Or she was probably
pretty at one time. She is older, maybe in her 50’s. She has pretty eyes, but
the rest of her looks hard. Hard and pretty.
She peels out of the garage. She
drives