Page 75 of Ravaged With You

Silence.

I reach out, crawling to my left, away from the stone wall to my right. But I barely go a foot before hitting another wall. Then another. It’s a box. A small stone box. A miniature prison, like a dollhouse for the damned.

And I’m in here all alone.

“Red,” I whisper, my eyes too dry to shed tears. “Please be safe. Please, please be alive.”

I pull my knees up and hug them to my chest, telling myself I have to think logically. I have to figure out what happened. I have to try to find some advantage, though God knows what that could be.

Think, dammit. What do you know? What can you do?

The do part of that equation is pretty minimal. I have no weapons, no clothes, no idea where I am, where Red is, or how to get out of this room.

Trapped. I’m trapped.

I squeeze my hands tight and close my eyes, telling myself to calm down. There’s no real point in closing my eyes, but at least this way, it’s supposed to be dark.

“It can’t have been that long,” I say. “And they want something. If they’d just wanted me dead, they would have killed me in the car.”

The car. I realize with a start that until that moment, I’d remembered nothing from before. I’d simply been here, alone without Red. But I didn’t remember how that had come to pass. Didn’t even realize the memory was missing.

But it floods back now. The feel of him as I straddled him in the car. His horror that the woman who’d tormented him for so many months was alive. That she’d been playing cat and mouse with us.

That she’d sent men to bring us in.

I hear a pitiful sound, and realize it’s coming from me. I’m seeing those laser sights again, feeling the rough hands on my arms hauling me out of Red’s car, the ache in my throat as I scream his name, the bile that rises as Red slumps to the ground, a man in black with aviator glasses sneering at his inert form.

I screamed and fought, but it didn’t matter. All it took was one fist against my jaw. I tasted blood. My head hit the pavement.

And then I woke up in the dark.

But it hasn’t been that long.

I think about that, wondering how I know that. I’m not hungry, but that could be because of fear. But I don’t think so. I think it’s only been a few hours. And if that’s true, the maybe, surely, Red is still alive.

Surely, I’ll see him again.

I shiver, the possibility that I won’t too horrible to contemplate.

I hug myself, trying to organize my thoughts, but to what end? I have neither skills nor opportunity. I’m in a box. I’m in a coffin.

I start to shake, fear settling deep in my bones.

“Stop it,” I say. “It’s going to be fine. Red will make it fine.”

“Oh, I sincerely doubt that.” The woman’s voice is low and melodic with an accent I can’t place. It seems to surround me, and I can’t tell if she’s in front of me, behind, or above.

Above? Am I in a pit?

I look up, and I think that maybe—possibly—I see a glimmer of light. And then, as I blink and my eyes adjust, I know that I’m right. About the light and about the pit. Because that’s where I am, and someone is opening it from the top and light is seeping in, and then, suddenly, I’m blinking at white, blinding light.

I cringe and throw my arm over my eye, then tumble backward when someone slams me in the chest with some sort of prod.

I cry out and scurry backward, my eyes adjusting to see that one of the walls has swung away like a door, and two men dressed entirely in black stand behind a woman in a black suit skirt and a silk tank, her stiletto heels little more than nail points on the stone floor.

“Where’s Red? What have you done with him?”

“You will find out soon enough, Josephine,” she says in that same accent. “But first, I should introduce myself. I’m the bitch who’s going to torture the man you’re fucking, you naughty little whore. And do you know how I will do this thing? Hmm?”