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He wants to leave her.
He wants to leave anyone here who’s still alive, in favor of us getting out. Indignation burns my chest and I glance over at Ansel and Ronan. They don’t stop him. They don’t speak up against him, and that only fuels the heat behind my ribs.
“Hope you have a plan,” I whisper, taking steps backwards, heading for the light spilling out of the door, and the hunter there. “Otherwise, I’m dead here.”
And with that I turn, stepping into the light and being greeted by a surprised snarl of alarm and someone tackling me back against the wall, hand fisted in my hood as they yell for their companions to come help them bring me inside.
13
Iswear I see Ansel reach for me, almost lunging into the light, but Ronan and Adrien catch him and pull him back, dragging him into the shadows. My heart flutters behind my ribs as my hair is wrenched in a man’s iron grip, and I cry out in surprise and pain when I’m yanked inside.
The door slams behind me with finality, but the man doesn’t stop. He pulls me forward by my hair, ripping it out of its ponytail, until he can throw me to the floor just inside the main room of the roller rink.
It looks…different here.
Really fucking different, if I’m being honest. The counters are filled with large cases, some of them empty, while others hold weapons. Blades shine in the dim light, and a fucking buffet of snacks is set out on the food counter. The skate counter rental side looks like where everyone had dumped their stuff, and the disco ball above me spins, having apparently been fixed sometime recently. Light reflects off of the walls, and it’s hard to focus on anything with the room swimming in and out of light.
“Isn’t that Jonah’s?” a man asks, walking by without a mask on. His eyes are blacked out, and his clothes are splattered with blood that looks too dark to be anything but real. “That cheap motel bitch or whatever.”
That cheap motel bitch.
What a fucking way to be remembered.
“Sable works, actually,” I huff, stumbling to my feet when the man who’d dragged me in here walks away. I turn to follow him with my gaze as he heads for the buffet table, but when I’m forced to look past the roller rink, I freeze.
Slowly, because I already know what I’m going to see, I turn my eyes back to the open space in the middle of the room. The disco ball lights are closer together on the polished wood, and give a sense of fantasy to the scene. It almost distorts the reality of Miranda hanging from ropes in the middle of the room, her insides more on her outsides rather than where they need to be.
For the first time tonight, I have to clap my hand over my mouth in order not to vomit. Blood still drips from her opened up body and I jerk back a step, even though I’m at least twenty feet away from her. Some lurid part of my brain continues to catalogue her injuries and the destruction to her body, and I can’t help feeling like someone had reached into her abdominal cavity with a hook to scoop out her insides.
The mental picture is too much. My nose burns as bile claws up my throat, and my eyes begin to water even as I swallow down the influx of saliva in my mouth. I gasp for air and finally turn away, physically staggering to do it, only to see the balding man who’d dragged me in from outside picking up a few pieces of food from the table.
When he sees me looking, he grins. In the dim, retro lighting of the roller rink, the look feels more sinister than it should, and sends a shudder through me. “You hungry? You probably haven’t eaten in what, over a day?” He gestures at the buffet table like he’s being nice, when I’m sure there’s no way he’s actually offering.
Not to mention, I doubt I could keep anything down right now.
“Why would you do that to her?” I find myself whispering before I can stop myself. There’s no reason to ask these monsters anything. Not when they do this for fun. But I can’t help myself.
“You mean in general, or her specifically?” the man plops down in a booth, his eyes on me like he isn’t worried I’ll make a run for it. The way he just sits there, relaxed, makes me wonder why he isn’t more afraid of me.
At the very least, he should’ve checked me for weapons. On second thought, I’m lucky they hadn’t. And more than that, why would they? These men don’t have any reason to think that I’ve stashed away any–
“You checked her for weapons, right?” The voice breaks through the low music and the murmur of two men standing by a far door. They glance up just as the bathroom door opens, revealing the woman in the clown-like dress from earlier.
Now, though, most of her makeup is gone. She looks tired, as if she’s at the tail end of a night full of partying, and as she closes the distance between us, I find her gaze interested. Shrewd, instead of threatening.
“I remember you,” she says, no longer in that sing-song voice from earlier at the fence. “The smart one. You and her. Well…” she glances towards Miranda’s body. “Maybe not her now. She was determined, you know. She told us until the end she’d kill us. That she was going to get out of here.”
The girl pauses, and when she finally stops in front of me, I take the time to look her over. If I had to guess, she’s around the same age as me. Her blonde hair is up in high, thick pigtails, and the ends look like they’ve been died bright orange. That and the dress clash with her hair almost painfully, but somehow she pulls it off.
“Do you have any weapons?” she asks, surprising me at the question. “It’ll be better for you if you give me anything you have before I have to search you. If you lie–”
I don’t wait for the rest of the threat to land. Before she can finish, I pull the sheathed knife carefully from my lower back, where it’s still been bumping uncomfortably in my ass this whole time, no matter how hard I’d tried to ignore it.
Her face falls in surprise before she catches herself, and the woman reaches out carefully to take it with a look of almost respect on her face. “Where’d you get it?”
“Jonah,” I lie. “He’s dead.”
The girl pauses in her examination of the blade, and in the ensuing silence brought on by the declaration, the man sitting at a booth scrambles to his feet, nearly knocking over the plate of food.
