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“Let me guess,” I mused out loud, watching the passing trees. “Thai cuisine!” The excitement of eating my favorite food had me almost bouncing off my chair.
“Ha,” Luca muttered, but it was noncommittal. Usually he was right there with me when I joked, but his tone felt off. As if he had to force his answer. “No.”
He must’ve taken a few more turns while I was watching him closely, paying too much attention to his answers because when I looked up, I didn’t recognize the road we were on.
My hand came to the handle and I squeezed in attempt to calm my beating heart. Trees turned into flat pastures and the road slowly merged into gravel. A few minutes passed before I finally said anything else.
“Where are we?”
He had probably brought me to some secluded spot that was sentimental to him. Luca was a collector of everything. We would give him a hard time about the kind of crap he would hoard in his room that had no value whatsoever.
He slowed down a little and suddenly the car seemed too small. The air too tight.
“Luca?” I followed the familiar lines of his jaw and neck, searching for something. Anything. Anything at all that could reassure me that I knew my friend. “Where are you taking me?”
He didn’t answer. Not when the car was traveling down the bumpy road, and not when lights beamed in the middle of the night like a beacon of glass. The Cathedral. I had been here a few times, but all those times were during the day, and at night, there were no streetlights. The building illuminated through the stained glass at the front. Green, blue, gold, red. It was all I could see at this time of the night, and when Luca stopped the car in front of a man who sat inside a small office at the entry of the driveway, I held my breath.
One man went to Luca’s window, the other to mine. They were dressed in all black with a brown leather strap across their broad chest to hold AKs and all sorts of weird weapons.
Luca wound down our windows, and the man at my side leaned in, nothing but his eyes on display. A black mask covered the lower half of his face when he reached into the car and grabbed my phone.
“Luca,” I said, panic now tearing at my insides. Maybe there was a reason why Niko never wanted me to come here without him. “What—” Just as I turned to face him, the base of a gun was flying toward my face and everything went black.
My head pounded like a boxer was hitting it time and time again seconds apart. I wanted to open my eyes, needed to, but fear stirred inside my belly every time I tried. It was like weighted fucking glue stuck them down.
“What—” The smell hit me first. Pungent, and tough, yet strangely mellow. It wasn’t disturbing as much as it was odd. “Where am I?”
Finally, I was fully alert as I brought my hands to my sockets, rubbing the goo away. I touched the side of my head and winced when that same pounding intensified, and my fingers collided with a hard lump. I slowly pushed myself to my feet, taking this time to look around the room. Windowless, cold, and empty, but it’s what I was standing on that grabbed my attention.
I stepped back to get a better look and froze when I recognized the structure. Large wooden poles shaped into an upside-down L, then a rope hanging from the middle of the one that went above your head.
Gallows.
What the fuck.
I jumped down from the wooden platform, shaking off the prickling stabbing pains that were shooting down my spine. When I reached the only door in the room, a large steel rectangle that had no handle or lock on this side, I banged my fist over the metal.
“Hello!” I screamed, hitting my fist again and again. “Let me out!” I hammered on that door until my knuckles bled and my throat stung from my cries.
Sliding down the wall while keeping my eyes locked on the door, hopeful that someone was going to walk through and tell me that it was a misunderstanding, I pulled my legs up to my chest and cradled my arms around them as the tears dried against my cheeks. Why would Luca do this? He had to have something to do with this, right? Or maybe he was a hostage too and they had him locked up as well.
My hair had long since hardened from all my lost tears sticking to my face. It wasn’t until I was finally giving in to fatigue that I heard a slow creaking sound, like hinges being widened for the first time in years.
