AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Ten yards now. I’m so close.
Five yards. Almost there.
The back of my neck prickles, and I know there’s someone right behind me. I push on.
One yard.
I slam into the metal, unable to slow down in time. My fingers grasp above me, and my toes find purchase in the chain-link fence. I slowly—so slowly—climb, jerking my hands up in short increments so that I have enough time to grab back on before backward momentum takes me down.
This is a painstaking process.
How have they not gotten me by now?
I couldn’t have been that fast. I look down. I’m higher than I thought. Up, up, up I crawl, and then I’m at the top. The links shake as a body slams into the metal below me, and then they rattle as the person starts to climb. I grab on to the top, trying to scramble my lower body up and out of reach. I grab the barbed wire on accident, slicing my palm open.
I don’t think I’m breathing. I brace my hands on the top and start to swing my leg over, completely exposed from the slit in my skirt. I pray I don’t drop my pussy onto a sharp point of the barbed wire.
Then, my breath catches as a hand grabs my ankle, stopping my leg from going over and holding fast. I kick.
“Get off me, asshole,” I scream, using my words as my own armor. If I say it, I can make it happen. I shake my leg again, then sob. “Let me go. Let me go.”
The hand doesn’t move. It tugs, and I start to slip. My bound hands can’t hang on. My other foot slides out of the rung it’s braced in. Then, I’m tipping over, back on the airstrip side. The hand yanks me one more time, and that does it. I’m falling through the air, weightless for a moment before arms pluck me out of the sky. Gravity hits, causing my body to jerk to a stop against whoever has me. He falls backward, and I land on his chest.
I immediately roll, but I’m not even pushing up with my elbow before two more men are on top of me, pinning me down. I thrash, but it’s no use. They have me, and my one chance is over. There’s no getting away for me now.
I’m hauled up roughly by the two men who were on top of me—Viktor’s men. They are all Viktor’s men. I’m nothing to them. This was probably a little game of tag in their eyes. Not a fight for their lives.
Tears stream down my face, and I hate myself for them. I don’t want to appear weak. I want to go to my fate with my chin held high, but one side of my face has grass and sticks stuck to it, and the other is probably streaked with the mascara I so painstakingly applied at the beginning of this night.
How long ago that seems. I can’t believe I had happy thoughts earlier. I can’t believe I thought life was going to work out for me. Now, everything is over. My dreams are ruined. My hopes are dashed.
I’m shoved from behind, and I topple over, landing hard on my knees. I don’t cry out. I’m pulled up by my hair, my scalp screaming with the rough treatment. Then shoved again. This time, I stay on my feet, and I walk, back the way I ran from. Toward the plane, the open door waiting to swallow me whole.
I can see the bloody footprints behind me as I ascend the stairs, and I have a sick sense of satisfaction that someone will have to clean that. I’m proud of the marks I’m leaving behind. I want to run the cut on my hand across the leather upholstery inside the cabin. I want to shake the dirt out of my hair all over the fancy carpet on the floor.
I want them to know that I was here. That I fought back. That I went down screaming.
Viktor is perched in a chair, spectacles on the end of his nose, a folded newspaper in one hand and a cup of something in his other. He glances up as I enter. His gaze peruses me before coming back to my face.
“How nice of you to join us,” he says with a small smile. “Untie her hands.”
One of the men that brought me on the plane extracts a knife from his pocket and cleanly slices through the binding around my wrists. I let out a hiss of relief and lightly touch the sensitive, raised welts that are left behind on my skin.
It’s the face of a man who knows he’s won. Who knows he’s in control and never thought that he wasn’t. A man who knew I was never going to make it over that fence. I’m his plaything, a toy for him to be amused by.
“Please, sit.” He gestures to the plush chair across the small table from him with his newspaper, and I sink into it.
I look down, taking in the state of my mangled body, and then shake my head. Why does it matter now? It doesn’t.
He’s so calm. He sets his cup on the tabletop and opens the newspaper—an honest-to-God real newspaper—instead of looking. Then he asks, “We are taking off soon. Can the stewardess get you anything? Refreshments?”
I stare at him.
“I’m good,” I say, biting the words out.
Honestly, I’m parched, but I don’t want anything that he has to give me. I might change my tune in a few hours, but for now, I’m holding out. Viktor motions to the stewardess and murmurs something to her but he doesn’t say anything else to me. A bit later, a drink is placed on the table in front of me and then, we are taxiing down the runway, lifting into the air. I touch the glass of my window with the tips of my fingers, watching the runway lights on the ground fade away as we climb higher and higher. I try to ignore the cup, but it beckons to me, and my dry mouth eventually makes me give in. I take it and drink deeply.
This plane is taking me away from my home, from Connor, from the life I was starting to like. How quickly things have changed. But that’s been my life for the last almost two years. I have the sudden thought that maybe Connor will come for me. Maybe he will hunt me down. But then I see the look on his face in that room as he stared down at me, knowing what I’d done, how I’d betrayed him, and I know he won’t be tracking me down. That is, if he even made it out of the room at all.
