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I move painfully slow, panic building with each slow sweep of my hands. With my luck, I will knock it clear into the drain if it’s not gone already. Why didn’t I think of this earlier? “Shit, shit,shit,” I mutter to myself… and then I nearly collapse with joy when I finally find it half stuck on the grate of the drain.
Slowly, I extricate it and then run back to the window. During everything with Daniel, it had gotten so buried in my hair it’s a wonder it even stayed on my person in the first place. I kneel down in front of the window and start fiddling with the lock, pushing against the pins until they click and slowly,painfullyrotating the thing until the lock finally springs free.
It doesn’t feel real.
I stare at the open lock in shock and disbelief for what feels like forever.
My hands shake as I pull the lock free from the grate and let it fall to the carpet with a heavy thunk. I keep waiting for alarms to go off as I begin to lift the grate away from the window. I keep expecting large men with even larger guns to storm into the room demanding answers for where I think I'm going, but no one shows up. Nothing happens. Daniel seemed to be testing me to see if I could even get out of the room in the first place.
I slide the window open next, slowly.
I lean forward to peer out of it, and my stomach drops out of my ass.
I fall backward into the room and curl into a tight ball where I stay until I can breathe again. I shouldn’t have looked. I knew what I was going to have to do but I shouldn’t have looked. It’s a second-story drop… it’s unlikely to kill me. Unless I fall and hit my head again.
My face is wet with tears, and they pool beneath my head on the carpet. I flash right back to that balcony with Nikolai storming toward me, his mouth practically frothing as he hurled one accusation after the other at me. Over and over again until I fell. The metal of the balcony scraped so deeply against the backs of my hips and ass on the way down that it was sheer luck that I hadn’t been permanently scarred.
My head throbs in pain at the memory as I recall the exact sound it made when I heard my skull crack from the fall.
“No choice….” I sob to myself. “No choice…” I repeat it over and over again until it gives me the strength to stand. At least if this kills me, it will be my choice.
My hands are trembling so badly that I don't think I'll be able to hold myself up on the window at all. I frantically wipe them against the sides of my shorts, hoping to stop the panic from rising within me so that I can get out of here mostly unscathed. It's either this or Daniel. That leaves me with only two options. Sexual slavery and death, or escape and death?
It’s pathetic that I actually debate the first option for a moment.
I scrunch my eyes shut and look out the window once more, but there’s nothing helpful. Nothing to put my foot on. No leverage at all… just the window and the ground.
My panic almost wins. It almost makes me stay where I am despite having a clear escape route right in front of me. Tears fall freely down my face as I hop from one foot to the other trying to talk myself into crawling out of that window.
“You can do this… you can do it. What’s a broken leg after everything that you’ve lived through? You can do this, Helena… Just fucking do it!”
Before I can even inhale again, I exhale a slow, shaky breath and swing a leg out. I hold my breath, as if it's going to help, and slowly lower myself over the edge. Playing the cello again has significantly improved my upper body strength because I don't fall right away... but once I've lowered myself as far as I can go... I can't bring myself to just drop.
Between the building and my forehead, I can see how far down I have left to drop, and it feels immense. I can’t physically pull myself back up. My fingers are already burning from holding onto the ledge like this… There’s not an option, here. I have no choice but to drop and hope for the best.
I close my eyes as tightly as I can and clamp down on my tongue to keep from screaming in raw terror as I let go… and fall.
CHAPTERSEVENTEEN
Daniel
Whatever Michael was about to say to me, the thought dies on his lips the moment one of my security guards comes crashing through the back doors. The guard is newer than the rest, and until now I had never seen him spooked.
Michael and I are up on our feet in half a second. Something is wrong, very wrong, and I automatically reach for a gun that isn’t even on my person. Muscle memory.
“Boss, you have to come quick,” he says breathlessly.
“What? What happened?” I need him to speak plainly and as fast as possible so that I can decide how I’m going to handle whatever threat is about to come my way. Instantly, my mind starts to race.
“She’s escaped,” he breathes, and I know instantly who he means. It seems totally impossible that she could have gotten out of that room. I thought she would figure out a way to liberate herself from the handcuffs one way or another, but I never imagined that she would make it through the bedroom door. After I find her and put her back in there, I’m going to make sure she can never get out again.
I pull out my phone and access the security cameras to her room, and she sure enough isn’t in there. A window is open, however. How the hell did she manage to get a window open? It doesn’t make any kind of sense, but at least I know what direction she went in.
“You have guys still posted at the gates?” I ask. She can’t have made it that far undetected. There’s just no way. I can’t waste time watching the feeds right now when I need to find her and tan her ass for daring to disobey me.
“Of course.”
“Find. Her,” I seethe. She has to be back here somewhere. The path from that side of the house leads out to the gardens, so that’s where Michael and I head. The house is more than well-protected, and she doesn’t even know that it’s here, so it’s unlikely that she would stumble upon it by accident. The guards would stop her before then.
