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The phone shifts and the frame of a face comes into view. Familiar. A woman. That woman. I knew it.
“Keaton—” I burst into tears as a hand covers the lower half of my face. The flashlight is gone, so I close my eyes to brush it all out. In and out. Constantly. I don’t hear Eli anymore, and I reach sideways for him, touching a cold, hard finger. Dread fills my veins and I try to lean around to see if Eli is okay.
“Awww, you want a taste? Okay.” As soon as he extracts from me, I feel the heaviness of him lift from me physically but not mentally. I scatter across the room, grabbing the hand of who it was and pulling him near me.
I shove him away when I see it’s the other guy, dead, his throat split open and blood still pulsing out of his vein.
“Eli!” I roar, looking up to see him tied to the cabinet that holds the engine. Gagged with handcuffs around one wrist and an eye closed completely. How he managed to slit the other guy’s throat with one hand is beyond me.
“Well, come here then…” The man who is behind me picks me up from beneath my armpits and shoves me down on top of the corpse.
“No!” I yell, but a set of handcuffs is slapped around my wrists. The flash is back on in my face and I peer up at it until I see the shadow of the woman behind. “How could you? I kept your secret! I did everything you fucking wanted!”
The man behind me grabs me by the wrists and directs me over the dead guy’s cock. My body shakes and food begins to rise up my throat. “Please. No. Not this.”
“Oh, why not? I heard you and Keaton are pretty kinky with what you both like?” he whispers the words directly behind my ear, and I rear my head back as hard as I can until it collides with his nose. A crack splinters through my skull and rings through my ears.
Eli screams from behind his gag and I quickly stand to my feet, flicking my leg up and roundhouse kicking the woman holding the phone across the face until the phone slides over the concrete floor and toward Eli.
I step over the man who is holding his nose in his hand, the knife in his other. “Here’s the thing. You’re not going to kill me, because if you were, you would have done it already.” I swipe him over the jaw with the edge of my boot. “And let’s be real, I want you dead more.” When he falls to the floor, I stomp on his hand to stop him from reaching the knife and turn over my shoulder to call out to Eli, but it’s too late. The end of a pistol is flying straight into my face and everything goes black.
I don’t know if I’m dreaming or if I’m dead. My head feels so swollen I can’t process pain anymore. Everything is numb.
A chair moving across the floor screeches, and that’s when I feel the chair beneath my ass. My hands are tied behind my back, and that same flashlight is beaming on my face. Slowly, I turn to see Eli in the same position as me, hands tied, and gag now falling out of his mouth. His skin is pale and his face is barely recognizable. I widen my eyes, trying to gain clarity around the blood and goo as I focus on the vein in his neck.
I hold my breath and wait.
And wait.
Until a flutter of movement twitches beneath his skin.
“Guess who’s on the phone now?” Dominic murmurs from opposite me, the phone now facing me with the screen. “I guess they’ve decided to come play.” He leans forward, his arms on his thighs. Gray eyes stare back at me, and I picture what it’s going to feel like digging my fingernails into his pupils and tearing them right out. “For the record, Cartier, I didn’t want this.” His lips flatten, and his words are low, so low only I could probably hear them.
“Cartier.” Killian’s voice washes over me like a comforter. “Look at me, darling…”
I bring my head up, spitting the blood that’s spilling from my mouth onto the floor. Kill winces, swiping beneath his eye. “Fuck, I’m sorry.” He clears his throat. “Count down from ten, Cartier. I want you to picture red. The color, the taste, the sound. What does that mean to you?”
“What?” The word falls out of my mouth in a puddle of blood.
“Ten…” he says for me, and I watch as his blue eyes widen.
“Ten,” I repeat, imagining diving into his blue depths like I would the ocean. Swimming, drinking.
“Nine,” I say, and the ocean waters turns to blood. “Eight.” The metallic taste of blood touches the tip of my tongue, but when it slides down my throat, it crystallizes into sugar. “Seven.” My teeth sink into the flesh of a cherry as screams erupt around me. “Six…” My entire life rewinds backward, skipping over events from the past that I cherish, hold on to, or despise…
A woman was spread out on a hospital bed, her legs up in stirrups, and people around her body. They were screaming at her to push. Harder. Faster. Breathe. I continued to walk around the gathering until I could get between the cracks of two people.
“Push, Kiana.” My head turned to the side, following the sound of the doctor’s voice. I recognized him instantly as Kaius. What the fuck was Kaius doing in here with my mother?
I finally ghosted through the crack of bodies and goose bumps rose to the back of my neck.
“What’s happening?” I knew no one could hear me, but I needed to say the words anyway. I followed all of the other faces. Kaius, Keres, Kian, Kallisto.
“It’s a girl,” Kaius said, swiping the goo off the little baby’s face with the back of his thumb.
“Oh good!” My mother sighed out with a smile, looking up at her husband. The man I called Father all of my life and who I still looked at like one because he’s Kyrin’s.
“But she isn’t staying. She must leave us.” Kaius turned and screams erupted through the room when my mother launched off the bed, reaching for the baby. The baby, I’m guessing, was me.
