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Either way, my dad was definitely dead, and I was definitely crazy.
Which was why I started to laugh when Drake manically smashed the spacebar on the keyboard, muttering to himself as the computers woke from their slumber.
He whirled, sneering at me, a smear of blood on his jaw.
I immediately stopped laughing.
Whose blood was that?
Whosefuckingblood was that?
He realized where my eyes had strayed and looked down with a grimace, peeling off his leather jacket with a hiss.
He smelled like smoke and gasoline.
My heart thundered in my chest and I spoke through my teeth, trying to find the darkness inside that seemed to have abandoned me to my crazy sometime between being stripped of my clothes and dignity and being strapped into this godforsaken chair. “What did you do?”
He bared his teeth as he tore the sleeve from his black t-shirt, revealing a bullet wound in his shoulder, bloody and gruesome and enough to tickle my insides with fucking joy.
They got him. If only they’d hit a little lower. More to the right.
Drake grabbed the first aid kit he’d used to wrap up my wrists and tore a pair of long metal tweezers out of a plastic sleeve with his teeth.
He let out a mean cry, gripping the underside of the desk with one hand while he dug the pointed tips of the tweezers deep into the wound, coming out with a bullet a few seconds later. He dropped it to the floor and it clattered as it rolled toward the door.
“Fuck,” he barked, closing his eyes tight for a second before continuing to sanitize and wrap the injury.
“What happened?” I pressed again, swallowing past the thick cloth Drake had used to bind my head and neck even tighter to the chair, squirming the tiniest bit that I was able. My lower abdomen ached with even the slightest contraction of my muscles and my face pinched.
“I’m fucking talking to you, dickface,” I shouted hoarsely, coughing against the restraint of the cloth. When he didn’t answer, the laughter came again, and with little control over what fell from my mouth, words tumbled out as though from a drunk Ava Jade. But these words I didn’t care to stuff back inside.
“They figured it out, didn’t they?”
I laughed some more.
“They kicked your ass! Look at you? Pathetic.”
He turned on me, his fist closing around my throat, making me bite my tongue, my mouth welling with the coppery tang of blood.
I stared straight into his eyes, daring him to finish what he started, shoving down the knee jerk reaction to panic when my vision began to darken around the edges. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
Kill me then,I dared him with my stare alone. I wouldn’t give him my soul, become the hollow shell he wanted to fill with his own desires, so he might as well take my life. Get it over with.
“Fuckingbitch.”
Red veins flared in his eyes, and he squeezed harder, shaking with the effort. My lungs burned. If he squeezed any harder, I was sure my neck would snap.
Just before the lights went out, his hands moved and a gush of cool, sharp air filled my lungs, making me choke and splutter. Reality came back in patchy images spotted with dark circles as I breathed through the razor blades in my throat.
“You think so highly of them…” he said, his voice distant as I ebbed somewhere just outside of full consciousness. “You think they’re invincible,hmm?”
I tried to spit out the blood in my mouth between coughing fits, but only managed to get it all over the oversized t-shirt still covering my body.
“I’m going to show you just how mortal they are, Angel. And once they’re gone, you’ll see it was alwaysme. I’ll make you see.”
“Come on AJ,” Grey’s voice soothed me and a morbid grin graced my blood-coated lips. “Snap out of it, baby. I need you to focus. Watch what he’s doing on those screens.”
I opened my eyes wide to correct the lingering double-vision while also trying to swallow.
