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“What are you doing? Who are you? Where am I?”
I struggle against their grip but I’m met with silence, as they stand, holding me in place. Not uttering a single word.
“You, my dear, are our prisoner.”
I turn my head to look over my shoulder just as an older man with a white lab coat enters my cell, pushing a small cart of supplies that I can’t see from this angle. He walks up behind me and I throw my shoulders forward, trying to escape from the grasp of the men that hold me down, but I’m not strong, and I’m not a fighter. There’s no adrenaline left in my system. I’m so depleted already from the drugs and a night of sleeping on the cold concrete floor.
“Stop moving or I’ll drug you again,” the man snaps, and I immediately stop.
The last thing I want to do is willfully comply with my captors, but I also need to be lucid while I’m here. I need to know everything that’s happening as it happens. Who knows how much time I’ll lose if they knock me out again. Who knows what will happen to me if they knock me out again. I can’t let that happen.
With one arm twisted in an awkward angle at my chest, and the other twisted in an awkward, unnatural angle behind my back, one of the men grips the hair on the top of my head and forcefully shoves my chin into my chest. Cool liquid drips down the nape of my neck, causing my body to shake.
“Wh-what are you doing?”
“Securing what belongs to us.”
The sound of metal clanging against metal fills my ears as the man shuffles through the supplies on his small cart. I can’t see what he’s reaching for, what he’s touching, and the endless possibilities leave me unsettled with fear.
“Don’t. Move,” he warns, and before I can ask why, something sharp tears through the flesh on the back of my neck, moving deep beneath the surface of my skin. I swear to god I think I feel it scraping the bone. It’s nothing like the needle they used to drug me though. It’s thick and heavy, like a large gauge piercing needle.
What the fuck is he doing?
He withdraws the needle from my flesh slowly, dragging it across the bone again on the way out.
“There. You run? We will find you. You tamper with it? It alerts us,” he leans down and whispers in my ear, “We own you now.”
A chill rushes down my spine when the wheels of his cart squeak loudly as he walks out of my cell. The guards hold me in place for a few more moments before tossing me face first into the small, lumpy mattress. Immediately I scramble back to my feet, and I have no idea what possesses me, but I fling myself onto the back of one of the men. Hammering my fists down on him, I try to fight. I try to push my way from the confines of this cell, but I only get a few licks in before the second man jams a taser into my side.
A jolt of electricity slams through my body and every muscle tenses up, clenching tightly as though someone is squeezing the life from me. My whole body goes stiff and I can’t move. My teeth clench down so hard, I worry I may break them. It feels like the pulsating jolts rush through me forever, but really it stops as quickly as it began. The shock does manage to incapacitate me long enough though, for the guards to slip through the cell and lock me inside alone.
“I’ll be drooling when we come back for you, pretty boy,” one of the guards snickers as they both saunter away laughing, leaving me feeling utterly hopeless.
Scrambling back to my earlier spot against the concrete wall that separates my cell from Q’s, I curl my knees up to my chest, wrap my arms around them, and press my face between my knees. I don’t mean to let it happen, but the tears sneak out so effortlessly, I don’t even notice that I’m crying until the knees of my jeans are soaked with tears.
“New guy?”
There she is. I think.
“They’re not going to find me. I’m stuck here aren’t I? I’m never going to see them again.”
I begin sobbing harder, the tears stinging my eyes, blurring my vision to the point that I can’t even see.
“Hey, don’t think that way.”
“Q,” I sniffle.
“Yeah?”
“I know you don’t know how long you’ve been here… but like… how long?”
Her sigh is audible, loud even.
“Years.”
The concrete is rough, and hard, but his body pressed against my side is soft, warm, and it feels like home. I nuzzle my face into his chest, inhaling the scent of clean laundry and weed, before rolling onto my back, looking up at the midnight sky. There’s not a cloud to be seen tonight, which is rare for the city. A dark canvas coats all of Havok Hills, and from the rooftop of this bar, the diamonds strewn across the dark sky, light up the night. Enough that his baby blues absolutely glow.
He runs his hand across my abdomen, tracing the exposed skin between my jeans and the hem of my t-shirt. Snow coats the rooftop, but it’s not cold. In fact, I feel nothing other than the warmth of his fingertips tracing my flesh.