Page 89 of Hide and Seek

It hadn’t even occurred to me that I wasn’t alone, and I try to search the front as we speed down the road, hitting every bump and flying around the corners, jostling so much I’m almost positive I’m riding around a bumper car arena at the fair.

Consciousness comes and goes, and dark spots dance in my blurry vision as I grip my aching head, positive this is death.

“Who did this, kitten?” comes a stern voice from the front.

Fear blasts through my chest.

“No. No. No. No. No.”

This can’t be happening. It can’t be him.

“Kitten,” he rumbles, his tone demanding answers. “Who hurt you?”

I fade in and out, thinking back, trying to remember the faces, the people, the places, but nothing is coming to me. It’s so frustrating. Only a moment ago, I could picture it so clearly, but it has fallen right out of my brain.

“KITTEN!”

“NO!” I cry. “Don’t kill me. I don’t want to die. I’m not ready. No! Please. Just let me go.”

Visions come in and out. A back alley, faces I don’t know, a man rushing across the street, but none of them help me to piece together the reason I’m hurting so badly, why my brain feels as though it’s swelling inside my head. “It hurts,” I cry, clutching my agonizing waist. “It hurts.”

“I know,” he murmurs, his tone shifting and scratching at something inside my brain. Something familiar.

I know that voice, but why? I can’t work it out, can’t pinpoint how I know it while my head is hurting like this. I can’t even think about trying to work it out. All that matters is making the pain go away.

“Please,” I cry. “Make it stop.”

The driver looks back at me, and I get a flash of that terrifying mask, and I realize the man who was running across the road had grabbed my phone. He must have called someone in my contact list. Did he call Laith, only to get a direct line to my stalker? Is he responsible for this?

Tears flow down my cheeks, and I taste blood in my mouth. “You’re mine, kitten,” he says, a lethal chill in his tone. “I will gut the bastards who put their hands on you. Tell me who did this.”

Laith. He killed Laith.

My brows crease, darkness bubbling in my vision, bringing me in and out. My eyelids grow heavy, desperate to let the pain consume me and slip away into the nothingness.

“Stay with me, kitten. Who did this?”

Why did he have to hurt Laith?

I force myself to stay awake, trying to pull the images from my brain and make sense of everything that happened. Did I get jumped? Raped? I don’t know. I remember men hovering around me, someone dragging me by my hair, fists slamming into my face.

There was somebody there, somebody I knew. But why? Why would he want to hurt me?

I pull at every last memory, and with each passing second, my brain hurts more, but I need to know how this happened. Who would do this to me?

I came out of the tattoo parlor and gripped my bag, digging through it for my keys. Panic was thick in my chest, but why? My hand shot out like lightning. I felt threatened. Men standing around me. Someone dropping to the ground and screaming something.

“Get her.” I repeat the words out loud. “Get her. Get her.”

“What?” the masked driver demands. “Get who?”

“That’s what he said.Get her.I hit him, and he saidget herand they all—” a thick lump forms in my throat, and it becomesalmost impossible to take a breath as the visions come back in screaming color.

“Who said it?” he demands.

I shake my head, and my brain instantly pounds. “I screamed at them, begged them to stop, but they just kept hurting me.” I weep on the backseat of the car, struggling to hold myself still as every turn and bump in the road slings me around. “They wouldn’t stop. Why would they hurt me like that?”

“Tell me who they are, kitten,” he prompts, knowing time is running out, knowing it won’t be long until the darkness swallows me whole.