Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 76203 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 381(@200wpm)___ 305(@250wpm)___ 254(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76203 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 381(@200wpm)___ 305(@250wpm)___ 254(@300wpm)
My mom suffered from migraines until she hit menopause.
I’d always empathized with her and the long afternoons spent lying in darkened rooms with her hands pressed to her skull and a trash bin nearby, in case she got sick from the pain.
But I never could have known what the pain was like. How it felt like your skull was being ripped open, and something nailed right into your brain over and over.
My stomach rolled, and a low whimper escaped me as I prayed I didn’t get sick.
I honestly wasn’t even thinking for a while. I couldn’t even tell you how long. I was just… enduring. Trying to survive pain that seemed determined to make me pass out from it.
I wouldn’t say it ever eased, per se. But that my system got more accustomed to it over time. And allowed me to start thinking once again.
Like why my head hurt.
Not because I just had a random migraine.
No.
Because someone had hit me.
Hard.
Hard enough, it seemed, to make me pass out.
Because the last thing I remembered was being too far from the clubhouse, having taken a bit of a walk to clear my head after talking to my mom.
Then… then someone talking to me.
The pain.
And… nothing.
Panic seemed to start atmospherically at first, a charge in the air around me that started to choke out the oxygen, making a suffocating sensation flood me. My heartbeat started to beat a wild, erratic drum in my chest, so strong and overwhelming that I couldn’t think of anything else but the sensation for a long second.
Until I tried to lift my arms, so I could press my hand to my chest. And found my wrists bound together.
My skin prickled, a cold sensation like icy fingertips trailing over me, leaving a clammy bath in its wake.
My wrists were bound.
Almost at once, I realized that there was something over my mouth as well.
I was bound and gagged.
Bound and gagged.
Like in a freaking action movie.
You know the one. Where the girl finds her strength in the chaos, breaks out of her binds, and goes on a revenge mission to destroy her attackers.
The problem was, I wasn’t that girl.
I’d never be that girl.
My thoughts unraveled then, leaving nothing but frayed edges of rationality. I was assaulted by a million distinct catastrophic possibilities, each more irrational than the last, my mind hijacked by chaos.
Time warped as I struggled to gain control of my own thoughts, to force them to stop swirling, to allow me to catch on to one, singular, logical thought.
I struggled for breath as a vice tightened around my chest.
I sucked in air again through my nose, pulling it in until my chest burned, then slowly releasing it. Once, twice, three times.
Time warped. Seconds stretched into eternities.
But I kept breathing.
And, eventually, little by little, the panic started to recede.
My pulse slowed. My mind stopped spinning.
I felt utterly drained from fighting with my own mind.
But there was no time for exhaustion.
I had to think now that it was possible again.
I’d been hit.
I’d been… taken.
I’d been gagged and bound.
I was sure that Detroit would look for me.
The problem was, I had no idea where Detroit was. How long he would be gone. If anyone else would notice my absence until he returned at some unknown time in the future.
I couldn’t rely on him.
I, painfully average Everleigh Barker, a girl who couldn’t change my own tire or call to cancel an insanely overpriced car insurance policy because of the potential confrontation, was going to need to save myself.
A little helpless whimper escaped me, muffled by the duct tape that was biting into my skin with its glue.
I let myself feel the helplessness for just a moment.
Then I took another deep breath and looked around.
At… a bedroom.
A bedroom?
I’d expected a basement. You know, because what kind of criminal put you in a bedroom?
One full of their own personal items.
There was a bed crushed against a wall, a twin-size only. With a comforter half hanging off of it. Blue. But with some sort of pattern to it.
I squinted at it, making out the shapes of those little caricatures that I saw on children’s clothes and backpacks. Likely from a show that all the kids loved, but I was clueless about, not having any of my own.
That was a child’s bed.
Almost as soon as that thought formed, my gaze was sweeping around, taking in other signs of a kid.
A multicolored plastic storage unit, little animal figurines and trucks poking out of their buckets.
The carpet on the floor was one like my cousin had when I was a kid. A little town. With streets to run those little Matchbox cars on.
Little sneakers were on their sides near an open closet.
Oddly, though, the closet didn’t have a lot of clothes in it.
My gaze moved around again, seeing a window.