The air felt hot.
The air felt dry.
I tried to looking around, but sharp needle-like pains ran the length of my neck from the stiffness that had settled in.
Miguel had slung me over his shoulder, and as I rotated my head, I realized there wasn’t much around me.
I had no idea where I was but I had a strong suspicion when we entered into the dwelling, with cobwebs and dust everywhere that I wasn’t in Chicago anymore.
He sat me down in a corner, upright and I scooted back against the wall the best I could.
For a long, while he paced before coming back over, I flinched when he kneeled in front of me.
“I’m going to take the tape off your mouth,” he said. “Simone, I would never hurt you. Please know that. I just have to make you understand.”
As gently as he could, he peeled the tape off my mouth. My skin felt as though it were being peeled like an orange. He pulled out the gag he had stuffed into my mouth.
Very calmly I spoke, “Miguel, where did you bring me to? And how long have I been out?”
He stood and began pacing.
“Simone, I would never hurt you,” he repeated. “But when you recruited me to come work for Tainted Ink…you looked so much like her…I had to make you mine. Make you see we belonged together.”
There was a rage boiling up inside of me. It was like a spider walking on a fine thin line of webbing. How had I been so blind?
“Please answer my questions,” I said.
He snapped out of his thoughts.
“Right, sorry,” he turned to me. “We’re in Texas.”
“Texas?”
“Yeah on my family land. Use to be good silver mining in these parts but everything dried up. Not much around for miles and miles.”
Holy shit, Texas was so fucking far away from Chicago. No one would find me here.
Which had to have been the point.
Miguel smiled. “Stay right here, I have a few things for you to snack on. I’m going to make a store run in a few minutes.”
He dashed from the house and I took my time to look around. The place was undeniably falling apart. There was a smell in the air. Musk. Possibly rat urine? I was positive that there were droppings all around me. My skin crawled.
I wanted to throw up.
He came back in with a sleeping bag, pillow, and a bag of trail mix. He also had a bucket and I immediately knew that was for me to relieve myself in should I need to.
“This is temporary, Simone. Just until I get us a better home…”
There was a clanging sound in the bucket, like metal beating against itself. He pulled out some sort of contraption and brought it over to me. Before I knew it, I found myself with my ankle chained and secured to an old radiator across the room.
“Miguel…you can stop this at any moment,” I told him.
He just looked at me sharply, his eyes almost seeming to resemble that of an eagle. I wasn’t scared of him but there was also no trust that he would see how crazy this fucking plan of his was.
“It was fate, Simone. I lost the love of my life…Cheyenne and I were going to be married. God took her away, and then you came into my life and all the sadness stopped. It was meant to be. All those feelings…”
He was a fucking lunatic.
