I bite.
My teeth sink into the fabric over someone's forearm, hard. The man swears, jerks, slams my shoulder into the ground so hard stars burst across my vision.
“Bitch,” he spits in English. “You wanna lose your teeth?”
I scream and kick and fight with everything I have, but they're all too strong.
“Enough,” a voice barks above me. "Stop fucking moving." The tone is authoritative. “Leag-o ?i bag-o în ma?ina.”
Rope surrounds me and they tie me up.
“Please. Please, wait,” I gasp, coughing around dirt and blood. "Don’t take me back there, please don’t take me back. I'll do whatever you want.”
They ignore me and suddenly someone hoists me up and tosses me over their shoulder.
We walk to the idling SUV and they throw me into the back seat.
I hit the seat hard, gasping, and try to push myself up, but someone shoves me back down. A man leans over me, his face hard and unfamiliar, and he pulls out his phone.
He holds it up to my face, the screen glowing, and looks at his screen and then at me and over his shoulder to the others.
“Da. Da. O avem. E ea. Da.”
I yell, "Let me go! Please."
"Shut up!" someone says and before I can say anything else, a bag is yanked over my head.
Darkness swallows everything.
“No,” I gasp. “No. Please, not the dark."
A rough hand clamps over my mouth for a second, fingers digging into my cheeks through the bag.
“Nu avem timp de asta," he says before letting go.
“Who, who are you?” I choke out. “I don't know what you're saying. Where are you taking me? Please, I can give you anything you want, I can.”
"Relax," the man with the authoritative voice says. "We're not taking you back to those fucking lunatics in the woods. You belong to Matei Ionescu now," he says and they all start laughing.
The name means nothing to me. I don't know who he is. Don't know what he wants.
But the way the man says it makes my blood run cold.
I open my mouth to scream again, but something hard slams into the side of my head.
Pain explodes through my skull, bright and blinding, and then the world disappears.
4
ZARIA
My head throbs with a pain so intense I can't think past it at first. Every pulse feels like someone is driving a spike through my skull and twisting.
I try to move my hands to touch my temple, to press against the ache, but they won't budge.
Panic flares as memories try to come. The last thing I remember is the bag over my head. The blow to my skull. The SUV. The men speaking in that language I didn't understand, and then nothing. Until now.
I open my eyes, or try to. The dark is so complete I can’t tell the difference at first. A dim, low light flickers somewhere to my right, hazy and weak, illuminating shadows.
