“Looks like you have a pretty good survival instinct, though,” he adds in mock admiration. “Let’s see how long you can bob on the surface like an idiot before you sink.”
I gasp up at him, my limbs aching with the effort of staying afloat. Meanwhile, he slowly sips on his beer, eying me like I’m his entertainment for the evening.
“Want to tell me why you stole the perfume bottle?” he asksafter a while.
But I can’t speak. I can only gulp in little breaths of air as I continue to struggle in the water.
“Wrong answer,” he gloats. “Try again. Where’s the nanochip? The perfume bottle was unsealed and the nanochip is missing. Where did you put it?”
I shake my head, my eyes pricking. I’m too overwhelmed, too tired even to think my usual refrain. It’s not fair. I don’t understand what he’s talking about. My brain is turned off. All I can think of is surviving.
That fucking survival instinct. Sometimes, I wish it weren’t so strong in me.
It sure would have spared me a lot of pain.
I don’t know if it’s the look in my eyes, or if he’s just gotten bored of watching me so desperately trying to stay afloat, but after ten minutes or so, he goes to the other side of the boat again before coming back with a lifebuoy tied to a rope, which he throws into the water. I grip it, resting my head against it.
Logan says a few words to me, which I can’t hear above the blood rushing to my ears.
“Hey! Freak! I said, put it around your waist!”
I startle out of the fog of exhaustion pressing down on me, and slip the lifebuoy around me. I wait passively as he tugs it toward the boat. Then he lifts me up.
I sag limply in the bottom of the boat as he curses me out.
“Some help would’ve been nice,” he pants. “Motherfucker. You really stink.”
He turns away as I lay helpless on the ground, and then I feel the boat begin to move. He’s rowing.
I hear the water slosh around for a while before he comes backand prods my side with a foot.
“Get up, freak. We’re going home.”
He must have seen that the word got a reaction out of me. I take a deep breath, welcoming the numbness that invades me, and follow him out of the boat, which he’s maneuvered back to the dock while I was in a near comatose state.
“Hell no,” he says as I try to climb back into the passenger seat. “You’ll ruin my car. You can walk back, can’t you? You’re used to it.”
I stare dumbly as the engine roars and he cocks a gleaming gun at me.
“Don’t try to escape, or I will find you and kill you.”
With that, he drives off, leaving me soaked in slimy water, in the shittiest part of Oakley, in the middle of the night, nearly two hours away on foot from my Astley prison.
He doesn’t need to worry, though. It’s not like I have anywhere else to go.
I begin the long walk back to the apartment, thankful that it’s so easy to detach myself from this situation. I’m used to assholes. I’m used to pain. I can take it all. The only thing I can’t take is the mind games Damien seems to revel in playing on me.
Damien.
My breath hitches as I suddenly realize that Damien is the reason Logan acted like this with me tonight. He was protective of his friend.
Or maybe…
I inhale sharply at the thought.
Maybe Damien told him to do this.
The thought comes to me like a blow to my stomach, knocking the air out of me. My eyes blur with tears.
