“Well, look at that,” he says. “Our little prisoner is making a run for it.”
I shake my knife threateningly at him, but I already know it’s useless.
He takes a step forward and wraps his hand around the blade of the knife. I stare at it, then up at him.
He presses down, still grinning, and takes another step toward me, before yanking the knife out of my now feeble grasp by the blade, then twirling me around so that my back is pressed to him. He twists my wrists painfully behind my head, lifts his phone up so that it’s angled right in front of my face, and I can see the photo he took of me. Then he pressesSend.
As I exhale, oddly deflated, he kicks my shins hard, making me fall. His hand still around my wrists, he drags me over the rough floor to one corner of the warehouse, where the other Angels have gathered.
Noel is scowling at me, his hand pressed over a long gash on his chest, a cigarette wedged between his teeth.
“Relax,” Aaron is telling him. “Barely a scratch.”
“We’re fucking her upnow,” growls Noel.
“We fuck her up when I say so,” corrects Gabriel coldly. He pauses, then adds, “Now.”
He lifts my wrists so that my arms are stretched over my head, and attaches them to a rusty pipe above me with zip ties. I gasp from the stretch, my toes barely touching the ground.
Then he stands in front of me and tilts my head up so gently it almost makes me second guess what awaits me.
“Where is it?” he asks sweetly.
I brace myself for the pain. There’s no way of surviving this situation. All I can do is hope to go swiftly.
A slow death… or a slower one.
The only question now is how to make him give me the quicker version of death. By angering him? Or by playing along?
I roll a die, and decide on the former.
“You know where it is,” I grunt.
His reaction is immediate. In a flash of movement, I see his fist a moment before it crashes into my face, causing me to sway backward, the zip ties around my bleeding wrists the only thing keeping me upright.
Well, if punches are his idea of torture, I can take it. I’ve been taking it my whole life.
“My turn,” says Noel, taking another puff from his cigarette, before twirling it before me. “The nanochip, cunt. Where is it?”
“Ask Gabriel,” I insist, my voice loud and even.
It’s odd what the absence of hope will do to a person. My mind is pervaded by a flat, stale sense of acceptance. Even the old childish refrain that still frequently plays in my mind,it’s not fair, has died down. I can’t really bring myself to care.
Maybe it’s not just hopelessness. Maybe it’s also the knowledge that Damien will be here soon, and he’ll kill me.
Noel takes his cigarette and flits it over me, the ash smoldering on my arm. Then he takes the entire thing and crushes it against my stomach.
I bite back a groan of pain.
“What next?” asks Aaron. “Pull out her teeth or her nails?”
“Let’s fuck her first,” says Lazarus, and I look away, a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach as I notice the bulge in his pants. “I don’t want to fuck an ugly hag.”
He walks around me slowly, and I squeeze my eyes shut, wincing. I was ready to get beaten, disfigured, killed. Butraped?
That thought is unbearable, and a tear forms at the corner of my eye.
“Looks like we’re finally getting through to her,” chuckles Gabriel. “So, Seraphina. Orpet, as Damien calls you. Know anything about the nanochip? Otherwise, we’re going to fuck you so hard and so long you’ll bleed out by your holes.”
