So I walk.
“Please,” I breathe out and stop. Walking is so exhausting.
The woman sighs.
“We never had her. Deep fake,” she says.
I close my eyes. Her words take a moment to set in.
“You’re fucking kidding,” I finally say in total disbelief as I open my eyes again. Everything else forgotten.
“I don’t make jokes,” she says coldly. “Now walk, or I’ll really get Luisa.”
She’s mad,I tell myself, and I am pretty sure I was abducted by a psychopath. I recite what I learned about psychopaths in my studies, and decide I'd better walk. For the time being.
So, I walk, one step at a time, following the light of the laptop in her hand.
She opens the door I found before.
“Urgh,” I gasp out, hiding my face in my hands because the light is too bright. I instantly get a headache.
I follow her up the stairs with what must be more than thirty steps, halfway on all fours, and when I reach the top, I can’t see properly with a dizzy head and collapse on the last step, panting.
I sit on the rough natural stone tiles, heart pumping, with an unfocused vision and a throbbing head.
It’s only then that I realise how disgusting I smell. I peed myself. This is a nightmare.
My head falls to the side, and I try to focus with squinted eyes. I see natural stone piers, and a woman standing next to one, dressed in an all-black skirt with a wide-fit black blouse. She seems to be older, but as she has her back to me, I can’t quite tell. Her hands look aged. She is discussing something with the woman who brought me up and leans casually against the piers. It was Kat, or wasn’t it? I try to remember.
They’re discussing angrily, gesturing widely with words I can’t catch. Is it even English?
Suddenly they other woman turns and walks over to where I sit, leaning against the wall. The first thing I notice is that she is wearing no shoes. My eyes wander up her skinny legs, over her perfectly manicured hands that show every bone, up to her neck with a golden cross necklace around it.Being Christian and doing this, pah,I secretly think. The hypocrisy is mind-blowing.
My eyes wander further to her face.
She has a slim face showing lines around her eyes and mouth, and I assume she must be something in her late forties, maybe fifty. Her eyes are dark brown, her skin olive, and she has long, dark brown, almost black hair tied in a low bun.
She stares down at me like I’m a very annoying inconvenience. She squats down and grabs my jaw.
“I am warning you only this once,” she says. “You better deliver me something, or I will put a bullet in your head before you can say please,” she says threateningly. Her fingernails dig painfully into my skin. “Your father has betrayed me once, and I am no fool trusting twice,” she says, her voice getting even darker as her fingers squeeze my jaw painfully. “You are a murderer, and only breathing right now because you will be useful to get me what I want, nothing more. You are a piece of shit I will happily crush with my shoe.”
I swallow hard and nod. She stares at me so intensely, as if she could see the expected lies in my eyes. My eyes wander to the ground because I don’t want her to see the hate I feel for her right now, but I can’t keep my upper lip from slightly pursing up.
“Get yourself cleaned up,” she says with a disgusted sneer, and lets go of me like I am filth. “You smell like piss, sudicio.”
I don’t need to know the word to understand it.
“Come,” says the woman named Kat, holding out her hand. I hesitate. “I’m not doing anything. We’ll just get you cleaned up and fed.”
I scoff slightly because I find the change of dynamics quite irritating, and it leaves me wondering if this is all a game they play with me. I am also not quite processing what has happened.
Kat leads me upstairs to a room, where she shows me a bathroom with a shower and, to my relief, a toilet. The room is painted entirely black. It has a king-size wooden bed with a black velvet headboard, black sheets, a black nightstand, a black armchair in the corner and tulle-like, black curtains framing several windows.
Apparently, I am in Dracula land.
Kat locks the door when she leaves, and it reminds me that I am still a prisoner. In a house, wherever. I check the windows and can see a street, but they’re all locked. I mean, I could smash them andjump onto the streets? But then, I am so exhausted. Everything feels like too much.
So I use the bathroom, then shower. Judging from the bathroom and what I saw downstairs alone, this house must cost a fortune.
