Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Savannah…
A strange sort of hollowness, I didn’t know how to describe it, overtook me.
No, that wasn’t right. I didn’t know how it came to be.
All I knew was that one minute we were out the kitchen door, Corbett Prescott carefully lifting me over broken glass and not putting me down until we were on the driveway, and then we were at his rather ostentatious yellow Porsche. He shoved me into the passenger seat.
It was dark now, well past sunset, and I stared in horror at the shadows moving around up in the windows along the stairwell on the third floor.
“What’s happening?” I asked, and he set my laptop and its cord in my lap.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, and I jumped as the engine fired up and he swept us backward out of the lot and onto the lane, heading for… shit. I didn’t know where we were going.
“Where are we going?” I demanded.
He said again, “Don’t worry about it. Tell me what happened.”
I coughed and stammered things out, waffling back and forth between events, and meandering through the things that’d happened that were all a shaken mess in my mind.
“Okay, so shoes, keys, the Jag is yours – anything else?”
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and said, “I broke my phone – after I texted, before I could call 9-1-1.”
“Shit happens, buy you a new one,” he said, and I shook my head.
“Who were those people?”
“My people, and that’s all you need to know about it,” he said.
I asked quietly, “Are you going to kill me, too?”
“No,” he said and pulled into a carriage house on a street I knew I should know, but fuck, everything was a blur.
“Come on.” He got out of the car and came around, opening my door for me. Taking me by the elbow, he led me across the courtyard, out from under the carriage house to the main house.
A common structural thing here in Savannah.
He brought me into a small but cozy kitchen, then through into a sitting room that was part library, and sat me down in the wing-backed chair in the corner, switching on the lamp overhead.
“Let me look at you.” He gripped my chin and tipped up my face, turning it this way and that, in the light. “Good girl,” he murmured, and asked, “He hit you?”
I reflexively wrapped my arms around my middle, clutching my laptop over it like a shield, and said, “He gut-punched me.”
“You got him good with your heel, yeah?” he asked.
“Yeah… um… where are my shoes?”
“Dates,” he reminded me firmly. “When do the homeowners get back?”
Oh…
I opened my laptop and looked for him while he poured a drink out of one of the nearby decanters.
“Two weeks,” I said. “In exactly two weeks.”
He took my computer, set it aside, and replaced it with the drink.
I didn’t care what it was. I downed it.
“Easy there, tiger,” he said and looked bemused.
“I want to go home,” I said and stood.
“Easy,” he said and took the glass from me, setting it aside.
“I mean it,” I said. “I want to go home.”
“And I’ll take you there,” he said. When I went to walk past him, the room sort of swum, and I blinked and shook my head.
My heart was still thundering in my chest, my blood still raced, and I felt my respirations pick up again as the swimmy feeling intensified, and my hands and feet suddenly felt like lead.
“What did you do?” It took entirely too much to get the words out, and they felt slurred around the edges.
“Just a little GHB, to take the edge off. You’ll be out before you know it, and trust me – you’re good.”
My legs crumpled, and I slid down him to the floor. He came with me, kneeling beside me and whispered, “Don’t fight it, just breathe and let it happen.”
“What the fuck did you do to me?” I demanded and tried to bat his hands away, but I honestly didn’t think any of the words came out right.
“Shhhh,” he soothed, and I fought – oh boy did I fight it, but it was no use.