45. Elanee
45
ELANEE
I n. Out. I focus on my breathing. I look over my shoulder, where Sergey casually trails me outside the restaurant and through the hustling crowd.
He’s here. The Lion is here, and I don’t know how to tell Dmitri.
I don’t want that man touching me ever again. I can’t do it again. Memories resurface of my years with The Lion. The cold twist of pleasure and violation. Stupid. I’d always been such a stupid girl.
My legs are carrying me; I don’t even know where. I just want to run. Run as far away from this place as I can.
I walk for what feels like forever and yet not far enough. I round a corner into a narrow street. No one’s here, just overflowing trash. My legs pick up pace before I realize it. I push through the pain, trying to push this terror out of my body.
He’s going to break me all over again.
I don’t have anything else to give.
My mind plays in a loop, creating its own suffering in memories and manifestations of what surely is to come.
Sergey casually jogs behind me because I can’t run fast, but he has a twisted smirk as if reveling in my obvious weakness. I was nothing but a cripple trying to flee once again.
I thought you would’ve killed yourself.
The words play in loops. I want to be strong. I want to fight. But there was hardly anything left to give.
I forgot what it was to stand in front of my captor and tremble under his gaze alone.
I’d fallen under someone else’s potent spell; Dmitri’s, believing with a sliver of a chance I might make it out of this living hell. But the cold rush of reality torches me alive.
The moment I burst out onto the other side of the street, looking this way and that in a panic as to which direction to go, my eyesight is blanketed and a cloth placed over my mouth and nose. I grapple with the person strongly holding me from behind, trying to fight off the overpowering smell.
Two gunshots go off and what sounds like s a screeching car comes to a stop. I kick and scream but the last inhalation draws the poison into my body and I fade into black.