Chapter 12 Jasmine
JASMINE
My phone buzzed right as I harvested all of my strawberries in Stardew Valley. I paused the game just after loading them into the shipping bin so I could check my phone.
I smiled when I saw his text.
Ghost: Made it to work. Eat a bite of those snacks for me.
I placed my controller down and promptly sent him a text back.
Me: Just got done harvesting my strawberries. I’m about to be rollin’ in dough.
I saw him read the text, but he didn’t respond, and I didn’t like the feeling of disappointment that washed through my body. He’s at work, I thought to myself. He probably couldn’t check his phone without his boss breathing down his neck.
I knew how that was.
So I picked up my controller and got back to work on a virtual farm that I sometimes dreamt of owning one of these days.
Only for my text message alert to startle me awake.
“Huh? Wha?” I grumbled as my hand flopped around for my phone.
My console turned off. Fuck, where was I in the game? Shit, what kind of progress did I lose? My phone dinged out again, and I sighed heavily as I dug the heels of my hands into my eyes. I fell asleep upright on my fucking couch.
Damn it, I hated it when I squandered my only days off.
My phone dinged for a third time before I finally put my hands on it.
And when I saw that I had three text messages from my boss, I leapt to my feet.
Chips crunched beneath my feet, and I cursed to myself as the sharp shards raked against my soles.
I hopped around, dusting off the crumbs onto the carpet so everything would be easier to vacuum up.
I checked my text messages.
Boss: Meeting in an hour. Need you there.
Boss: You’ll be taking minutes.
Boss: You’ll be compensated for your time, as always.
I sighed heavily as I rushed into my bathroom and started the little ho bath I had to take sometimes when being called in like this. I should’ve known that a whole weekend off to myself was nothing but a pipe dream.
And I spent my time sleeping.
“Ugh,” I groaned as I splashed water under my pits.
I scrubbed with hand soap and a washcloth at my most private areas. Pits, dips, underbreasts, and between the legs. It wasn’t glamorous, but once I doused myself in deodorant and body spray, no one would be any the wiser.
At least the paycheck will be amazing next week.
I had getting ready down to a science at that point, and fifteen minutes later, I was corporate-ready and heading out the door. My heels clicked down the stairs as I rushed out to my car, my hair steady on top of my head and bobby-pinned so that it didn’t look as oily as it felt.
I’d have to scrub myself down once I got back from the meeting.
My phone dinged again just as I was digging out the keys for my vehicle.
I grumbled to myself as I jammed my key into the door of my car, wiggling it around to unlock it.
I hated this hunk of junk. I really needed to upgrade to something made in the last decade.
But it was cheap, I had no car payment, and the insurance payment on it was laughably cheap.
Two more years, and you’re debt free, I reminded myself before something clamped down onto my mouth.
“AH!”
The sound of my voice was muffled by fabric as an arm wrapped around my waist. Immediately, alarm bells went off in my head and I began flailing.
I felt myself being picked up off my feet and I kicked so hard, my heels went flying.
I tried to kick them in any which direction, hoping beyond all hope that they’d hit a car with an alarm that would start blaring any second.
Ah, who the fuck was I kidding.
No one in my complex owned a car expensive enough to have an alarm on it.
“NO! PLEASE! STOP IT! I’LL GIVE YOU WHAT YOU WANT!”
I heard tires screeching before I was lurched around, being moved like I was nothing but a ragdoll. My eyes widened when I saw the black car with black windows. I couldn’t even see inside.
If this person gets me in there, I’m dead.
I dug my heels into the asphalt of the parking lot.
The damned thing didn’t even have its headlights on.
Everything moved in slow motion, like my brain tried to capture every single moment as it happened right in front of me.
I held out my hands as the person behind me dragged me to the trunk.
It grew hard to breathe against the fabric pressed against my mouth.
And when I saw the trunk pop, tears flooded my eyes.
“No, no, no, no, NO! PLEASE! STOP IT! SOMEBODY HELP MEEEEE!”
My head slammed into something before I got tossed into the trunk, and when the door slammed closed, it was dark. Pitch fucking black. Panic overwhelmed me as tears leaked down my face.
Oh.
My.
God.
I’m being kidnapped.
My brain came to a grinding halt, my fight or flight senses kicking in. No one ever told you about the ‘freeze’, though. That needed to be in there, too.
I was one of those people that froze up during panic.
Get out of the trunk.
The voice in my head was the only thing making any sense, so I began to feel around. The car took off, tires squealing against the asphalt, and I rolled around in the trunk until my head slammed into something. I groaned in pain as a warm, viscous liquid trickled down my face.
Fuck, I’d split my forehead open.
I cried softly as my hands felt around. Didn’t some cars have something I could grab onto in order to get the goddamn trunk open? The car took a hard turn, and I rolled to the back of the trunk. My back slammed into the surface at the back, separating me from the rest of the vehicle.
I clawed my way back to the front of the truck.
“Come on, please,” I whispered as I felt around.
My blood trickled into my eyes.
I wiped it away and smeared it all over the floorboard.
Because if I died tonight, I was making sure someone knew I had been in this fucking vehicle.
Just as my hand wrapped around something that felt like I should tug, I heard gunfire. I screamed out as bullets tinged off the surface of the vehicle. The car whipped around, slamming me against the wall and away from what I was grasping.
“No, no, no, no,” I whispered as I dug my nails into the carpet of the trunk and tried pulling myself forward again.
Only to find that I had really pulled myself to the back of the trunk.
Fuck, I couldn’t even see well enough to get my—
“What the fuck!?” a man cried out.
The gunfire exchanged itself for something else. Something different. Something that I didn’t recognize. The car swerved, tossing me around until I had no idea what side of the trunk I was on. Metal crunched, the sound sending goosebumps fleeing across my body like nails on a fucking chalkboard.
And then, we flipped.
Head over heels.
I tucked into a ball and began to pray. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know what the fuck was happening. I didn’t know where I was, or who took me, or why someone would take me in the first place.
What about my boss?
Of course, you’d think about work at a time like this.
We tumbled until I was sure my body slammed against every single surface the trunk had to offer.
And then, the tumbling just… stopped. The car rocked.
It slammed down onto its tires so hard that the damn thing bounced.
Glass shattered. Metal continued to buckle.
I laid there, waiting for the roof of the trunk to cave in and decapitate me.
We had to be tumbling down a ravine of some sort. Had we gotten into an accident?
Maybe I could find the trunk release thingy now?
I was so disoriented. I felt sick to my stomach. Blood trickled down to my lips and I spit a few times, trying to wipe it away. I brought my hand to my face, and it was shaking. My hip ached as if it were on fire. And my head. Good God, it felt like my head was going to explode.
But the sound of a revving engine pulled me out of the recesses of my aching mind.
I heard the sound of leaves crunching. Someone running. There were gunshots, but they didn’t sound like the other gunshots I heard. They were… smaller? No, not smaller. What’s the word?
Softer?
Thwip-thwip.
I didn’t have a chance to wrap my brain around anything before moonlight spilled onto me.
The blue hue illuminated the trunk, and for the first time, I saw where I was.
Sort of. In a way. If I would have tried to look around.
But my brain could only focus on the shadow hovering above me, shrouded in moonlight like a halo.
But then a hand reached out for me.
And I fought.
I fought with everything I had, which honestly wasn’t much.
I fought like my life depended on it, but to be honest, was my life really worthy of that much?
God, I was so tired. How the hell was I so tired after sleeping the day away?
The person I fought against wrangled me easily out of the trunk.
I flailed my limbs and went dead weight in his arms, hoping that I could find a pressure point to ram my fucking elbow into if I could just slither away.
Maybe I could still get out of this.
Maybe I still had a chance.
Maybe—
“Stop it, Jasmine. Stop fighting. It’s just me.”
I froze.
Wait a second.
I recognize that voice.
The world tilted around me before I found myself staring up at the sky. Everything hurt. I was so fucking confused. But when I turned my head to the left, there he was. With that mask over his face and everything.
“Ghost?” I whispered out.
He peered down at me before we ascended out of a ditch. “Stay quiet. I don’t know if there’s more..”
I wanted to ask, ‘more of what?’ But I knew how to read a room. I whimpered as I curled against him, shocked that he could even pick me up in the first place. Most men just wobbled with me for a while before putting me back down.
My hips always attracted until men realized how heavy they actually were.
The world sort of passed in a blur until I was plopped down onto a seat of some sort.
There was no back. There was no front. At least, there wasn’t a front until he sat in front of me and became the front.
And it wasn’t until the engine struck up with vibrations pouring all around me that I realized… we were on his motorcycle.
No.
Ooooh, no, no, no.
“Hang on to me as tightly as you can,” he said as he tilted us to the side. “We’re not stopping until we’re back at the clubhouse.”
I wanted to ask him what the hell he was talking about.
Clubhouse? However, when he pushed off down the road, the bike taking off in a fury, I yelped a bit as I wrapped my arms around his waist. I tucked myself against his back, pressing my face in the groove between his shoulder blades.
My nails dug into his shirt. My legs shivered around him as I slid up against him, my pencil skirt practically rolling up my legs.
The tightness of the unforgiving seam made my thighs buckle and ache, but not nearly as much as my head and my hip.
FFFFFWHIP!
Holy fuck, something whizzed by my head.
“Hang on!” Ghost growled as the engine beneath my body revved.
I managed to peer over my shoulder, only to see the outlines of two men standing next to the ditch we just crawled out of. Oh god. He meant… more men.
How the hell did he find me?
“Hang on,” he growled as he swerved his bike left and right, dodging the bullets flying our way.
We turned a dark corner and sped off into the night down a road I didn’t recognize.