Chapter Fifty-Five
Fifty-Five
I started to come to. I didn’t know how long I’d been out, but my head hurt so bad that it was hard for me to imagine opening my eyes. There was a humming that I could both hear and feel. It was smooth until it wasn’t, and that’s how I knew I was in a vehicle, slumped over on a bench seat.
My hands were behind my back, handcuffed together so tight I would have protested had I been conscious when it happened. I tried to adjust but quickly realized a seat belt was looped through my arms, keeping me in place. This was not good. I had to open my eyes.
I opened the left eye first. In front of me was the back of the passenger seat. I was in a van. Dominic’s van.
I sucked it up and opened the other eye. It was blurry, but I endured a piercing pain in my head in order to focus, and my vision cleared.
I brought my chin to my chest so that I could see the driver’s seat. Jake’s profile stared ahead, eyes on the road. He wasn’t gripping the steering wheel like a menacing Cruella de Vil; instead he casually rested his right wrist over the top like he was out for a Sunday drive.
He caught my motion in his periphery. “Oh, hi there,” he said.
There was enough give in the seat belt for me to shift my legs onto the floor and I sat up. “Where are you taking me?”
“You’ll see,” he said.
“Where’s Elyse?” I asked. “Did you do something to her?”
“She’s fine.” His answer was flippant. Did he forget he had bopped me over the head and handcuffed me to the back seat? The jig was kind of up.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked.
“Jeez,” he said, “so many questions.”
“You’ve made my life a living hell,” I reminded him. “You just knocked me out and kidnapped me. I have a lot of questions.”
He laughed at that. “Oh, made it a living hell, have I?”
I wasn’t scared. I should have been scared, but I was too angry, too annoyed, and too defeated. I had played into everything. “Are you going to kill me?”
He didn’t answer, too concerned with changing lanes to exit the highway.
“Why are you guys even doing this? Torturing me and killing me, then what?”
“First of all, there’s no you guys,” he corrected me. “Dominic has nothing to do with any of this. He really is just as pitiful as he seems. Second of all, though, I want you to think really hard about this victim narrative you’ve spun for yourself.”
My head was pounding and my wrists were starting to chafe. I was struggling to stay on board with his self-righteousness—to follow the logic of his motivations.
“My head hurts,” I mumbled.
He laughed almost maniacally at that, which I found quite rude.
“Your head hurts?” He hit his hand on the steering wheel, 1-2-3. “Your head hurts?!”
“Yeah, you hit me in the fucking head,” I reminded him.
“Marin!” he screamed, looking back at me, taking his eyes off the road for way too long.
He turned back in time to slam the brakes and narrowly avoid rear-ending the car in front of us.
Once we were safely stopped, he reached up to his hair—the slicked-back black hair I used to think was so edgy.
Just as Natalie had done, he pushed it away from his face, lifting the long pieces off the shaved part underneath and revealing a thick scar where no hair could grow. “My head fucking hurts!” he shouted.