Twenty-Three #2
I tried to move, but I was useless. He outweighed me by at least a hundred pounds, and his weight on my chest, his knees on my arms, pinned me easily.
He thumbed open the button of my corduroys and flipped me over hard, winding me.
I was worried that he’d notice I was free, but he was far more focused on what he wanted at the moment.
It also didn’t hurt that he reeked of alcohol.
I was shoved face down on the floor, and my sweater was pushed up as my pants were yanked down. I squirmed, but the knee that was driven into my back stopped me. He grabbed a handful of my hair and yanked my head up sharply before showing me a long, jagged hunting knife.
“My dick goes in your ass or this does. You decide.”
I went completely still.
“Yeah, I fuckin’ thought so,” he said, his hand sliding across my bare skin. I felt him shift, and he yanked me to my hands and knees before I heard him spit. “Gonna tear up that sweet little ass of yours.”
I felt him there against me, my legs between his, felt him ready and hard, felt the knife in his hand against my ribs, felt him nudge me before, I knew, he would lean back and then forward again to bury himself in me.
In that instant I had an advantage. He was bigger, but even hurt, I was sure I was faster than an inebriated man.
I dropped my left shoulder, which put him slightly off-balance, then brought my foot up toward my back, putting my heel as hard as I could into his balls.
He cried out, the blade slipping from his hand, and I rolled onto my back before grabbing for the weapon.
He couldn’t stop his forward momentum, and I was going to stab him, catch him in the throat, but at the last second, I slid sideways out of the way, scrambling to my knees.
There was a crunch as his face banged the floor, and I saw the spreading pool of blood around his head.
He was stunned for a moment, nose clearly broken, and I took that second to hit him between the base of his skull and the top of his spine.
As I was holding the hilt of knife between both hands, that being what made contact, it made me far more powerful.
The strike rendered him unconscious. The whole ordeal had lasted only seconds but felt like a lifetime.
It was so quiet, and in that stillness, I decided not to sit there and wait.
I pulled up my pants, grabbed one of the blankets, and bolted back across the room.
Adrenaline is an amazing thing. You go from tired and weak to Superman in seconds.
With one end of the now rolled blanket tied around my neck—I was not leaving the knife and it was tucked there—I even had a cape.
It was funny. I had never climbed a rope ladder in my life, but it seemed self-explanatory.
You put your feet on the bottom knot, put your hands above the next knot and pulled yourself up.
It was an upward crawl, like a worm. Up, down, little by little.
When I heard the guy who had tried to rape me stirring, I moved faster.
I watched him get to his knees, feel his face, swear, and realize I was gone.
His roar was loud; it bounced off the walls, echoing in the huge space.
But he couldn’t see me. I was high enough up that I was cloaked in darkness.
I froze as another man came running in, not wanting the rope to move, then climbed faster when the new guy started questioning the first. I started to panic when I kept going up and there didn’t seem to be an end, but there was suddenly a beam in front of me, and I saw the shelf.
I reached for it, realized I needed to be higher, and climbed above and dropped down inside.
I pulled the rope ladder up slowly, hearing the two men yelling, and watched as the man who’d tried to rape me was helped from the room.
Once I had the length of the rope in a pile beside me, I calmed.
I had just enough energy left to wrap the blanket around me, and put the knife by my head, before I passed out from exhaustion. I had never been so tired.
It was light out, the gray sky visible through the windows I could now see from my perch.
Obviously, a fire or some other disaster had taken the floor that used to exist between the ground and where I was.
What I was lying on was what was left of a loft.
Perhaps it had once been a barn or some kind of production plant.
I didn’t know. I just hoped that what I was lying on would hold.
It was just wooden planks that looked flimsy and creaked with the wind.
I could see through the slats to the floor, and I was a long way up.
A fall from this height would easily kill me, as would the wind outside.
Of the two options, I was banking on the shelf not giving way.
Through the slats, I watched Dominic’s men come in and out, heard him yelling at Marco before the firecracker sounds started again outside, and then there was silence except for the wind.
In the darkness that night, as I put the blanket between my teeth to keep them from chattering, I knew I was going to die.
My only solace was that I had not been raped.
I would just fall asleep and not wake up.
It was almost comforting, because I ached everywhere and I had never been so thirsty in my life.
“Jory!”
I was startled awake and looked down through the slats to the floor underneath. Dominic was standing there, directly below me, hands on his hips, staring up at the ceiling. I knew he couldn’t see me, it was too dark up where I was, and the lights were below me, but still, I was terrified anyway.
“Jory, you fuck, I know you’re in here somewhere. There’s no way you got more than a couple miles from here in any direction, and I’ve got no body, so I fuckin’ know you’re here!”
I shivered hard.
“When I find you, I’m gonna slit your throat, you sonofabitch!”
I froze, convinced that he could hear my breathing.
I tracked him with my eyes until he left.
I laid my head back down and closed my eyes, letting the panic drain out of me.
In the logical part of my brain, I realized that if what Dominic had initially said was true, he still needed me to present to Roman’s father.
I was still valuable. He wanted to find me because, without me, he was in trouble.
I didn’t realize I had fainted again until I heard the tapping and it woke me up.
I rolled my head and saw Dominic an instant before he broke the window and screamed at me.
Just for a second, I was petrified. He looked like I figured the devil would.
With his hair whipping around from the wind, his eyes hard, the way his face looked when he screamed at me—I thought my heart stopped.
“Jory!” he roared and shoved his hand through the window and shot at me.
But he was at least forty feet away and he was balanced on a something—either a huge ladder leaning against the side of the building or something built into the wall—and he was holding on. He couldn’t keep still enough to fire a second time, and I crawled back against the far wall.